3 Trips To The Store...Happy Thanksgiving!

It's become quite the tradition to do lots of cooking Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, so that things are less stressful on Thanksgiving day. This year was the Clark year, meaning we had Thanksgiving with my side of the fam. I was very prepared and had gone grocery shopping a week ago so I would be able to avoid the stores this close to Thanksgiving.

My brother Darren and his family were staying at my parents house so last night my mom, dad, Darren, Susan, Sam, and I all congregated in the kitchen to go over our "to do" lists. The first thing that needed to be done was clean up the kitchen from the dinner we just inhaled. So, amongst the cleaning, a big pot of sloppy joes went out to my parents patio table since there was no room in the fridge.

Everyone was jovial and happy, see?


The first item of business was the brining solution for the turkey. A big ol' vat of brining solution was made, boiled, and then set outside on the same patio table to cool so we could brine the turkey in it later that night.

We were a little worried that the turkey was getting too warm, so it was also sent out to the table.

Next on the list? Hmmmmm, well, Darren pouted a little and convinced my mom to make her scrumptious apple pie. So pie making we went. I decided that my mom should teach me how to make her pie crust so here she is giving me lessons. I guess I wasn't doing a very good job, judging by the look on her face. Ah well, practice makes perfect!


While we were in the middle of finishing the pie, we heard this huge CRASH!!!!!!!! The first thing we thought of was some dogs had gotten into my parents backyard and were eating the turkey! We ran outside, to find this:


Oh yeah, did you know you aren't supposed to place boiling hot pots of brine onto a really cold, glass table top? Well, consider yourself educated.

What a mess. The sloppy joes were thrown away, the turkey was still in its packaging so were were okay there. The brine....well, we strained it...


Yeah, that's glass. We strained it twice and got the glass out, but in the back of our minds we couldn't help but worry about the possibility of swalling some glass with our turkey dinner. So, off to the store we went to buy all new brining ingredients. Of course we had to go to two different stores because the first store was out of Vegetable Stock.

By the time we got the new brine going, it was close to 10pm and I still had two chocolate pies, yes you read right, TWO (much to Darren's disappointment) to make and a sweet potatoe casserole to put together. Darren then decided he wanted to make sugar cream pie. He made the pie while I started putting all my stuff together. Pretty soon smoke was pouring from my parents oven. We look inside and all the sugar cream had bubbled out of the pie crust and into the pan underneath. Classic.


We realized the Darren's pie crust wasn't deep enough. So we went back to the store, for the third time, to buy some deep dish frozen pie crusts and more ingredients for another sugar cream pie. Of course, we had to go to two stores to find everything we needed... Oh my. I went to bed at midnight, totally exhausted!

The nice thing about my family though, is we were laughing our guts out the whole time. It's like one big tragedy after another, but that's okay, it makes the experience better. So on this Thanksgiving Day, I have to say that I'm so grateful for my family. We don't fight or bicker or hold grudges. We love to be together as often as possible. The only thing that would have made this day better would be if my brother Mike, and his family, could have been here. One day!

Today I woke up on a mission. I had some rolls to make! I baked up a huge ol' basket of rolls for dinner today and leftover sandwiches. Yummers!


Once at my parents, I found out their turkey roaster had died (they were doing the ham in the roaster) so my parents got creative and did the ham on the grill. It was so good!


Dinner was amazing, Darren got a picture of all the food, hopefully he'll blog it soon because everything was definitely grubbin!

Here are some shots of the day:





Tomorrow morning I'm going along for the ride with my Dad and Darren for "Black Friday" Apparently they are picking me up at 4:30am. This could be my first and last experience with Black Friday. Not much of an angry mob/crowd type of person. Tonight Michael's opened their doors at 6pm so a few of us went and there was a huge line out the door when we got there. I asked Susan if this is what it's like on Black Friday and she laughed and said "it's lots worse on Black Friday" Good times.