Thanksgiving Dinner

It was our first Thanksgiving "on our own" and we did a pretty good job! The menu included:

Turkey
Stuffing
Mashed Sweet Potatoes
Green Bean Casserole
Left Over Pumpkin Bars (from a previous dinner)

Since we did the parade my stipulation was that we would take dinner kind of easy because we wouldn't have as much time to concentrate on cooking things. The stuffing, green beans and dessert were all basically simple and we each had our own things to concentrate on (turkey for me and the potatoes for her). It all ended up pretty good but of course things didn't go exactly as planned. The turkey cooking time ended up being about an hour shorter than expected, so we had to rush the sides and actually ended up eating and finishing the dishes by the time we originally planned to start eating.

The only downfall to our dinner was that the eating portion of the night was pretty short, the typical 15 minute dinner time, since we didn't have a bunch of people we didn't have the normal sit around and chat about all sorts of stuff time. About 4 hours of cooking for 15 minutes of eating and then clean up time. So for a meal like that it was just strange since we are both used to having the big dinners (and for the last couple of years 2 different dinners). Due to my taking the seasonal job we couldn't really go home because I had to work (black friday) at 4 am the next morning, so that is the only reason why we couldn't celebrate with other family...I don't plan on having to work black friday next year!

Thanks to my brother who put his turkey in about 10 minutes earlier than we did for notifying us that his was done super early, otherwise we might have over cooked the crap out of it.