Thanksgiving

For food fanatics like us, Thanksgiving isn't so much a holiday as an event/food extravaganza. We look forward to this day all year long, and eagerly await the week's worth of turkey sandwiches afterward. After five years of Thanksgiving dinners together, we've got our family meal down pat, but this year we also branched out a bit and tried a few new things.

No one wants to spend all day putting together the meals and then doing dishes, so a significant amount of the prep-work actually gets done the day before. The green been casserole, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and deviled eggs are assembled and refrigerated until the next day.

To start off with, Megan slices up the maple bacon for the green bean casserole, which is pan fried for a few minutes.



While we're throwing thin slices of bacon in the pan, the eggs for the deviled eggs are boiling and we're cooking up the cranberries, which will be refrigerated over night. Don't use that gross canned cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving - bagged cranberries aren't that expensive and don't take much effort to cook up.


After the bacon has cooked up a bit, it's tossed with a whole lot of green beans. We also picked up a few tin pans at the store so there would be fewer dishes. They also serve as an easy way to store the leftovers without having to use an extra tupperware dish.


Next up is the cream of mushroom soup to finish off the green bean casserole. At this stage it's oven-ready, so it waits in the fridge until the actual day of Thanksgiving.


Here's the peeled and cubed sweet potatoes getting a nice warm bath!


Thanksgiving isn't Thanksgiving without eating more deviled eggs than is really necessary. Weirdly, Matt doesn't like deviled eggs - which just means more for everyone else! This year we actually didn't make that many, as our friends Glen and Cristal make two delicious varieties and brought them over for dinner.


Here Megan is filling a cooked egg white with the devil egg filling, which uses mustard and the liquid from the olive jar.


Slices of olive and dashes of paprika finished off our deviled eggs for a nice presentation.


After boiling, the sweet potatoes cover a layer of marshmallows.


On top of that goes a generous layer of brown sugar.


And then finally there's butter and pecans added. Like the casserole, it's now oven ready, and is stowed away in the fridge for the night.


The morning of Thanksgiving (after getting the newspaper for the Black Friday ads!) we start the prep work for the turkey. Inspired by the show "Take Home Chef," we changed up our turkey spices this year and decided to do a butter rub. First off we finely diced whole garlic cloves and fresh sage.


Here's the finished pile of herbs and garlic, which smell simply fantastic, and really got our appetites up for the big event.

The herbs are mixed in to melted butter so the whole mixture can be rubbed in-between the skin and the meat of the turkey, which seasons the bird and gives the skin a different texture than normal.


Here the butter and herbs are thrown together just before getting mixed up.


The final product (while looking deceptively like spinach and artichoke dip somehow!) has an amazing aroma and gives the turkey a flavor that's to die for.


We got our biggest turkey ever this year, weighing in at a whopping 22 pounds. Albertson's ran a sale where the bird was 49 cents a pound if you bought another $25 worth of food. That was a no brainer for us, since we needed other Thanksgiving supplies anyway.


Megan and the guys really aren't fans of the neck, heart, liver, etc, but I like them as a change of pace from the standard turkey flavor, so we stuffed them inside the cavity to cook along with the bird.


Here's the turkey after applying the butter mixture. We pulled the skin up (Literally just pull up the edge of the skin with your finger, and then shove your hand under the skin and push back until the skin comes up from the meat. It's messy, but worth it.) and rubbed the mixture underneath, and then applied the leftovers to the top of the skin as well. For better cooking and to retain more moisture, the bird got hog tied with kitchen string.


Normally the turkey is our only meat dish on Thanksgiving, but this year we wanted to spice things up and have something fun to snack on while cooking, so I also got a big platter of shrimp and cocktail sauce.


To go to another level entirely, we also picked up a spiral ham at Sam's Club, which comes with a honey glaze. Here's the ham before applying the glaze.


Things are starting to come together and the oven time is about to begin. Here's the table with some veggie snacks and some of the dishes getting ready to hit the oven.


Glen made two different kinds of deviled eggs: chipotle bacon, and garlic with herb mayo. These most definitely are not your standard deviled eggs, and pack a huge flavor not usually found in this classic dish.


There has to be mashed potatoes, of course, and here's an unbelievable 10 pounds of them peeled, cubed, boiled, and waiting to be whipped up.


Stuffing is another tradition that we gleefully follow. In addition to the bread component, we saute various vegetables in butter before baking.


Just before putting the green been casserole and sweet potatoes in the oven, the casserole gets topped with french fried onions.


Here's the finished casserole, fresh out of the oven. By this point we were out of counter space, so our gaming table got put to good use.


Here I'm applying the honey glaze in-between each layer of the spiral sliced ham.


Gadzooks! The food is almost ready and Jacob is bamboozled by it's glory!


The ham comes out of the oven first, glazed and baked to perfection. Slices of spiral ham make an excellent sandwich the next day with miracle whip and cranberry mustard.

Here's the turkey coming out of the oven, which it turned out was a two-man job!


We use a cooking bag with the turkey, which seriously cuts down the cooking time and also keeps all the juices inside. Rather than using store bought gravy, we cut a hole in the bag and pour all the juice out into a pan.

Here's the juice from the turkey, which is already seasoned to perfection. Some flour and a little simmer time turns it into some of the best turkey gravy you'll ever have.


And here's some shots of the turkey about to get sliced. If you've ever wondered the best way to slice a turkey - it's actually really easy. Slide the knife into the center and cut down so you cut the bone in half. The turkey will naturally segment into two sides so you can easily cut off diagnal slices on either side.








That's a whole lot of turkey, and as you can imagine, it didn't all get eaten that night, even with friends over to help out. Plates of leftovers and turkey sandwiches are the order for the next few days. When we get tired of that, Megan uses what's left to make a big turkey pot pie.

Now that all the Thanksgiving festivities have calmed down and the leftovers are gone, we can get back to our normal weekly meals. We're going to be trying out some new meals using vegetables such as spaghetti squash and corn in the coming weeks, so check back soon for more delicious adventures in cooking!