This was only the second time since I moved back to the East Coast that I didn’t go up to Mom and Dad’s for Thanksgiving. Last year, they came here, and this year they went to visit my brother and his family. I was invited too, but friends are getting married this weekend and I didn’t want to spend Thanksgiving in the car.
The original plan was to find a restaurant that was open for Thanksgiving. I’ve done that before. Back when I was living in Nevada, a friend and I went to the local Hyatt hotel and had Thanksgiving Dinner in their Chinese restaurant. It was a traditional American Thanksgiving Dinner, with turkey and all the expected trimmings, but because we were in a Chinese restaurant, we decided to use chopsticks to eat the cranberry sauce.
In the end, I decided to cook my own dinner. Most of my meals are pretty simple stuff, but now and then I get adventuresome and this seemed like a good opportunity. Besides, I didn’t think any of the places that would be open around here were likely to have both chopsticks and cranberry sauce.
So on Monday I went to the store and bought the smallest turkey I could find (it was 10 pounds – I’m gonna have leftovers for a while) and around 2:30 this afternoon I put it in the oven. Along with the turkey, I picked up some pre-mixed mashed potatoes, and the freezer was already full of veggies. Add in some biscuits, and I was good to go.
The biscuits didn’t turn out so well. But the turkey and everything else came out pretty darn nicely.

Wylie had a hunk of turkey as part of his dinner

and Terry had a big ol’ piece of carrot.