twenty-two seconds to live

I made my first solo wire-to-wire Thanksgiving Dinner this year.  I didn’t get too inventive, but I did pull everything off with fresh ingredients and managed to time all the dishes in a limited cookware, single-oven environment, including:

The Turkey (brined, complicated, 18 pounds because I just grabbed any old bird)

The Dressing (hand-cubed bread, cranberries, apples, apricots, onions, etc)

Garlic Mashed Potatoes (Marissa helped by peeling them and then whipping them)

Green Bean Casserole – from fresh grean beans boiled in chicken stock, and sauteed onions and mushrooms, but i still cheated and used cream of mushroom soup.

Fresh cranberry sauce with gran marnier in it to marry everything up.  (Marissa forced it through a strainer for me while i obsessed over other things.)

I cheated on the gravy and used a mix (only because I left my giblets in the fridge 400 miles away) I also went with King’s Hawaiian rolls because those are the BEST.

Everything was very well received, and I am looking forward to doing Christmas dinner in a month!

Spending the time with Marissa and Jacob just topped it off to make it the best Thanksgiving I’ve ever had – and made me realize how much I really do have to be thankful for.

We got Christmas presents for all the kids – and dropped an absolutely ridiculous amount of money we don’t have doing it, but I think it was worth it.  Marissa is full of great ideas – she really is a wonderful counterpoint to my hopeless over-analytical approach to things sometimes.

We finished season 6 of Smallville, now to somehow catch up on the now-running season 7.