Thanksgiving Dinner - Or Not

For the past few days, I have been reading all my facebook friends' descriptions of their vast cooking preparations for their Thanksgiving meals. Since there will be much talk about this, at least in our family and friends circle, I thought I'd better set the record straight. Thanksgiving Dinner 2010 did not go as planned. Here's why:

I actually started off on a positive note. I remembered to get the turkey breast (I gave up on a full bird years ago, when trying to cut meat off could only be accomplished if I had consumed Valium with a vodka chaser before wielding the knife). I even remembered to get it a few days before Thanksgiving so it could thaw. Of course the turkey breast Steve picked out wasn't frozen, so I was really on the road to Thanksgiving Dinner Success.

On the way to the car after purchasing said turkey breast, I casually asked Steve when his and Molly's flight was on Thanksgiving Day (they are flying to Orlando - yes, we were just there - blah, blah, blah). He answered that the flight left at 12:30, meaning they would need to leave the house at 11 am.

Using my 9th grade Algebra skills, I calculated the time we would need to eat the Thanksgiving meal, and decided we would need to eat at approximately 10:00 in order to get to the airport at the designated time. Thanksgiving lunch quickly got cancelled.

The problem was that I still had the turkey breast. Since most of us would be out of town, I decided to cook the thing today, Thanksgiving Eve. It's really not difficult - I just toss it in the crockpot in the morning and 12 hours later, it's done. No, the turkey cooking wasn't hard - it was just all the other stuff that needed preparing.

At some point, I decided we would just have turkey sandwiches. We've never had turkey sandwiches, so I wasn't sure of the recipe. I figured we would need gravy, which I also don't make. So, Steve went to the store and bought some.

I emailed the family and told them we were having turkey. Sam said he would bring Amish sweet rolls (he should have brought an entire Amish Thanksgiving meal), Lindley refused to bring anything, and Molly said she would bring the leftover bags of chips from her house re-warming party - that was held last Saturday.

By the time the family assembled, we also had a butt-load of cous-cous, some fancy corn, some black-eyed peas, Blue Bell vanilla ice cream, and Hershey's syrup/caramel sauce/Magic Shell. The best part of the meal was my Diet Coke float.

So, there you have it. My 2010 Thanksgiving meal. It had turkey and some veggies. It had dessert. It had family. And the best part is that it's done and now it's time to plan for our family Christmas meal. Maybe I should go ahead and break out the Valium and vodka now.

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Today's blessings: spending the day and taking a stroller walk with Lindley; turkey for dinner with Steve, Sam, Lynnette, Lindley, and Molly