Thoughtful Keepsakes: Happy Thanksgiving

What a great Thanksgiving day! Spencer and I had talked about doing a Turkey Trot somewhere here in Louisville since his parents would be here to watch the kids this morning. After finding out that it would cost us about $50 in entry fees for both of us to run, we decided to go to the store and buy our own cute running shirts and run around the neighborhood and call it good. So instead of some Man's sized running shirt with a turkey on it, Spencer got me a cute Reebok running shirt on clearance at Marshall's for $10 and we got to sleep in a few extra minutes instead of driving downtown somewhere. Anyway...we ran. I still out-ate any calories that I might have burned, but that's okay. Once we got back to the house, I showered and cooked everyone a big pancake breakfast. We cleaned up from breakfast and then we all watched the last part of the Macy's Parade while the turkey was in the oven. Since we had a huge breakfast around 9, we knew that lunch was not going to be until 2ish. I started the sides after the parade and somehow it all got done at the same time. I did a lot of prep work the night before so that helped. With all of this planning and cooking you would think that we had food for an army. But we had a pretty modest menu. I still marvel at how Big Granny gets all of those 20 side dishes and 52 desserts ready every year.

Turkey

Yeast rolls

Green Bean Casserole

Sweet Potato Casserole

Dressing

Pear/Gorgonzola Spinach Salad

Pecan Pie

Chess Pie

See? It's not that much when listed out. The kids made the cookies on Wednesday and Mimi/Poppy brought the chess pie, so I only had to do one dessert. (I had another one ready to go but I forgot to get more powdered sugar and it was fine because we were too stuffed anyway). And the salad was a joke. I was trying to be all healthy and have a green option to fill our plates. Not even I wanted that salad with everything else around. I'm looking forward to eating it for lunch tomorrow, but I need not have wasted time getting it on the table. I even knicked my thumb slicing the pears. It was a sign and I should have paid attention!

So let's talk about yeast rolls. THEY. WERE. GOOD. Like, really good. Like, Big Granny good. Now any outside person could walk in and taste the rolls and declare them nothing special. But they tasted the way I remember and that's what I wanted. Kind of like the dressing. Everyone makes a different dressing and everyone declares a different taste to be "good". But the kind of dressing that I want is the kind I had every year on Concord road in Martha Waller's kitchen. And that's what I got :-)

And here we are eating our hearts out:

Mr. Turkey - squished in my biggest corning wear dish.

While I was in Gatlinburg, my handy husband surprised me by painting our kitchen walls green. It is a lovely green, but it is a different shade than my green curtains. This picture does a horrible job of showing colors, but here is the "before":

By a complete fluke, I happened to look in my fabric closet and I had 2 yards of this chocolate brown staring back at me begging to become the new curtain. So...voila! Green+brown = happy.