The family came up here this year .. but for some reason it never clicked in my head that I’d be making my first turkey this year. I guess I just always expected to have everything on hand, and then my mom and dad would take over the cooking. Anyways I picked up the turkey on Tuesday after Liz got up here. Wednesday morning I was up at 7am putting together a brine for the turkey. The recipe we decided to use was from Martha Stewart’s Cooking School book that I picked up a few weeks ago. It was really easy with beautiful photographs of every step. But waiting for the brine to cool down took much longer then we had expected. After about 2 hours I unwrapped our turkey, cleaned it all up, put it in a brine bag from Bed Bath and Beyond and dumped in all the brine. Then the turkey and the brine all went back into the bottom drawer in the fridge. Did I mention our turkey was 19 lbs .. YES 19 LBS for 5 of us!! OMG! I also cooked a cake for Dad’s birthday before we headed to Orlando to drop Ella off with her dad for the holiday. Wednesday night Liz made shepherds pie while we waited for mom and dad to finally arrive

Thursday morning I was up before 7am again, making a pumpkin pie from scratch, and taking the turkey out of the brine to let it warm up before roasting. I had planned on having dinner around 3pm, knowing that every year we plan for 3pm and end up eating at 5ish. So I had the turkey in the oven at 10am, again with Martha Stewart’s instructions, having a butter and wine soaked cheese cloth on top 3.5 hours later the turkey was done, and beautiful! Turned out that I pretty much did all the work on the turkey myself, with some cheerleading from mom and Liz. I was so proud of myself, considering it was my first bird I’ve ever roasted successfully. I actually had that listed on my 101 things to do in 1001 days, and even though its expired I can now cross it off my list! Liz and Mom took over for the side dishes and we had a very delicious meal

We finished the night off playing Rock Band and watching the hilarious Tropic Thunder .. awesome