Thanksgiving

If you've read the last two posts, you'll know that I spent Saturday evening out picking/gathering grapes, Sunday making grape pie, Monday making grape juice, and Tuesday making that juice into jelly.

Well Wednesday night I spent the evening preparing the turkey and making pies. And Thursday, well...of course half the day was spent cooking as well.

Let's start at the beginning. I was supposed to work on Wednesday, but campus got closed for this blizzard of a century to come in and knock out power and dump feet of snow and be negative degrees. Ok, it was cold, but we only got a dusting of snow and no power outages, and not even very high winds. I guess they got more snow up north though.

So I got to spend the day with Dave, YIPPEE! I honestly don't know what we did all day.

That evening Dave helped me pull out the insides (or "instructions") from the turkey. I prepared a brine for the turkey, thanks to Sarah Brazee from Tennessee's suggestion. I already had most of the ingredients, and the turkey had been thawing in the fridge since Monday (it was still a bit frozen, next time I need to thaw it 2 1/2 days instead of 2). We dunked the turkey, stuck it in the fridge, and then I got to work making pies.

I made the pumpkin pie recipe on the back of the can of pumpkin and realized it was for two pie crusts, and I only had two. So I improvised. I chopped up vanilla wafers in my food processor and put them in cupcake liners (the foil kind, not the paper kind). I forgot to get a picture of those, but they weren't much to look at. They were tasty though.

Thursday morning we got up, stuffed the turkey, sewed it up, and put it in the oven for Baby and me...and Dave. We then spent a good portion of the day going through boxes of junk mostly from the office that will be a nursery soon. Then at about noon (after 2 1/2 hours of turkey cooking at 325) we made the other parts of the dinner according to our plan. The turkey was probably done at about 3 hours, but we took it out at 3 1/2 hours. It was so moist and tender that it was falling off the bones as Dave tried to carve it. By 2pm Thanksgiving Dinner was ready! Everything went according to plan, and it was perfect. Well, Dave had requested extra stove top stuffing, but we ended up not even having a single bite of it. (I'll probably make it into a cassarole.)

Of course I took pictures of the results: