All about that Baste

Hi Everyone!  I have a belated turkey post to share with ya'll today! I know, I'm more than a week late, but we've had some life curve-balls come up, and I'm just now getting around to it.  Oh well.

This Thanksgiving was a little different than usual.  We often see one or both sets of our parents during the holiday break but this year, my parents decided to take a trip to see my grandfather, out of state.  We unfortunately did not get to see either of our parents on the Thanksgiving break, but in their absence, Jordan and I decided to host our own (small) dinner and invited my brother, Scott, and cousin, Mandy.  You could say it was the under 30 crowd (or barely over 30).

Mandy and I spent probably 30 minutes or so talking about our little dinner at the lake several weekends ago (not fully comprehending all that is involved).  Between the two of us, we managed to pull off a really great dinner for the 4 of us and had LOTs of leftovers!  Thank you Mandy for all your hard work, recipes, and dish-washing! 

Top Right: Mandy and I preparing dinner!  Her and I both made as much as we could in advance, but Thanksgiving morning we still had plenty to do.

Left: Me and Scott

Bottom Right: This is sort of a random picture of deviled eggs.  I'd boiled the eggs ahead of time and was proud of my artistic filling.  Those cake decorating supplies come in handy!

While Mandy and I worked on our meal, we sent the boys outside to work on Christmas lights on the house.  I was thankful that both Jordan and Scott gave in to my plea to put up our lights that day and they did a fantastic job!  Here are a few pictures of Jordan and Scott on the roof.

They are a couple of good looking guys, huh?  I think it took them a total of an hour to do the lights (maaaybe an hour and 15 minutes, max).

Meanwhile...Mandy and I were working hard.  I know this is shocking, but I've NEVER made a turkey in my whole life folks.  I've baked plenty of chicken but never a turkey (much less a 19 pounder).  Since this was one of the "firsts" in our household, Jordan decided to put together a little video of Mandy and I getting the turkey ready for the oven.  The layers of innuendo makes me laugh.

I'll spare you the suspense...the turkey turned out really great!  I couldn't believe it!  I was quite distracted the entire morning with chopping, cooking, mixing, setting the table, etc. etc. so I was glad I remembered to just check on Mr. 19 pounds every so often!

Top Left: Mandy, Scott, and I

Top Right: We used the china that we got from our wedding which included our champagne flutes!  Love this pattern!
Bottom Left: Last Christmas Mom and Dad bought me this gravy boat and it has been perfect!  Ya'll the gravy even turned out great!
Bottom Right: The finished turkey in his golden brown goodness.  Yum!

In our house, the fancy china is something that we use for more than just special occasions, but I have to admitt, I've not used it as much as I wanted to since 2014 has been kind of a hectic year for us.  Still, we pulled out the nice china, our lovely silverware, and all kinds of other jazz for our Thanksgiving meal.  I'm alarmingly poor in table cloths and cloth napkins, but the solid red table cloth looked just fine.  Here are some pictures of the food and table before we ate.

I'm not sure I can accurately list everything we had for dinner but I'll give it a shot: Turkey, gravy, dressing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, cucumber salad, squash, relish tray, cranberry sauce, shrimp, and cheddar biscuits!

Post thanksgiving dinner (and the mountain of dishes), we took a break to watch football. All of us propped our feet up to rest and digest.

Once we found our second wind, everyone enjoyed dessert!  We had pecan pie, apple pie, and pumpkin crumble (all with a side of ice cream)!  These recipes are all delicious and almost deadly!

The next day we all decided to head out to do a little light shopping or do something fun.  We weren't really feeling the shopping vibe so we skipped a lot of the Black Friday deals and instead we decided to snap a couple of group pictures before heading to TopGolf.

Top Right and Left pictures: Jordan, Me, Mandy, and Scott 

Bottom: This is the gang just before golfing at TopGolf

We've written about TopGolf in previous posts but above are several pictures of our group golfing that Friday afternoon.  We were there several hours and had a blast!

At one point during our golfing afternoon Scott hit the ball a liiiiitttle too hard and the head of the golf club flew out onto the green!  It was a hilarious moment and luckily it was fairly common so the attendant got us a new club.

True to form, Jordan captured and put together a nice video to share with you.  If you look closely, you can see Scott breaking the club off pretty effectively.

To wrap up our day, we all headed towards home and ate at Frankie's (one of our favorite Mexican joints).

It was a fun car ride, that's for sure.  Above I've included several random shots of all of us signing along to the radio.  Jordan and I are so glad to have the larger vehicle so that everyone fits more comfortably!

And that wraps up our Thanksgiving events!  I have another post in the queue to tell ya'll about our redneck Christmas parade soon!  Stay tuned!