Amazing Turkey Dinner

For most of you, Thanksgiving Dinner is quickly approaching and the who, what, where when and how is all needing to be planned. Since my husband will be working on Turkey Day we decided we would have our enormous dinner yesterday. I have to say, it turned out amazing.

For the turkey I used the recipe from Best Bites blog here. I think the main ideas were that you need to first brine the turkey for atleast 24 hours, then inject the turkey with your key flavors and, finally, cook your turkey in a an oven safe bag. I followed the recipe for the turkey quite closely with only a few minor changes. I used a lot of garlic and parsley instead of the sage but it was still amazing.

Another plus, was that when you use the bag to cook the turkey it only takes about 2 1/2 to 3 hours to be finished. I remember my mom getting up well past sunrise the morning of Thanksgiving Day to get the turkey in the oven so it would be finished by 2 pm. In a way, because of that I dreaded the day when I would have to cook my own turkey. However, this ended up being very easy to pull off.

With the turkey we had potato rolls, mashed potatoes and gravy, key lime pie and chocolate pudding pie. What's that? What about the pumpkin pie and the berry pies? Well, neither my husband or I like pumpkin pie very much and there are no berries on the southern border I could have used. This was a bit of a dissapointment for me since I love my homemade fruit pies.

Anyway, I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving Day and enjoy your turkey!!

Paper Mache Pumpkin

Although these might be kind of time consuming this is a fun craft you can do with your kids. Might end up kinda messy at times but messy is fun, right?

Supplies you will need:

Balloons
Newspaper Strips
School Glue
Scissors or sharp knife
Orange Paint
Tin Foil
Green or Brown Paint

Make sure you have a place where you don't mind things getting messy. I use an old plastic table cover for all my messy crafts.

Make a mix of your glue with water. Usually you use a 2:1 ratio glue to water but I don't ever measure it.

Blow up your balloon to the size you want your pumpkin to be. Dib a strip of newspaper into your glue mixture and place flat on your balloon. Do this until the entire balloon is covered, leaving the "stem" of the balloon uncovered. You can either allow each layer to dry before you add more or you can keep adding the wet layers like I did. Then I allowed it to dry for about 24 hours before I painted it.

For the stems take a piece of tin foil and twist it into the shape of a pumkin stem. After it is the shape you want it to be you can pain it however you like. I did a couple layers of different greens and browns to give it more of a realistic look and I love the way they turned out :)