It's the most wonderful time of the year!

Enjoy - but be warned - the cornbread is NOT wheat-free, and the onions are fartogenic in this mix.  I hope you have no problem with such mixtures, or are with people who don't care!

I suppose the fartogenic factor also varies from gut to gut, but I think you'll find you have less gas if instead of 'stuffing mix' you start by making honest-to-dog CORNBREAD---just corn meal, eggs, and milk (no flour),cooked in a big ol' iron skillet---and if you use the butter to saute your onions and celery before adding them to the dry mix.

Hmm - baking my own cornbread to make stuffing is SO not going to happen (nevermind the 4 boxes of Mrs. Cubbison's cornbread stuffing I've already purchased), but do you think sauteeing the celery and onions before adding to the mix would help with the fartogenicity of the final product?  Because THAT I'd be willing to do.

Well, it seems to help MY gut. And that's the way I've always made stuffing. (*grin*)

We are doing Thanksgiving at my sister's, we are actually renting the clubhouse of an apartment complex that some of their friends manage. There are 18 of us, not counting a couple boyfriends/girlfriends that may be coming. So it will be nice to have a big room with lots of seating for everyone!
We are splitting up all of the cooking, but we will have:
2 turkey's, one smoked, one roasted
1 ham
mashed potato's
sweet potato's
soup of some kind
butternut squash with blue cheese (I make this)
stuffing
some kind of cooked green veggie
homemade noodles (I make this - using Grandma's recipe that we all grew up on!)
homemade rolls
lots of desserts, I am making homemade apple pie, and one other, probably peach (frozen CO peaches are in the freezer), but possibly pecan or cherry.
I am sure there will be more, as everyone always brings extras. Three of the "kids" are now married and will bring their own things as well.

Christmas dinner, we go non-traditional. When my family lived in Kansas City, we brought BBQ back to Nebr. with us, and they all ordered our favorite pizza for us! But the last few years since we moved back, we make it a soup night. We have chili (with cinnamon rolls), homemade chicken noodle soup, cheeseburger soup, and usually some other kind that changes every year. Plus all kinds of sides and munchies and desserts. 

SOUP!!  I could eat soup every day and every night.  I love almost all things soup.  And my husband doesn't (except my potato leek soup, which he adores).  I make a great split pea soup with the leftover hambone after Thanksgiving - the gas from the peas (and onions) is a bit of an issue, but worth it.  Fortunately, others in my family (besides DH) like it, so I am prevented from making the house uninhabitable for a week at a time (I don't know how to make less that a couple of gallons at once).

I like miso soup and shrimp wonton soup as snacks; Progresso beef burgundy as a small meal, tomato soup (with Ritz crackers if I'm living dangerously) as comfort food; cold borscht with sour cream - pretty much any soup.

And my father makes a fabulous matzoh ball soup - I make a good chicken soup base, but I've never learned how to make matzoh balls as good as his.  And his mother made a wonderful cold cherry soup (a Hungarian specialty) - NOBODY in his family bothered to learn how she did it, and I haven't tasted anything like it since.

Hmm, a reminder to all - besides taking time during these family gatherings at the holidays to not only talk to the older generation about their lives and experiences - GET THEM TO WRITE DOWN THEIR RECIPES!

MMMMM soup.  I do a pork veggie soup here at Porky's, and Soup Beans, of course with my pork and broth, too.  When a brisket goes wiley, it becomes Briskey Chili.  I've been dying to do smoky chicken and dumplings, but my pulled chicken goes too fast.

OMG - I'm going to have to order some of your BBQ etc. by FedEx.

How does a brisket go "wiley"?  Does that mean overcooked?  Dried out?  I can't imagine how you plan and prepare food for a restaurant without either overbuying or under-preparing.

The beauty of slow-cooked foods is the recycling opportunities.  A brisket can have a "bad spot" that remains tough and never softens to the quality we want to serve.  Some slow-cooking in a pot of soup changes that.  Leftover pork goes into the green beans and baked beans (and soup), and leftover green beans and collard greens are added to veggie soup.  We do cook, however, with the idea of running out at the last hour.  On Saturdays, though, we purge all things left and give them to a church that feeds the poor twice a week.

We want our stuff to be fresh, especially the meat.  We have a white board that shows what is ready to be served right now, and it changes as stuff runs out and is replenished through the day.  At the bottom of the menu is an explanation of the concept of fresh smoked meat and how to act accordingly, as in don't yell at the staff - there's no freezer to pull anything out of and nothing is "whipped up" easily.  We cook more when we see the last two weeks on that same day yielding the same traffic.  Every quarter, we encounter a couple of weeks where we run out of food way early, which is our queue to start producing more on that day.  For ribs and brisket, we get calls as early as 10am (because they're that damned good) to reserve brisket or ribs for dinner that night.  It's fun and exciting, but you're right.  It's  quite the juggling act, and sometimes guessing game.  This week, we've got 70 turkey orders and we're fortune-telling the rest of the week, expecting lunch to go down and dinner to go up, as relatives are in town and there's not a lot of cool restaurants in our small town, and we're definitely considered a good spot to bring people...so we're looking forward to a fun week.

ITS been just over a year since my DS , and this is my first TG on a regular diet, surgery was the week before tg, so I'm looking forward to it without the feeding tube. I'm at goal, and haven't dieted or eaten anything special, or different than i did before surgery, just less, and it of course was Mal absorbed.  Life is grand.  I can do a typical Chinese combo plate so Im good to go for thanks giving dinner.  Ill have it all. so glad I stayed with Diana over the years when the insurance companies and some doctors wanted to do the rny,