.:: Fire The Housewife ::.

Thanksgiving is big. Really big.  Huge even.  This is the first year I undertook Thanksgiving alone, usually I would attend someone else’s Thanksgiving and just show up with the can of cranberry sauce (no stems!  See if you can name that movie.) Or I would at the very least have The Sister there to do all the gross stuff like take the giblets out of the turkey.  But this year, oh this year, it was all me.  I started the day before with this…

It’s highly recommended everyone start with this.  Especially if along with cooking Thanksgiving dinner for your The Boyfriend’s family.  Especially if your The Boyfriend tends to wait until you have spent a lot of time meticulously cleaning your house and your The Boyfriend decides that is a good time to leave his crap everywhere.  If YOUR THE BOYFRIEND DOES THIS I RECOMMEND THIS MORE THAN ANYTHING.

Aaanyway, I also recommend you get this cute little kid to come over and keep you company for a while.

It really lowers your stress level.  Just tell me it’s even possible to see that cute little bald head and not want to snuggle it to pieces.  Don’t tell her mother this or she’ll never bring her over again.

I had done a lot of cleaning the weekend before, but like any house there was cleaning to be done the day before still.  I cleaned every square inch of that house and also set the table.  I don’t think anything is better than a pretty table.  Especially when someone bought herself these awesome napkin rings long before Thanksgiving JUST WAITING FOR SOMEONE TO COME OVER AND EAT DINNER WITH HER.

So, all these things happened Wednesday, the day before the big day.  Thanksgiving takes a lot of planning, about a week before T-Day I sat down and made a menu, and got out the ol’ box of recipes and started listing every single thing I would need for each recipe.  Having a thorough list es muy importante.  Having functional Spanish, es…meh.  My menu for T-Day was as follows:

• Veggie Plate (Carrots, Cauliflower, Olives, Dip)
• Fudge
• Sweet Potatoes
• Corn
• Canned Cranberry Sauce
• Cranberry Salad
• Turkey
• Mashed Potatoes
• Gravy
• Ham
• Rolls
• Pumpkin Pie
• Chocolate Pie

For four people this was a crazy large amount of food.  What was even more awesome was that my job gave us a 25 lb turkey.  I did not know this was going to happen the weekend before WHEN WE WENT OUT AND BOUGHT ALL OF THE GROCERIES FOR THANKSGIVING, INCLUDING A TURKEY.  It would have been pretty nice to know that, but beggars can’t be choosers.  The best/worst part was, I tried to donate the huge turkey, I wanted some family to have a turkey that couldn’t have had one otherwise, but all the food banks and community dinners in the area did not need turkeys! I’m glad they were so full up, but I still would have loved to donate my turkey to them.

On Day 1 of T-day (the day before) I cooked both pies, made the beginnings of the cranberry salad, and was going to make the fudge, but housewives like me tend to get a little, uh, distracted when babies and wine come over to play.  I didn’t quite get to that fudge on Day 1.  Don’t worry, I was up at the crack of dawn on T-Day putting in the turkey and prepping the rest of the food.

Everything turned out wonderfully and despite the fact that it was an insane amount of work alone, I pumped it all out, the boyfriend made the ham, the fire, and this awesome beard….

We ended up with quite the buffet:

And this beautiful turkey, GO ME.

This post was exhausting, so I am refusing to include recipes today.  Instead, you can all leave nasty comments for The Boyfriend who was supposed to have a whole lot of other things updated and re-done on FTHW to make my life easier.  Gosh, you’d think after that huge Thanksgiving meal he would have been feeling, well, Thankful and Giving.

Happy Thanksgiving and here’s to time to stop eating real food and start eating all sugary Christmas food!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 at 11:41 am and is filed under And She Cooks!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.