YA READY FOR YOUR TURKEY DINNER?

turkey is amazing and i look forward to eating it every year.

we will be picking up thanksgiving dinner from the supermarket, I'm pretty pleased.

we're doing this too -- it's a sort-of tradition whenever i don't feel like committing the time/expense/amount of dishes and pans to a homemade thanksgiving dinner with all the fixings. plus i'm supposed to be watching my weight so this keeps the leftovers to a minimum.

inlaws are buying the spread from wholefoods again this year

which would be fine, the food p dece except inlaws willfully ignore the fact that their oven is total garbage and has been for three years running now. i swear it take 9 times longer to reheat everything, and they get shitty with us for reminding them that it happens every year

but yay food & yay macy's parade :)

It's just the three of us, but I've decided to go traditional anyway - turkey breast, stuffing, brussel sprouts, macaroni and cheese, cranberry sauce. Then on Friday we're having leftover turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce sandwiches.

i made cranberry sauce for 20 for the office potluck and~ 5% of it got eaten. wtf do it with it? put it on turkey sandwiches?

i meant "wtf do i do with it"?

That would work, but you'll get sick of it before long. Do you bake? Maybe make some kind of tart with it.

the cranberry sauce never gets eaten. :-(

sick of being at thanksgivings that are too hoity toity for good old canned cranberry sauce (the best)

I am ready for stuffing, and laughter, and not being online for most of a day.

I'm a Thanksgiving orphan this year. Someone talk me out of making a completely OTT turkey mole.

no way man, you need to do that

double-down on the weird orphan-ness and go for it!

this is the only place I'm going to say this and i don't even know if I feel good about saying it anywhere but I'm pretty sure my thanksgiving is going to be bummertown usa and that being back home in our own place with mr veg afterwards will be the best part of the day

family gatherings are weird since my mother in law passed away; father in law has full dementia now and while he does know who we all are, conversation is almost impossible unless brief question/answers about mundane things like is the food good etc count as conversation... everyone just kind of pretends to be nominally okay with everything and we're all just waiting for the awkwardness to be over with

it's hella weird

and sad, just really sad

Ugh ugh ugh. Is he living at home w/caregiver or in a nursing home?

he's living at home with a caregiver who's with him 7am til 7pm, basically 7 days a week

my brother in law promised his mom before she died that he wouldn't put his dad in a nursing home -- he's a fire captain & former emt & has seen too much of the inside of those places to ever put his father there

but having him at home has been really tough on them.

when my grandma was still alive my parents hired a live-in caregiver for her, basically for the same reasons (and they didn't want some greedy nursing home to raid her bank account).

There are actually some really nice assisted living/memory care residences out there. Like, places I could actually picture myself choosing to live were I widowed/needed assistance/whatever. Most of them cost a fortune, however :(

My apartment smells of roasting turkey and browning butter. Maillard reaction FTW.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf3mgmEdfwg

https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfp1/v/t1.0-9/1897843_10152460491886596_5263414207114717774_n.jpg?oh=50a11af7a0723ac39474f7d0ead89e43&oe=551F409F&__gda__=1427901391_acd738645865da118190c13da48f0565

mmmmm. Delicious.

inlaws bought the wholefoods thanksgiving meal & it was pretty goddamn delicious
those mashed potatoes are craaaazy rich and good
and we didn't have to wait 9 hours for it to reheat in their crappy oven -- mr veg bought digital thermometer setup, got the oven to temp & then set up the bird and it only had to cook for an extra 20 min

rest of my time there was kinda meh -- niece played minecraft on a laptop the whole time except for hellos, goodbyes and the meal; brother in law played Halo on the living room tv at full volume the whole time except for hellos, goodbyes and meal; sister in law sat and did whatever on her laptop
kicked myself for not bringing my book... I am sorry for insensitivity unpc-ness of this statement but RAGH they are such aspie weirdos sometimes!

today was great! we ate the t-day spread from gelson's (turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, yams, vegetables, cranberry sauce, dinner rolls) and some almond danish kringle. the turkey dinner is marketed being "for two" but we've managed to get afternoon and evening meals out of it and still have leftovers.

we streamed some of the mst3k turkey day marathon -- laserblast and the pod people -- and played scrabble, which i won. we just finished watching the huell howser documentary on kcet, which was good in kind of a softball, puff-piece way.

We're celebrating thanksgiving down here in Oz with a picnic. Turkey is cooked, we have sweet potatoes, a yotam ottolenghi green bean salad, 2 pecan pies, 1 pumpkin, cornbread, cornbread stuffing, thermos flasks full of gravy. Its forecast for a high of 29C with a light breeze. I'm sitting in the barbers drinking a beer, life is good.

Celebrating Northern hemisphere holidays in Australia is deeply weird.

are there… any americans there??

I'm sitting in the barbers drinking a beer, life is good.

...getting cornbread and thermos gravy cut out of your beard?

what did y'all put in your stuffing? i added apples, onions, carrots, and prunes.

i kind of miss when people put livers in stuffing, does anyone do that anymore?

My partner is American and Turkey day is therefore mandatory. Picnic went very well, Australians like pumpkin pie it seems.

I did a cornbread stuffing with just onions, celery, thyme and sage. I still use the livers when I'm making British style stuffing which is largely sausage based.

My family always put turkey giblets in the dressing.

Family is scattered this year due to my niece's new bebeh (4 days old today), so I am cooking some of the traditional things and my mom made a pan of dressing for us ahead of time. So it's a baked ham, dressing, broccoli & rice casserole, grated sweet potato casserole, rolls, cranberry sauce. My first time making the broccoli-rice and the sweet potatoes, but the recipes are pretty straightforward.

I am cooking my famous 'roast chicken with a lemon up its butt' for Christmas -- x 2 chooks because this family eats a lot and 1 seems to be not enough.
Am kind of looking forward to it, since I haven't cooked a Christmas dinner for quite a few years now.

it's so weird to me that people drink booze at family dinners

Depending on the family. (In our case, for great happiness.)

So who's gearing up to do what? My girlfriend and I are bringing the pies to ours.

Thanksgiving is weird as an expat. though we're going to share some thanksgiving-ish food with my daughter's school tomorrow, with the kids asking us questions about the USA.

I'm having my first vegan Thanksgiving. I'd be lying if I said I won't miss my grandmother's cooking, but it will be delicious.

We are doing family Thanksgiving on Sunday bcz of work commitments - for that I'm brimging green bean casserole, and my mother in law's beloved sour cream cheesecake, and Mr Veg is doing an awesome baked ham with ginger snaps

Mr Veg and I are doing our own Thanksgiving tomorrow for ourselves - for that he's brining & barbecueing a chicken, and I'm making collard greens & mashed taters, and a pumpkin pie

We're having a Friendsgiving tomorrow, the turkey is going to be Catalan-style turkey legs from the Adria "Family Meal" cookbook. I'm not in charge of that fortunately. I am contributing (and ought to get started on soon) stuffing (sausage and vegetarian) and gravy and snickerdoodles and also bread.

xps to crut: sliced real thin, Tofurkey and its wild rice stuffing was better than any actual turkey I ever had

I am going to be drinking a lot and trying to shoot down any dumb attempt my bigoted grandfather makes at trying to provoke everyone w/ his stupid conservative views

having my first ever thanksgiving tomorrow, surrounded by ilx0rs

My former carnivore father-in-law just went vegan last month, so I can't even bring my vegetarian meatloaf recipe that usually wins people over.

I'm ready for furtive nips of liquor though. All the nips...

booze has been a great addition to family thanksgiving, esp as my sisters have aged into legal drinking yrs (though i believe one of my sisters still burns one down before dinner somewhere in/near the house). it helps that everybody has a pretty pleasant buzz/drunk. my s.o. will be joining us which is nice, her family usually has a variable thanksgiving menu whereas we have literally the same things every year, all of which she loves (and which coincidentally her mother refers to, without realizing it's our tradition, as a 'white-trash' spread). looking very much forward to a four day weekend after a grueling series of high-pressure workweeks. gobble gobble

a couple years ago, I went to a vegan thanksgiving ... someone made vegan chicken and DUMPLINGS! that was amazing and did not taste at all like faux-meat

tofu & DUMPLINGS! is incredible

Here is that meatloaf recipe, unnecessarily googleproofed by yours truly:

http://ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?showall=true&bookmarkedmessageid=4710873&boardid=40&threadid=85061

For the first time in donkey's years, my sister will not be hosting a mega-family Thanksgiving at her house, because my brother-in-law just had knee replacement surgery and is convalescing. Our alternative plan fell through at the last minute, so this year's Thanksgiving will be a quiet, informal affair between my wife and I.

I am making pumpkin pies today, but there shall not be a turkey, nor any of the other customary dishes. We'll survive.

SPAGEDY