When the store bought pie crust burns.....

while baking the pumpkin pie, what do you do?  Answer:  Make cut-out pie crust cookies with the spare crust.  I chose to make squirrels.  (But next year I am going back to making my crusts from scratch.)

There are two things my dad has always done to help my mom out during the Thanksgiving preparations; 1) clean all the dishes (even while she is still using them) and 2) make the cranberry sauce.  When it comes to cranberry sauce, my dad is a mad scientist; every year he experiments with different ingredients.  Some years the results turned out really yummy, but some years we were glad mom had a can of cranberry jelly in the cupboard.  Since I haven't been able to spend Thanksgiving with my parents for many years now, I feel it is my duty to make the cranberry sauce every year.  I've stayed pretty tame in my recipes, but this year I ventured out of my comfort zone.  I added dried figs, honey and ground cardamon to the boiling, popping cranberries (the recipe from Real Simple). It was very tasty; my dad would have approved.