I'm no Martha Stewart

Thanksgiving this year was quite the adventure. At the end of the day I told JR that it was one of the most eventful uneventful events I've ever had the pleasure of participating in. If you remember back a couple posts ago I had decided I would try to cook a full Thanksgiving meal for the two of us. Although I may not be Martha Stewart I think it turned out pretty dang well. I wish I had been Martha Stewart though because then I would have had about a thousand people to help me prepare this meal. Instead I started cooking pies at 10 am and wrapped up with everything else around 3:30 pm or so. That's about 5 hours of straight cooking. Hence why it was such an eventful uneventful day. I turned on the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade, rolled up my sleeves and got to work. Thank goodness for our upstairs neighbors being gone and leaving us their house key to cat sit because having and extra oven was pretty helpful.
Although it took super long to do everything I actually really enjoyed it. I had to admit it sure was a lot of work for about 10 minutes of eating, you might even call it somewhat anti-climactic. I was especially proud of the fact that nothing came from a box or was pre-packaged at all. Even my stuffing started as french bread! Our menu consisted of Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes with gravy, green bean casserole, home made rolls, and we finished up with a peaches and cream pie. We went with a turkey breast rather than a full one considering a full turkey may have been a little much for 2 people. My biggest challenge turned out to be the rolls. Some day I'll get rolls down but they didn't rise quite right. I also struggled a bit with the pie crust because I was reading the recipe wrong and didn't put in enough butter before I cooked it. I made 2 pies and with one of them the crust totally fell apart when filling it but I was able make an emergency crust and saved Thanksgiving. I'm glad Thanksgiving isn't for another year because I'm not quite ready to commit to another meal like that for at least a year. It sure made me appreciate moms the world over!






We also put up our Christmas tree after dinner. Since we are going to be gone half of December we decided to get the decorations up early so we could enjoy it longer in our home. Our tree is so beautiful this year! I'm quite pleased with it. It's amazing the difference a nice artificial tree and some new ornaments can make!




And here we are enjoying our egg nog. It's always been my tradition to drink egg nog while decorating the Christmas tree.

By the way, JR is obsessed with egg nog. No, really. I had bought half gallon to drink when decorating the Christmas tree and when I wouldn't let him drink it early you know what he did? He went out and bought not 1, not 2, but 3 half gallons of egg nog to drink and for awhile was trying to keep them hid from me. What a silly man he is. He sure does LOVE egg nog.
We spent Thanksgiving night with friends playing games and eating yummy desserts. It was a really good day! We missed family but were still able to make special.