Thanksgiving Dinner

I feel like I'm behind the times here. I have every intention of taking a few blog posts to talk about Thanksgiving and our weekend, but I feel like I should already be moving on to Christmas. Well, doggone it...I still want to talk about Thanksgiving, so I will! :-)

I was a little nervous about making the full Thanksgiving dinner for the first time, but almost everything worked out really well! I hadn't had time to make the milk chocolate pecan pie before my parents got here, so I did that on Wednesday night. I had a huge mess to clean up when quite a bit of the filling overflowed the pie shell, but once we got the pie plate unstuck from the baking sheet (thank God someone suggested I put a baking sheet under the pie!), the pie was absolutely heavenly!! I started out Thanksgiving day by preparing my turkey. Fortunately, it was no longer frozen (although the neck really didn't want to come out...it was still slightly frozen to the inside of the turkey). I covered the turkey with an olive oil/butter/spice blend that I found on allrecipes.com, put some chicken stock and water in the bottom of the pan, and stuck it in the oven.

I was hoping to use Shawn's mom's recipe for dinner rolls, but she remembered that the recipe she uses has been tweaked and adjusted over the years for her to use at high altitude. That obviously wouldn't work for me down here at sea level, and she's not sure where exactly the original recipe is. So instead she sent us a roll mix. :) I still had to add a few ingredients, knead the dough, and let it rise...so I say it counts as making homemade rolls! The package had a suggestion for adding some herbs to the dry mix, so I did that, and the rolls were so good!!

The rest of our meal consisted of steamed green beans, mashed potatoes (one of the few things I can make without having to look at a recipe), and fried sweet potatoes (which my dad cooked, since mine never turn out as good as his). When everything was ready, Shawn happily used our electric knife (a wedding present) to carve the turkey! We also noticed that our "bar" section of the kitchen counter can be used as an excellent buffet area! Which is good, since I don't think our table is big enough to hold that much food at once. :)