Yay Thanksgiving! I fully support any holiday during which you eat until you cannot possibly shove another bite in your pie hole. (And really any holiday with pie to shove in said pie hole.)
The only kind of holiday I like better than a food holiday is a present holiday. I like presents. Presents are better than food. Sometimes. Depends on who’s giving.
Anyway…back to Thanksgiving. I hope your’s was good because mine was awesome. I shot guns, ate delicious food, hung out with the family, ate more good food, saw my first Bond movie (yes, I know my cinematic education is lacking) and shopped with one of my besties. But not on Black Friday. Never on Black Friday.
But before actual Thanksgiving, we hosted Florida Family Thanksgiving, aka My First Thanksgiving, aka My First dinner for More than Four People, aka My First Turkey.
I don’t like raw chicken…it’s gross…so I don’t cook chickens (well…I cook chicken only when I can slide it out of a package and not have to touch it) and everyone kept telling me it was just like roasting a chicken so then I had to explain why I don’t roast chickens and basically it wasn’t helpful at all.
But…I decided to be brave. I went to the store and bought a bowling ball that they claimed was a turkey but no bird could weigh that damn much. Unless it’s a dinosaur. Pterodactyls could probably weigh that much. So we maybe we had a Thanksgiving pterodactyl.
I brought it home and looked up lots of turkey roasting recipes but they were long and I didn’t feel like reading them so I just covered it with a thick layer of butter and salt and pepper and herbs and shoved a bunch of herbs in the giant hole where his guts are supposed to be. (I figured if it was inedible at least it would smell good!) (And yes I remembered to remove the leftover guts first.)
So anyway…I cooked the turkey…and surprisingly it was not only edible but pretty good. And I’m not really a big turkey person. (I prefer my turkey processed and deli sliced, thanks.) So…yay me!
I also made a sweet potato soufflé (so delicious it should have been dessert…I am totally ok with vegetables that taste like dessert), an apple/pecan/bacon/sage risotto (grains, fruit, protein vegetable and dairy in one dish…this is a superfood) (yes, I’m counting sage as a vegetable..it’s green), a spinach salad (it was salad….how good could it be?), a chess pie (which, if you’ve never had/heard of this your life is not complete and you need to call me…also, this makes a wonderful balanced breakfast when topped with ice cream), a chocolate chess pie (ditto) and cheesecake brownies.
Some how…I guess I forgot that other people were bringing food and that this was just Thanksgiving and not the Last Supper.
The husband kept wandering through the kitchen while I was cooking reminding me that there were only going to be 7 of us. He apparently forgot how much he usually eats. Most of the recipes I make say they serve six but we get maybe three servings so I cooked for an army.
Nothing wrong with leftovers. It’s not Thanksgiving if there are no leftovers. Then it’s just dinner with stretchy pants.
We had big plans for the night. A dance party was anticipated, someone brought tools for beer pong.
No one factored in 7 people consuming 70lbs of food and a pterodactyl. After dinner we all collapsed in a food induced stupor and put in that classic holiday movie…Zach and Miri Make a Porno.
Yep, classy after dinner entertainment. Didn’t matter…everyone was gone and we were in bed by 11. Apparently pterodactyls have way more tryptophan than turkeys.
All in all…success! Looking forward to the next Florida Family holiday…we’re thinking New Year’s. Without so much pterodactyl so maybe we’ll make it to midnight…
Real Housewife of Jacksonville 
Leave a comment