Thanksgiving

So I survived cooking my first full Thanksgiving dinner for five, thanks in part to our friend Holly who spent the day with us and helped. After I made the stuffing, Holly and I stuffed the turkey and sewed him up together. In this picture, I am looking happy because the turkey is no longer in the dangerous brine, and Holly is looking happy because she's holding the turkey under the armpits while I dry it off with paper towels; this is an experience that could make anyone happy.


The turkey looked better after being roasted:


It's good to have a useful husband. He dazzled us all with his superior carving skills. (For him, the best part about Thanksgiving was that he got to use the electric carving knife we got as a wedding present.)


I made rolls using a recipe from the in-laws. If Nathan's consumption is any proof of their tastiness, I guess you could say they were delicious - he ate ten in one sitting. Yes, ten.


I made two kinds of stuffing: one 'regular' kind (i.e. the way my Mom makes it) and one more adventurous kind: Sausage, Apple, and Cranberry Stuffing. In the end I liked the Mom-kind better, so that'll teach me to go trying to improve on perfection.




Of course, no Thanksgiving would be complete without mashed potatoes and gravy:


And in addition to the Palmer-family-standard of peas with toasted slivered almonds, I branched out and made a recipe for butternut squash that I love. You cube and boil a squash and mash it up. Add some mayonaise and a beaten egg, about a half teaspoon of brown sugar, salt and pepper to taste, and a diced, lightly sauteed onion. Pour the squash into a casserole dish and top with a mixture of crumbled saltine crackers, parmesan cheese, and melted butter, and bake at 350 for about 30 minutes. Yum!


Melissa and Roman brought an amazing salad with pomegranate seeds and sugared nuts in it!


So the five us of enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner together. Then we had dessert, but the pies were gone too quickly for me to get pictures. I made a Maple Pumpkin Pie with a ginger streusel topping. (I used this recipe for the crust.) I also made a chocolate pie using my Grandma's delicious recipe. Nathan loved it and ate the leftovers for breakfast on Friday morning. (The fact that I allowed him to do that either makes me an awesome wife or a terrible wife; I'm not sure which one...)

After dinner on Thursday I was exhausted, and I stayed exhausted until, well, now, because I'm still exhausted. FavoriteBoy understands that any eating we do for the next month will be either leftovers or takeout because I don't want to see another recipe or dirty dish for a very long time.

Except that I just found a recipe for turkey stroganoff, and it looks like the perfect way to use up some leftovers tonight! I guess I may venture back into the kitchen after all.