Our Thanksgiving

As fascinating as my GI tract is, I think it's time to write about Something Else. Like Thanksgiving weekend. Here's how it went.

Wednesday

--We started the gluttony with a late night meal at Chili's.

--I assembled the stuffing, koshered the turkey and mapped out cooking times for each dish.

--Dragged myself to bed circa 2 am. Not so smart.

Thursday

--Set alarm. Bwah ha ha ha! Realize that nothing will proceed according to schedule from this point forward.

--An hour later, start things off with some quality nookie.

--Shower, approach kitchen.

--Open oven to adjust racks. Find loaf of bread that was supposed to go in the stuffing. (Has wondered why there was so much egg/broth left over). Break bread into sacrament sized pieces and stir into stuffing.

--Butter & season turkey. Slide extra fat under breast skin so it can self-baste while cooking. Wrestle into oven. In retrospect, a 20 lb. turkey was much too much for four people.

--Bake pumpkin pie, baste turkey, bake stuffing, make cranberry sauce; kids help with rolls & green beans. Mike handles cooking & mashing potatoes.

--Casualty: a sweet potato/green apple/pineapple concoction. I didn't roast the sweet potatoes long enough by themselves, so they didn't cook through before adding the other ingredients.

--Got snappish with Mike in the home stretch. To his credit, he was trying to be helpful and I was less than patient while trying to explain cooking steps to him AND stay on top of the 4 things I was cooking. (My bad).

--After we sit down to eat, I hear cooking sounds. ?! Mike had put my sweet potatoes in the top oven (cold) and put the turkey back in the bottom oven (hot) where it got roasted all over again. This rendered the dark meat unusable for anything except making stock. :(

--After dinner, my friend Minerva stopped by for dessert. After she left, we went to go see Enchanted. Fun movie! Again, collapse into bed in wee morning hours.

To be continued...