Since I have been behind on my posting in general, I figured I would keep up the trend and post about our Thanksgiving. We were not able to go home this year, which means we had our very first Thanksgiving. It was nice in a way to have the freedom to do it our way. And hopefully we can make some good memories for the little man.
Anyway, originally the plan was to celebrate Thanksgiving on the Friday afterward because we were going to drive back home on Thursday. Since S and I were both not feeling well though, we decided to come back earlier. We had bought all of our dinner fixings before we left so we were set there. The hubs picked out a 17 pound brined turkey from good ole Trader Joe’s (Colorado sure doesn’t know what they’re missing out on) and all the fixings. On our menu was:
- turkey
- homemade rolls
- sweet potato spears
- green beans
- stuffing
- gravy
- homemade cranberry sauce
- pumpkin pie
This was the first time my husband and I had made a turkey and I have to say it was delicious! We didn’t cook the stuffing in it, but we did fill it with onions, carrots, apples and herbs. Since we weren’t home the day before to get a jump start on the cooking, we got rolling about 8:00. The rolls we make are a family recipe and take 3-4 hours start to finish. Once I mixed up the dough and left them to rise I worked on the pie. I cheated on the crust though and used a frozen one. My husband wanted little individual pies so I started by cutting little crusts. It was a disaster, they all fell and were masses in the bottom of the tins. Luckily I had 2 crusts so I put the other one in my pie plate and baked it. It also fell, but we figured no big deal, it was just for us. So I mixed up the filling according to the directions on the can and it all looked and smelled wonderful. I placed it in the oven and baked it up and thought I had a nice looking pie…

Once it was out of the oven I moved onto the rolls. I had to roll them out and cut them and then let them rise again. The second rise was fast though since the kitchen was getting warm.

As we baked the rolls, we got the turkey prepped. We tried placing butter pats under the skin and put the aromatics inside. We roasted it breast side up, covered with foil. We must have done something right though, because our bird was done in 4 hours, about 30 minutes before we expected.

Once the turkey was cooking I made the cranberry sauce (I love this recipe BTW. Alton is awesome!)

Since the turkey finished early we popped the sweet potatoes in the oven while the bird rested. I also whipped up the gravy and the green beans and then we were ready for our feast.

Everything was soo good and the baby liked it too! Unfortunately the pie was not set in the middle so we didn’t have any pumpkin pie. But we did have these a few nights later to celebrate my birthday:
Yummy!