Cooking | Lessons from my daughter

Up until Emily’s year in first grade, we didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving.

Not because we didn’t want to but because I was born and raised in Quebec. We didn’t celebrate The “Action de Grace” the way Emily wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving.

Fall 2006…

Now that Emily’s teacher taught her all about Thanksgiving.. we found ourselves in an interesting spot… a couple of days before the actual holiday.

We had to invite family and cook some really specific food as per what Emily told me. I had to google some recipes.

Because Emily could tell us, using her words, we certainly obliged.

Lucky for us, we now had family near by.

We invited, Barb & Greg

And Jonathan’s parents

We moved the table in the living and set-up the buffet in the kitchen

I bought everything in the colors that Emily said we needed

I thought the table looked amazing but Emily had something else in mind

Even when she was only 8, she had lots of imagination 🙂 I have always loved that about her.

Before dinner, she made us go around the table and tell what we were thankful for.

So although today is not Thanksgiving, I am thankful for fall being around the corner and for my in-laws and family members living near by.

Above are 2 pictures that really shows the relationship between Emily and her grandfather. You can feel the affection they had for each other. We still miss him deeply and if you have a couple more minutes, I invite you to read how Emily decided to remember her “papie” here!

We are by no mean gardeners.

This is our second go at it.

We tried a couple of years ago and got some peas and a big mess of “not really grown” anything!

We skipped a summer as Jonathan worked overnight and we were traveling to my father’s place which meant the garden would not get the attention it needed.

This year, we are trying a limited amount of vegetables and strawberries!

We’ve had 3 really small strawberries 🙂

We are trying to grow pumpkins and learned today that we might need to try and fertilize the flowers.

We have picked a handful of green and yellow beans

We are growing cherry tomatoes, red and yellow

So far, we’ve picked maybe 10 yellow cherry tomatoes and will finally get to try some of the red ones

We are hoping to grow some tomatoes that would be big enough to make a sandwich…

Our only pepper so far wasn’t really good but we still have 3 more coming!

Our only successful story is this lovely basil plant which we bought this big and managed not to kill it. We’ve used lots of it and it’s still growing!