Thanksgiving Day Menu

I was hoping to sleep in today considering our Thanksgiving meal won't be until this evening and I'll have all day to cook and prep, but at 3:30 this morning, my eyes popped open. I tried rolling around a while hoping I could drift back off to sleep, but that didn't happen. Once I made a trip to the bathroom, Flash must have heard me, then let out a few loud barks to let me know that he would like to empty his bladder too. After a cold and rainy trip outside, he was ready to play and wouldn't even consider going back to his bed for a few hours. Damn dog needs to learn how to tell time! Anyhow, I'm up and since I've been a very bad blogger this month, not meeting my NaBloPoMo goals, I thought now while the rest of my family is sound asleep and not requesting that I make them something to eat, or clean something, or play Candy Land for the millionth time, I would take a few minutes and share our Thanksgiving day menu.

Once again, the Gardener and I are hosting Thanksgiving dinner for his family. We usually eat late in the day on Thanksgiving as not to upset the deer hunters in the family who are still searching for a prize buck in the fields. So far no one I know has been successful in bagging a deer yet, but there are still a few days to go before Wisconsin's gun deer season comes to an end. So, once the boys head out of the field, they will be coming over here, undoubtedly hungry for a big meal of Turkey and all the fixings. Not that they'll actually find a turkey on the table at our house.

For the second year in a row, I have decided to go with a local free-range chicken instead of a turkey. I guess, if our local egg lady grew turkeys, we might have gone that route but since her chickens are out of this world, it was a no brainer. She saved a big 11 pounder for me the last time she and her husband butchered and that's what we will be eating today. I initially froze the fresh chicken, then thawed it out in the fridge earlier this week and made the brine yesterday. The chicken is currently out in the garage soaking away in this brine mixture. Normally I would be bitching about the cold snap that has overtaken our area in the last few days, but outdoor refrigeration is quite handy during the holidays.

Most store bought frozen turkeys (or chickens) do not need to be brined since the manufacturer usually brines them before freezing, but fresh birds like ours have not been treated with anything (but love!) and need to be soaked in a salt water brine for 16-24 hours for a most delicious flavor. I had planned on grilling a red wine chicken like I did last year, but with the cold and windy weather, I decided that running outside to check the bird on the grill every 30 minutes was not something I wanted to do, so I 'm going to roast it in the oven.

Besides chicken, I'm making whipped mashed potatoes with butter and cream cheese mixed in, grandma Dee's stuffing- traditional dried bread stuffing with sauteed onions, celery, carrots, apple, dried cranberries, and chicken stock to hold it all together. she always used raisins, but we prefer craisins in this house. Squash from the garden with butter and either brown sugar or a drizzling of maple syrup, cranberry sauce (made by Mae yesterday), a fresh fruit salad and roasted brussel sprouts with balsamic vinegar and bacon. For dessert my father-in-law is bringing pumpkin pie, and if I get time later today, I'll make an apple pie with some home canned apple pie filling leftover from last year that I need to use up, and pie crust made with lard from the pig we bought from the same local farmer from which the chicken (and bacon) came. I can't wait to get cooking and EATING!

So, for my American readers, what are your Thanksgiving plans today? Are you cooking or enjoying someone else's cooking today? I'd love to hear your Thanksgiving favorites, or even your least favorite. My least favorite is when cooks pollute the stuffing with the bag of Turkey innards that comes with most frozen birds. You know, the gizzard, neck, heart and liver? Talk about a quick way to ruin one of the best Thanksgiving day sides. That and anything with cream of _____ soup mixed in. Yuck! But that's just my opinion.

Wishing everyone a very Happy Thanksgiving!

Another Funny Thanksgiving Card And A Few Photos From Our First Round Of Face Stuffing Family Togetherness

Someecards says it better than Hallmark ever could...

Thanksgiving Plans

Tomorrow is the first of 2 (possibly 3) Thanksgiving feasts our family will stuffing our faces with this year. The best part is that at the first one all I have to bring is the cranberry sauce. That and a stack of containers for leftovers to take home. I love it when Grandma N cooks for us!

Thanksgiving Confessions

I started writing this post a few days ago before my grandfather's health started to decline, so while I do feel odd posting something so silly today, I have decided that sitting and crying about it won't do me any good, plus I'm still making a big honking Thanksgiving meal tomorrow so what the heck, here goes...

Before I even start blathering on about my own Thanksgiving traditions and tricks, you must read (if you haven't already) Helen's Thanksgiving Letter To The Family. After you wipe away the tears that will come from laughing so hard (and possibly a change of underpants for the mom crowd), read her letters from years past. You will not be disappointed. I especially love that she prefers to cook the meal entirely herself and if her guests bring something, let's say sub-par, she lets them know. In my husband's family, that sub-par item would have to be either the snotty looking green bean casserole or as I like to call it, how many cans of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup did you add to an otherwise tasty and healthy vegetable? Or the Snicker bar and apple salad (I use the term 'salad' very loosely for a dish whose main ingredients are 3 candy bars and 2 tubs of cool whip). That said I like to have the meal at my house and avoid another Holiday of this.

Once again I will be making a big meal on Thanksgiving day for my husband's parents and brother-in-law and possibly a few single men from my family, but I'm sure they won't actually respond to my offer until the night before or even call 20 minutes before we eat and nonchalantly ask what we're having for dinner. Which brings me to the topic of this very post. Although I'm sure my meal will be the best in Wisconsin great, I have a few confessions to make about this year's Thanksgiving.

1. I have decided not to make a turkey this year. *gasp* No I didn't pick up one of those weird Tofurkey things from Trader Joe's, I'm actually making an 11 pound happy chicken. Seriously, if you're going to not eat meat then don't eat meat. Why dress up tofu to make it look and taste like turkey? Plus chicken is way better than turkey, just sayin'.
   
2. Since I don't think that my in-laws will notice, much less give a shit, I plan to serve the less expensive wine (2-Buck Chuck to be exact) this year.
3. The pie crust will contain lard. Get over it now. (Not sounding so appetizing after all the talk of blocked arteries today though.)
   
4. I plan to spend all day cooking in the kitchen, what I won't divulge (to my guests) is the fact that I will open a good bottle of wine for sipping during food preparation. Gotta keep the cook happy right?
   
5. I may be very excited about cooking and serving a big meal but I really don't care for the post dinner clean-up, especially after several glasses of wine eating a huge meal. No one should be surprised if I ignore the mess in the kitchen or even fake a headache to get out of clean-up.
6. I will be adding lots of butter and sour cream to the mashed potatoes. Get over it now.
7. My green beans will resemble actual green beans.
8. Canned cranberry sauce (cranberry wiggle) is banned from this house. I will serve traditional cranberry sauce made from actual cranberries.
   
9. Just because it's deer hunting season doesn't mean that my guests may wear their blaze orange outerwear complete with doe vaginal secretion scent at the dinner table. You think I'm joking? Then you obviously have never eaten Thanksgiving with serious deer hunters.
10. No football. No one in this family are real football (or any kind of sport for that matter) fans anyway so I'm not really breaking any hearts with this one. We will instead be watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade and the dog show (Perhaps a big, drooly Saint Bernard will win this year???).
    

Update on my Grandpa Conrad:
I called my grandmother this morning for an update and she broke down as she told me we were losing him. The situation didn't sound very promising at all. I then called my aunt, an RN and the voice of reason in our family and we talked about what she knew which was that the Cardiologist was planning to place a stint in one of the blocked/collapsed arteries this morning and get a better idea of treatment options. My Grandmother's friend B called me this afternoon to let me know what she knew after being at the hospital with my grandparents all day. She said the blockage and overall shape of the bad artery was too severe to even attempt the stint procedure. Grandpa does however have an extra artery that has been acting like a natural bypass for the blocked artery, taking over the load.

For now the doc wants to just adjust Grandpa's meds and do another Echocardiogram in a month to see if surgically placing a defibrillator would be an option. For a while this afternoon we were all worried that he only had a few days left but now his odds look better for an even longer and productive life as the doc said he could even go back to playing in jams and with the Arizona Banjo Band in the next few weeks, something our family can look forward to and certainly be thankful for this Thanksgiving!

I thought about going out to Arizona this weekend to be with them and help them in any way I can (cooking, driving them to doctor appointments, etc.) but for now I think that it would be premature to do so and plus my aunt will heading there on Friday after she returns to AZ from visiting her family. Once she gets there and fills me in, I'll make plans to fly out there and see them.

Thanks everyone for your thoughts and kind words! And don't forget to take time out tomorrow between Turkey, mashed potatoes and pie to give thanks for the ones you love, I know I will.

I cooked all day and all I got was a belly ache

My kitchen is finally lit again (hooray!) and I celebrated by cooking an entire Thanksgiving dinner for 7 completely from scratch- no tube biscuits, boxed stuffing or canned cranberry sauce. Being a lazy perfectionist, I wouldn't have it any other way, but I must say I am exhausted and don't wish to peel another potato until next year. The fam. seemed to enjoy my over-rated meal. By the time I sat down to eat, my mother and father-in-law had already finished one plateful and were going for a second. Good sign.

The one dish that I really didn't want to make was the hit of the table. No it wasn't snotty green beans (yuck x2) it was the sweet potatoes swimming in butter and brown sugar topped with caramelized marshmallows. I was planning to make the sweet potatoes with apples and craisins but I was outnumbered by a bunch who is just counting the days until diabetes sets it. The turkey was excellent too if I dare toot my own horn. I tried a new bird technique this year. I coated the turkey in salt (2 cups) and refrigerated for 2 days prior to Thanksgiving then washed the bird and did the usual seasoning and sage rub and cooked the whole business in an oven bag. Holy crap, that was the juiciest most flavorful turkey I have ever tasted. I will definitely be doing that again next year. Thank You Martha Stewart.

Hope all of you had a great holiday and didn't get trampled while shopping today. Yikes! I ventured out to hit a few sales and soon realized that I had made a horrible mistake. I should have thrown in the towel when only 5 minutes into the first store we had to find the nearest bathroom. Then the fighting- oh the fighting, and I'm not talking about the women hovering over the bargain bin, no no, it was my children.

I really wanted to find a bedding set because I knew that I would be able to find a great deal today. I found what I wanted but it happened to be perched up on the highest shelf of the completely crowded Boston Store. I wanted to just climb up and get it myself, but my oldest accused my of being unsafe (who me?) so I wandered around the packed store in search of someone to get it down for me. Luckily all of the employees were wearing ridiculous reindeer antlers, making them easier to spot. the woman threw down my huge comforter set and off I went now carrying this heavy over-sized bag, dragging 2 bored children behind me. I then found some bed pillows at a great price so I grabbed those with my one free hand, children now on their own and still fighting. Then I thought, I can still carry something in mouth, so I better see if I can find some matching throw pillows while I'm already in holiday shopping hell. Found the pillows, filled the trunk, and headed home.

Next year if I decide to do this again, I will be hiring a sitter.

Anyone else shop today?

Oh, and what do you think of my pink ceiling? It matches my dishes (Desert Rose- my grandmother's pattern) that I have used to decorate my kitchen. It's only paint and I can always change it, but for now I think it's pretty and unexpected.

*Updated with snow photos* Can I take back the nice things I said about my house?

Yesterday I decided I would paint my kitchen in time for Thanksgiving. Now that we have proper ventilation through our range downdraft vent, the walls won't get all greasy and gross. Except for the fact that I have a Saint Bernard in my house house, so my walls are always covered in some sort of drool-hair slime that can only be cleaned off with a Magic Eraser. So I perused our paint department in the basement to discover that I only had about a half gallon of the kitchen color left so... Off to Menard's with me and my "I promise I don't have to go potty before we leave, I just went" children. We get all the way back to the paint counter and Mae says "I think I need to go potty now." NOW, she decides to go. It always seems to be an emergency with her, so I drop off my paint request and run all the way back to the front of the store to the bathroom. Thank god we know our way around Menard's.

So I buy the paint, return home and start painting. I start painting the ceiling and realize that we still have that hideous fluorescent light fixture hanging above our island. I refer to the offensive light as The Big Buzzer because it emits this horrible buzzing sound- duh? So I say in my sweetest, dumbed-down housewife voice " Honey, will you take down that fixture and put something else up, please?" I should have known better. Let the complaining begin. Hubby now-"It's not that simple, I can't just hang a new light there, there probably isn't even a box, and if there is, how old is it, and what idiot do-it-your- selfer put it in? You know, this whole first floor needs to be rewired, and I've got so many other projects going on right now." But he loves me and knows that he's spent a whole week and a half on a project in his work van that has gotten nowhere, so he grabs his tools to start the investigation.

He removed the Big Buzzer and was right, the old crusty wires were just hanging out of the ceiling from some mystery box hidden way up in a buried ceiling (oh my) with even more unidentified wires hanging out of that, just out of arms reach. So instead of new lighting for Thanksgiving, I have swiss cheese ceiling and now no light in my kitchen, save the puny light over the sink and the newly positioned lamp on the corner table.



Being the smart electrician that he is, he will conquer this project and give me a beautifully lit Thanksgiving table...I hope. Remolding is his way of being romantic and sweet. Works for me. Like Red Green says " If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy." Luckily mine is both!

And now totally unrelated to my kitchen

It snowed this morning! The girls were thrilled. Mae played in the snow for a few minutes while we waited for the bus.

A Tale of Thanksgiving Past

I think it was Mae's first Thanksgiving way back in 2002 or was it 2003? It was Thanksgiving day and at that time we were still going to 2 or 3 Thanksgiving meals to please our families (especially with an infant) so this would have been the final meal for the day and thank goodness we had already eaten.

It started out with us arriving at my in-laws house and noticing several deer carcasses, some detached from their hides strewn about the yard in various stages of disassembly. Something very much to be expected from this group of men. My brother-in-law is an avid hunter and thinks it's sooooo damn funny to gross out the women with tales of shooting a fawn's mother, or the gruesome task of butchering the deer and asking "wanna help?" Maybe that's why he's not married anymore.

So we get in the house, I unwrap my sterile pumpkin pie and notice my father-in-law standing over the stove wearing his blaze orange hunting cap (which by the way never came off all evening) gnawing on a chunk of meat that he just removed from a boiling pot on the stove. I look at him, examine the meat and immediately think oh my god what the hell are we eating for dinner? Turns out that was not our Thanksgiving dinner, but it was the coveted deer heart. He stabs a shriveled up ventricle with his fork and says "Aliceson, try this, and grab me another beer." After about a minute of everyone convincing me to shove it in my mouth, I suck it up and take a bite. It wasn't too bad, a little chewy and awfully dense. I guess what should I expect from ORGAN MEAT?

Much to my delight, there was a turkey roasting in the oven with all the fixings. We all sit down to the completely expanded dining room table covered in Thanksgiving glory. They must have all been hungry after a day of deer slaying because that was the fastest prayer I have ever heard out of them other than the time at our wedding when we asked my Brother-in-law to bless the food and during his rambling into the microphone, he forgot! So after the hurried "Our Father" the food began to fly and believe me when I say fly it was because when my sister-in-law bit into a warm "tube biscuit" she realized that it was not cooked all the way through as did the rest of the gang, so my MIL, bless her heart, turns on the oven, grabs the baking sheet and says "throw em back on." In the midst of half-eaten biscuits sailing across the table someone bumps their head on the chandelier over the table and a bunch of dead bugs fall out of the fixture and into... the mashed potatoes. Grrross! I was apparently the only one who noticed and sounded like a real pain in the ass when I asked someone to scoop out the dried bugs, followed by a shout from my father-in-law in the kitchen of "it only hurts a little while" his standard response to almost anything. And you know what? He's right, none of us got sick.

Makes me look forward to this year's meal, although I think I will be cooking for them here. No heart, hopefully no dead bugs and heaven help me, no tube biscuits! Can't wait!

This post was written for Parent Bloggers Network as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by Butterball.

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