Thanksgiving Day Preparations

are insane. Just insane, I tell you. My biggest problem is that I try too hard to be Martha Stewart. I'm not. Not even close. But I want to be. I want the perfectly laid table, the best foods on the table, beautifully displayed, cooked to perfection. I want to make teacher gifts. Oh, ya, and I want the time and patience to do it all, too!

Last night I started getting stuff ready for the big day. I baked a couple of cakes to make cake balls. Yes, it's a strange name for a recipe, but I got it off twopeasinabucket.com and the ladies there raved about how easy and tasty it was. So, I decided it couldn't be that bad; I make some "Thank You" gifts to have the kids give to their teachers and day care providers.

Oh, and here's the recipe:

CAKE BALLS

1 cake mix - any flavor
1 tub of frosting - usually the same flavor as the cake
Almond bark

Bake cake in 9x13 pan according to directions.
Once cake has cooked and cooled, crumble into a bowl.
Add 2/3 of the frosting then roll into balls a little smaller than a golf ball.
Lay on cookie sheet and freeze.
Once frozen dip in melted Almond Bark.

This is what they looked like when they were mixed and formed into a ball:


Then, as the balls were firming up in the freezer, I made some pumpkin pies. YUM! I also made some cranberry sauce. This looks like it's going to be yummy. This is the recipe I used for cranberry sauce:

CRANBERRY SAUCE

INGREDIENTS
1 cup white sugar
1 cup orange juice
1 (12 ounce) package fresh cranberries

DIRECTIONS
In a medium saucepan over medium heat, dissolve the sugar in the orange juice. Stir in the cranberries, and cook until they start to pop (about 10 minutes). Remove from heat, and transfer to a bowl. Cranberry sauce will thicken as it cools.

After the cranberry sauce was ready, I decided to melt the almond bark and dip the cake balls. It was a long, tedious process, but I think they turned out well. Ok...well, once again, I can't get more than 1 picture to load up on blogger! grrrrr! I'll try again tomorrow so you can see what they look like.

I even made little packages up using take out containers. I stuck on pictures of turkies that the kids colored and wrote a short message on the other three sides. Again, no pictures because of blogger's noncooperation...Trust me...they're cute! ;)

So...after working full time today, I came home and put in another four hours...sigh...Oh, and I even had dinner ready to go. I made spaghetti sauce in the crockpot. Prepped it last night and had it simmer all day. The house smelled good! I'm tired now, though.

Tomorrow, I'm going to make egg salad sandwiches for dinner and I'll start prepping for the sweet potato casserole and the green beans with oven roasted onions. Thursday should be fairly low key. I'll make the broccoli and cheese, the gravy and the rest of the green beans. Apple pies are done and in the freezer so I'll take those out tomorrow night. I think we're ready...but...it's not going to be a Martha Thanksgiving... ;)