Normally, our menu looks like this:
Roasted turkey, the biggest one we can find
Mashed potatoes and gravy
Rice (sometimes)
Cornbread dressing
Spinach Madeleine
Green beans or green bean casserole or maybe limas instead
Cranberry relish
Whole cranberry sauce
Canned cranberry sauce (for my beloved Shay... he likes the others, too)
Dinner rolls
Olives (in honor of my grandfather, and because we like them)
Deviled eggs, with and without pickle relish
Cushaw pie
In-the-pumpkin pie
The menu ended up greatly trimmed yesterday, because we couldn't do much ahead of time on account of being sick, and because we had unexpected company -- my uncle and his new wife!
We almost had no turkey! Mom pulled it out of the refrigerator, and informed me that it was still frozen, and knocked on it to show me. Normally, we defrost mostly outside of the refrigerator. This time, we had our turkey over a week and a half ahead of time, and were going to be good and defrost in the fridge. I didn't think my fridge was cold enough to keep a turkey frozen for that long!
Hoping that perhaps it was just marginally frozen, and that some heat would quickly loosen the thing up, we soaked it in hot water. I drained the water and pried out the giblets, ran hot water inside it, worked the joints, and soaked it in hot water again.
After about an hour and a half, it was ready to cook! :razz: We wouldn't have dinner in the early afternoon, but early evening, but we were going to have turkey after all! :lol:
Having my uncle and his wife over made our Thanksgiving! :razz:
