Our First Thanksgiving Meal Experience!

This year I cooked my very own Thanksgiving meal for the first time! Of course I did it with lots of help from Jocelyn, Carmen and Dan. :) It was a lot of fun!! It's amazing how much work is put in for one meal! 

The Menu:

Turkey

Mashed Potatoes and Gravy

Baked Sweet Potatoes

Green Bean Casserole

Fruit Salad

Homemade Rolls

Samoas Brownies

There will be an insane amount of photos in this post, but I hope you enjoy our Thanksgiving meal experience...

On Wednesday we started with getting the turkey in a brine. I got out the turkey on Sunday afternoon and it was still NOT thawed all the way through, so through some bathing in warm water he finally thawed out. The brine was a recipe from my brother-in-law and here we are getting it all ready. Now if you know me you know that I do not touch raw meat, so I was very grateful to my sisters for their help in this part!

Meet Eugene Jones. :)

We defied the status quo for pie & anything related to pumpkin or apple. :) I found this recipe on Pinterest, a Samoas Brownie. Here we are putting it together. It ended up being a bit of a disappointment actually, the brownie flavor way overpowered the rest and so wasn't very Samoa-y.

The finished product. Don't mind the pool of chocolate in the corner. :)

Carmen wishing us a Happy Thanksgiving with her art.

At this point the turkey is still thawing, and the wrapper with the instructions had been thrown away so here I am digging through the trash so we have some clue of what to do with this bird.

I think here we were finally successful in pulling out the gizzards and 

eventually, through unfortunate circumstances, the neck. gag.

Jonsey trying to fly away.

Wednesday night we made the rolls. Now I was a little nervous about these just because me and yeast don't always work out the best. But this recipe seemed like one we could do, also from Pinterest. Although they look like crescent rolls, they didn't taste like them. They were amazing!! It was probably my favorite part of the meal and we made 48 of them- yum.

The finished product. Butter inside and on top. Delish!

On to Thursday! We started the day by placing the turkey in a bag and in the oven. 

(I did this all by myself by the way).

Then after a couple hours of preparing other foods like potatoes and green bean casserole the turkey was ready to carve. This was Dan's job. He debated of which weapon he would choose...

Not surprisingly he chose the sword. 

After a while the long sword was a little much, so he went back to the knife. 

He did a perfect job! Jocelyn is mashing the potatoes, which were delicious as well!

Here is our spread. Perfect size for us! We were stuffed.

Aiden enjoying his sweet potato.

Afterwards we had a nice relaxing afternoon with the amazing 

warmer weather and sunshine coming in our windows.

 I am so thankful for the people in my life! 

God has blessed me abundantly with amazing family and close friends!!