Thanksgiving...

I now have a much better appreciation for all the Thanksgiving meals that I have enjoyed at other peoples houses. After years of being spoiled by the wonderful cooking of all my fabulous relatives and friends, I decided it was time that I held a proper Thanksgiving feast for other people. This idea led me to host a Thanksgiving dinner for some neighborhood friends this past week. I must say that it is a little more difficult to celebrate Thanksgiving here since we still have work, school and after school activities on Thanksgiving Day and the day after.

The run up to our Thanksgiving dinner was a test of our organizational skills. If I did not have my dear friend Michele Bote to help me every step of the way, I am pretty sure I would not have been able to pull it off. In fact, if you read her blog, Michele's cycling blog noted under "My favorite Blogs", you will find her own account of her Thanksgiving week here. We did our best to pack in as many site-seeing trips as possible in between our cooking sessions. However, time was against us since I had to pick up the kids from school at 3:00pm each day.

Despite the fact that we were spreading ourselves thin trying to see the sites, fit in bike spinning classes, and eat meals other than the big one we were trying to prepare, Michele and I managed to present a lovely feast to our guests from England. They were all gracious and enthusiastic about our tradition and made the day even more special.

For our dinner we smoked a 20 lb. turkey on a Weber along with as many traditional dishes as we could create. This included sweet potatoes, stuffing, oyster dressing, green beans with bacon, cranberry relish, a big salad and mashed potatoes with gravy. We had pumpkin pies and apple pies for dessert after which we all had to roll ourselves out of our chairs.

The hardest part of our wonderful feast was the next day when everyone had to get up and go to work and school. Because it was a workday, our Thanksgiving meal did not commence until 6:00pm. After a late evening on Thursday, all I wanted to do was curl up under a blanket and do nothing on Friday. However, when I showed up at the school grounds Friday morning to drop the kids off, I was greeted with wide smiles from all my guests who expressed their great hope that I would host Thanksgiving again next year.