Christmas cooking

For our employee Christmas party this year we made an Amish wedding meal - at least some portions of it.  Betz and I spent much time in my tiny little townhouse kitchen and dining room preparing everything.

We started with roasht - turkey and filling together.  We cooked 4 turkeys in roaster pans,

cubed up 15 loaves of bread

that filled two lugs of fresh bread cubes.

We only used 2 heads of the giant cabbages that produced 20 lbs. of finished cole slaw.

I tried something new for this meal - crock pot mashed potatoes..  We wanted to have home made, real, mashed potatoes.  We filled my large kettle (the one I use to make 4 gallon of meadow tea through the summer), mashed them,

and stirred in sour cream, lots of cheese, butter and milk. 

We filled 4 crock pots with finished mashed potatoes and simply plugged in the crock pots the next morning.  We didn't need to do anything further to prepare them and we had soft, fluffy, creamy mashed potatoes the next day for our meal.  I'll be doing this from now on for our family dinners that require mashed potatoes - no more last minute mixing.

We added sweet potatoes, mixed vegetables and of course, lots of gravy plus large trays of Christmas cookies to the meal. Betz took all the pictures in this post - I'm just notcoordinated enough to pull off a Pioneer Woman stunt and get pictures of each and every step.

Betz and Mr. Studly were extremely helpful with this meal.  I never could have pulled it off without their wonderful help - before, during and after with all the clean up.

We set a very simple table - much like I remember my extended family Christmas dinners that my amish grandmother set..

Jay wanted to have a sit-down meal this year.  He wanted everyone to be served, everyone to be at one table.  One table - one family.  We have a great crew of  'family members'.

The business, family and 'family' started wih Jay's father (red hat).

Oh, we also had the amish 'center pieces'...... homegrown celery placed in glass containers down the center of the table. (glass and concrete floors make me nervous so we improvised with plastic.)

It was a fun filled day.  Lots of people, lots of food,

and lots of fun.

And a few little people to round out the day..... and post.