A Thanksgiving To Remember

I present the Thanksgiving dinner.  It turned out quite nice.  The bird was moist and flavorful.  The sides were limited and quite tasty.  But still a few things happened along the way that will make this one a dinner to remember.

So here is the bird.  In the background, you will see the pan it cooked in and we used several sweet potatoes cut in thick wedges as a buffer on the bottom so all the turkey juices and butter dripped down.  we are going to mash those up for leftovers this weekend.  Now mind you, there were 4 gay men in the apartment and not one really wanted to carve the turkey.  Thus, I did and was finding it rather difficult.  Well, the mystery was discovered when I realized I had cooked the bird upsides down the entire time without any knowledge.  As you can see this is the moment when I realized where all the wonderful breast meat was.  Much laughter was shared and deserved.

Now mind you, this was not the only "oops" of the afternoon.  Earlier I had prepped the green bean casserole and set it aside on the counter to go in once the bird came out.  Then Damon went to work and made the wonderful sweet potato au gratin.  As you can see it turned out just beautiful (below).  The only thing was that he put his au gratin on top of my green bean casserole.  This was not discovered, nor shared, until I mentioned it was time to put the green bean casserole in the over.

So here is a picture to try and show you the combo.  It was actually quite good and we have discussed that if we make it again, we will flip them.  It has been christened the vegetarian tur-dun-ken.  

And here is a little bit of everything, less the cranberry sauce which came after the picture.  I did not make it through but it was all mighty tasty.  I went and took a little nap afterwards and the elves were in the kitchen cleaning up.  Pie was not attacked until many hours later.  But they are mighty fine.  I hope that however you celebrated, you had a wonderful day.