Thanksgiving recipes

We spent Thanksgiving at home this year, with about 10-12 members of my family.

My mom made the turkey (a rosemary butter recipe that she found on the Food Network's website one year) and also brought you fan (literally "oily rice"), bhee whoon (my transliteration from Taiwanese, stir-fried vermicelli), and carrot cake. My aunt brought a beef and onion appetizer, shrimp cocktail, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie. We made pineapple and brown sugar glazed ham, two types of sweet potatoes, cornbread (courtesy of Trader Joe's), homemade cranberry sauce, savory bread pudding, and key lime pie.

The ham was the same recipe I've been using since college, when all the West Coast students would band together to cook Thanksgiving dinner. Here's the recipe, as posted last year.

I've only made cranberry sauce once before. This time I bought better port, and it tasted much better:

Cranberry Sauce with Port

1. Simmer 1 bag whole cranberries with 1 cup of sugar and 1 cup of port until the cranberries explode. (This takes about 15 minutes.)

2. Remove from heat, add 1/4 to 1/2 cup orange juice, and then cool before serving.

I usually make sweet potatoes with marshmallows and raisins (the standard recipe) but this year I decided I was sick of that and made two new kinds of sweet potatoes:

This recipe came via a coworker, from a New York Times article. I modified it a bit so I could keep the sage and garlic:

Stir-Fried Sweet Potatoes With Brown Butter and Sage

1. Stir fry 1/2 box sage (about 30 leaves) and 5 cloves of finely chopped garlic in 1/2 stick of butter until the garlic is a bit brown and the sage is crispy.

2. Cut 4-5 sweet potatoes into sticks (like french fries but thinner), and stir-fry with oil, adding salt and pepper to taste. Potatoes should be tender but not mushy.

3. Toss the potatoes with the garlic, butter, and sage, and serve.

The second kind of sweet potato was really easy; I just cubed the potatoes and fried them in oil, first in low heat until cooked through, then in high heat to make them crispy. For spices I only added salt and pepper. My mom actually liked this kind better than the sage kind.

The bread pudding recipe I used involved green peppers, onions, and several kind of mushrooms. It turned out okay but I thought it was a bit too rich (8 eggs and 3.5 cups of cream!) and it was a bit troublesome to make, so I probably will modify it before using it again.