The Results

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope you all had as wonderful day as we did. So wonderful, in fact, that I haven't quite made it to the computer yet to finish off my Thanksgiving thread...I know none of you are exactly hanging in suspense, but here is the final preparation result.

The turkey went in the oven at 9:36 a.m.

We sat down at the table at 2:13.

We were finished by 2:47.

17 hours of preparation? Worth every last bite.

Oh, and on a side note...one of the families we invited for pie didn't make it so we have just a leetle bit of leftovers if anyone wants to stop by.

Pie Day

Chocolate Cream

Coconut Cream

Pumpkin

Triple Chocolate Pumpkin

Boysenberry

Crumb-top apple

Peach

One of my slaves


12 hours and counting (although I guess technically there's a lot of down-time while pies are baking)

Thanksgiving Update and a really exciting opportunity!

I've been thinking about adding a tally of the number of sticks of butter used in this meal, but trust me, you don't want to know.

Yesterday I finished all the rest of the piecrust and put them in my freezer...one more hour and we're up to 7 now I believe. Today is going to be a pie-baking marathon; I think my 2 ovens will be running continually for about 8 hours. I'm looking forward to this part though, because my kids get out of school early today and I can't wait to put them to work. They will love it for about the first hour, and anything after that is pure and simple "character building!"

Don't you just love the fact that no two pie plates are the same? There's a metaphor in that somewhere I believe.

And now in news unrelated to cooking, I had something really exciting happen yesterday. Many of you know that our Stake is the host Stake for the new Draper Temple. It's nearing completion and the open house will start in January; the dedication is scheduled for the end of March. I had a meeting with a member of the Stake High Council last night and was given an official call to sing in one of the Dedication choirs. This is a wonderful and humbling privilege since only 16 members of our Stake will be asked. I am so grateful for the talent I have been blessed with and the opportunity I have to use it to praise its Source. This really is a once-in-a-lifetime event!

Tabula Rasa

Aren't these piecrusts so full of potential as they sit here naked on my counter? Who knows what they will grow up to be? Will they live a wholesome life of fruit ala mode, or pursue a richer existence of cream and chocolate? Only time will tell.

Two picrusts down, only five more to go...and yes it would have made more sense to make and freeze all the piecrust yesterday, but my life sort of interfered with pie-making. Out of curiosity, who came up with the phrase, "easy as pie?" Either it's someone who never actually made one or that phrase used to connotate something entirely different.

Preparation Count at 6 hours.

5 Days of Cooking for 20 Minutes of Eating

In order to keep an historical record of what it takes to put a Thanksgiving Dinner on the table, I have decided to make a daily update this week of all the preparations. Don't get me wrong, this is not an effort to complain or make my husband feel guilty for watching football on Thursday. I LOVE Thanksgiving...I love to plan, I love to cook, I love to get the family together and EAT. I think in recent years Thanksgiving has become my favorite holiday. But it's also a lot of work, and I thought it would be enlightening for my own benefit to document exactly what it takes to pull off this kind of event.

So here is where we are so far. I have already decided the menu...we're pretty traditional around here. I have done Thanksgiving about 7 years now, so I'm sticking with my old tried and true standbys for the most part. However, I do like to try out a couple of new recipes every year. This year I'm making a new stuffing recipe, I'm replacing my usual broccoli with brussel sprouts, and I am even tweaking the pumpkin pie a little. That's right, I'm a rebel with a cause.

Once the menu was finalized, I did the grocery shopping on Friday and Saturday last week. So between planning and shopping, we're up to about 4 hours of preparation.

Last night the actual cooking began. I made the cornbread for the stuffing so that it would have enough time to get nice and dry and stale. I actually made double cornbread because I knew that if I filled the house with the aroma of hot cornbread and then told the natives they couldn't eat any, I would have a mutiny on my hands.

It was hard work getting them to leave the second half alone, but boy aren't they going to be grateful when they see this beautiful stuff in its second life on our Thanksgiving table.

So by the end of Sunday, the preparation count is at 5 1/2 hours. No one has cried yet.

Do we have to talk in order to agree, or agree in order to talk?

One of my early childhood memories is of an adult friend of the family calling me, "Chatterbox." Even though I was probably only 6 or 7, I could distinctly detect the sarcastic and unkind edge to the seemingly innocuous remark. It apparently did no lasting damage; however, because as an adult I talk every bit as much as that chattering child. I've heard it all through the years...motor-mouth, jabber-jaws, and my personal favorite, diarrhea mouth. And I will be the first to admit that I talk way too much.

But there is something I have discovered about this weakness of mine. Talking is how I figure things out...it's part of how I learn. For some reason it helps me to understand if I vocalize my thought process. I have many friends who are exceptionally internal. There are days and times when I long to be silently reflective like them, but that nature is as foreign to me as I'm sure my talkative one is to them. So I hope those of you stuck within the sound of my voice will be patient with my endless discussion. If you only knew how hard I work at keeping things to myself and listening better to others; I think you would truly be amazed. And despite this trait/flaw? I am an ironclad secret keeper.

You may wonder what brought on this moment of introspection? This morning, I sent Zachary upstairs to do 4 things. I sat in the office responding to email where I could clearly hear his progress. He did not stop talking for one second in the 20 minutes it took to complete his tasks-- (including brushing his teeth, by the way). Finally, I yelled upstairs for him to just be quiet long enough to finish so that he would not be late for school!

And then the phone rang, and I picked it up, and it was the pot. He said, "Hey kettle, you're black!" and then he hung up. Pots can be really rude sometimes.

Happy Birthday Noah!

On Sunday, I was lamenting the fact that Noah has already grown out of another pair of church pants. I keep telling the kids to knock it off and stop getting bigger, but they are either not listening or grossly disobedient. I swear, I just bought those pants like a month ago for Noah's baptism. And then I remembered that Noah's 9th birthday was the next day! How does this happen?

So in honor of his birthday, I decided to document some of the great things about Noah today. (Actually, I'm a day late, his birthday was the 10th, but somehow yesterday I blinked for about 2 seconds, and then the day was over.)

Noah is one smart cookie! He has been able to read anything since he was 5. It is a joy to me that my passion for reading has been passed on to my child. As a toddler he could sit on my lap literally indefinitely and listen to stories...now he disappears for hours with his books, surfacing only when he has finished.

I am still waiting for the day when Noah will need my help with his homework, but he is so capable and independent that I think it will never come. At some point, maybe he'll ask me about trigonometry and I'll have to confess that I don't remember anything about it. That will be a sad day because right now he thinks I know everything.

Noah takes good care of his little brother and sister. He is the one who is always willing to play board games with Isaac, to read stories to Anna, and to play inventive games with his siblings in the back yard.

Noah is cheerful. When I picture Noah at any stage of his life..baby, toddler, boy... it is always with a big smile on his face.

For his birthday yesterday, I brought lunch from Taco Bell to him at school and ate with him in the cafeteria. For dinner, we made individual pizzas, topped however we wanted, then we went to a juggling show at the library. We came home and ate birthday cake (chocolate...it's not fair that all of my children insist on chocolate birthday cakes when I don't like it) and opened presents. On Saturday, he is having a birthday party with a few friends from school. It seems such a short minute ago that he was baptized last year, and only slightly longer when we brought him home from the hospital on an unusally warm November afternoon.

Happy birthday Noah!

Boo to the end of Daylight Savings!

Did you know that in the state of Arizona they don't ever do any daylight savings? This means you don't go through the whole "spring forward, fall back" clock-changing episode twice a year that the rest of the country puts up with. So it has felt something like a cruel joke to move back to Utah and suddenly just as I'm psyching myself out for approaching winter, losing an entire hour of evening daylight. When it gets dark before dinner, I begin to panic and even feel a little claustrophobic as if the whole day is suddenly closing in around me and I have still not finished all I've meant to accomplish for the day...and now it's a heavy darkness and my kids aren't finished with their homework...and Cory hasn't even gotten home from work so he must be staying late, except he's not really late, it just feels like he is...and I still have a load of laundry running...and I have to rush, rush, rush to get kids ready for bed or it will be too late for me to have a moment of quiet...and HELP! I'm having trouble breathing, I'm running around trying to do something without enough focus to see anything through. So my point is, who do I need to get in contact with to eliminate this whole frustrating system? My local Congressman? The governor? Oprah?


Then, to add insult to injury, I woke up this morning to this:

Ah, the humanity!

It almost makes me think that the daylight savings guys got together with Mother Nature and decided to suck the joy out of my life all in the course of one weekend.