Happy Thanksgiving!

We did it! Our very first Thanksgiving dinner on our own!



Granted we didn't have as many dishes as we usually get on our annual double-dinner in Ohio. We also didn't have to deal with the chaos of having lots of people around. For our Thanksgiving, we feasted on a turkey breast, mashed potatoes, gravy, spoon bread (our cornbread-like stuffing alternative), peas, rolls, and, of course, pumpkin pie. We opted for the turkey breast since we don't really care for the dark meat and it would fit in our teenie-weenie oven.


This is the "big" portion of the oven. There's another smaller oven on top of this one–it's really only big enough for a casserole dish. It did come in handy having two ovens, though. We don't have that advantage at home.

The turkey came out great despite a temperature gauge malfunction.


And to top it all off, we had some mighty tasty pumpkin pie.


Luckily the cultural lady in Cincinnati tipped us off on that one. You can't buy pumpkin in England so she recommended packing what we would need to make the pie. Thanks cultural lady! Apparently you can't buy ready-made pie crust over here either, or at least we couldn't find it. Pillsbury is not in high demand over here. I ended up combining two pie recipes so we could get the traditional Libby's pumpkin pie filling and a pecan pie crust. It worked out surprisingly well considering I had to make a last-minute butter substitution for the vegetable shortening I realized we didn't have, I used a wine bottle as a rolling pin, and I used expired evaporated milk (we haven't gotten sick yet :).

Pat wished all of his co-workers a Happy Thanksgiving, even the one who said "You know we don't celebrate that, right?" Well duh... He was able to come home a little early and help with the food multi-tasking. We even played a game of Scrabble in between things.

We declare dinner a success. Pat says "Dinner was fantastic. Jamie did a great job!" That's good since we have a TON of leftovers :) But don't worry, we're looking forward to enjoying all of our favorite dishes again next year!