Sunday night and the end of Thanksgiving weekend. I.am.tired. So tired, in fact, that I spent the day dozing off and on my recliner, sandwiched between two heated blankets. It was blissful, especially since the Mr. and I have not been feeling well since yesterday.
But let me back up, and start where I left off. The stuffing was soooooo good. I will be making that for myself for Christmas, and I will be buying up packages of Pepperidge Farm stuffing mix well before the big day.
Thursday morning, I was supposed to have the turkey in the oven by eight AM. However, the day was full of funny mishaps, and I guess you could say the turkey got caught in the crossfire. I watched an Alton Brown video in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, an updated video on his famous Turkey Brine. We have used his recipe before and the turkey was great. This year we decided to try the new version. I should have known by the amount of alcohol the man was consuming during the video that this new way might not live up to all of his promises. So the brine was fine, although different than last time. Last time it was all kinds of herbs and salt and apples and oranges. This time it was just salt and brown sugar. He promised that if we soaked it and then laid it out and let it air dry, which I did in the fridge on a cookie sheet with a cooling rack underneath, and trussed it a certain way, then the turkey would cook super fast and evenly. So I did what he said. Put it in the oven at 500 degrees for thirty minutes, and then turned it down to 350. But when I opened the oven door to look, the toe tips, for lack of a better word, and wingtips were burnt. Burnt! But I figured, well who eats that anyway, and went along with the plan. 2.5 hours later and the internal temp was 155, which was what he said. I listened several times, just to make sure I got it right. 155. It looked good. It smelled good. I took it out and placed it on the platter on the table. I came back ten minutes later to a plate filled with pink juice. Uh-oh. Ugh. Grrr. So I put the turkey back in for another hour and THEN it was done. Clearly Alton needs to lay off the sauce.
But the turkey was delicious. So delicious, in fact that we ate almost all of it, and gave the rest away, so we didn't have leftovers for turkey sandwiches, much to my own and Ally's dismay, when she returned from her trip to Hawaii.
Just about the time the turkey was done the Mr.'s mom was there, and everyone began arriving. We had so much we had to have a second table. We set everything up buffet style because there was no room at the dinner table for all of it. We had two cakes, two pies, cheesecake bites, charcuterie board, turkey and prime rib. Potatoes, sweet potato casserole, black bean salad, regular salad, rolls, cornbread, two gravies, chips, dips...crackers...
Had a mishap in the morning though that made me laugh out loud. I was distracted. I was upstairs and picked up a can of whipped cream. I walked downstairs with it, without meaning to. That was our "upstairs" whipped cream. I didn't want to walk back upstairs with it, so I wedged it into the fridge above the turkey because there wasn't a spec of room in there, and shut the door. As I walked away I heard a horrible racket coming from the fridge! What...the...I slowly walked back to the fridge and gingerly opened it, to the whipped cream shooting out the top and all over everything! I guess I had shut the door on it, but for the life of me I thought the fridge was having a terrible mechanical issue.
After everybody left I washed all the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen. I put everything away back where it belonged. In doing so, though, I grabbled too many things at once to put in the fridge and dropped everything, and the one casualty of the day was the stuffing. I was SO mad. Of all the things I had to drop, why did it have to be that delicious stuffing. The container came open and all the deliciousness spilled out all over the floor, along with half a dozen gorgeous deviled eggs, probably the prettiest deviled eggs I have ever made. Growl.
Saturday morning found us up at the crack of dawn. The weather was bad and getting worse, but Ally's plane was coming in at 7 AM. Originally we were going to have her Uber to her grandma's house, but grandma was not going to be home, so we just got up early, got some coffee, and went. This left us really tired last night. So tired we went to bed at 7 PM. I had not been feeling well, and both the Mr. and I woke up feeling terrible this morning.
But I managed to drag out all the Christmas stuff and start decorating today. And I cooked another turkey. Just so we could have those sandwiches.
It was halfway through the day when the Mr. reminded me that today was what he calls his second birthday. November 30, and four years since he received his transplant. I sat in my chair and thought about how Good God has been to us since that day. Everything was so uncertain. We didn't know what the next minute, or the next week held, let alone the next year. All we knew was that if something didn't happen he was going to die, and it would be soon.
What a blessed day that was. Death to life. We are absolutely thankful, keeping in mind always that someone else's family lost a loved one that day. So for us it's a day of joy, for another family it's a sad remembrance of the one they lost.
Nothing planned for tomorrow, but Tues through Thurs we will be on school duty again, so there should be lots to write about then. Ally is back in school, it is cold. I am tired, so sleep calls.
Thank you, Lord for this wonderful anniversary. Truly a fitting end to Thanksgiving weekend. You are GOOD.
Ally says I get an "A minus" in Charcuterie
I had forgotten just how sick the Mr. looked
before his transplant.
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