Turkey Day... Or In My Case, Chicken!

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, and oh, what a wonderful day it was!

Every year for Thanksgiving, families get together, watch football and the parade, and chit chat about life and who's doing what. Relatives brag about how awesome their children are doing, and talk about the latest gossip from childhood friendships. This year, my Thanksgiving was a little different.

My extended family-grandmas and grandpas, cousins, and my mom-all live in Oregon/Idaho. I live in Utah, as do my parents. My parents took vacation to go see the family and spend Thanksgiving with them, something we do almost every year. Unfortunately, I had to work on Black Friday, and was not able to go with them. Originally, it was planned I would spend Thanksgiving with Andrew and his family. However, his family went to California... Without him. So here we are, neither of us had ever spent a Thanksgiving away from our families, and I have no idea how the hell to cook a turkey. What the hell do we do now?

Despite our lack of experience cooking a Thanksgiving dinner-or really any dinner, for that matter, because neither of us is a master of the kitchen-we decided to take on the challenge and cook our first Turkey day dinner, unsupervised and alone.

I thought for sure we were going to burn the house down.

We made a list of everything we would need, and Andrew did the shopping. In my family, multiple days were spent preparing for Thanksgiving. If it could be made in advance, it was. There was no way in hell I was going to spend days making dinner. Nope, I was planning on cramming it all into one day. I mean, it was only Andrew and me that were going to be eating. It couldn't be too hard!

I woke up on Thanksgiving morning, and started making food around ten. I made the devilled eggs, the pies, the fruit salad. Andrew prepared the chicken, and ran to the store for any forgotten ingredients. I started putting dinner together, and I won't lie.. I started to panic. What the hell was I doing?? I didn't know how to make devilled eggs, I didn't even know how long to boil them. The chicken said 'cook breast side up.' Uh... Which side is the breast on?? I opened to can of sweet potatoes to find them rotten.. Great! NOT!

Thank goodness I had Andrew there. He helped me with every thing, we split the tasks, and got each other needed ingredients. We even had time to watch a movie.

Finally, 4 o'clock rolls around and both of us are starving. We pull the chicken out of the oven, and it's a perfect golden brown. We finish making the gravy, and putting the final touches on the table, and finally, dinner is served..

I cannot tell you how much fun I had this Thanksgiving. Not only did I get to spend it with Andrew, but this was my first Thanksgiving dinner that I had prepared, as well as his. It was an adventure, and it was a little scary, but the ending results were something to be proud of. Like I said, I expected we would burn the house down. We may not have gotten sweet potatoes, and maybe we forgot to make the rolls (woops!) but I had a day with a boy that I wouldn't trade for the world, and an amazing dinner to top it all off!

And now, I can't wait for round 2 next year, and this time, we won't forget the rolls.