Thanksgiving Melee

As I've mentioned before, Thanksgiving is a hallowed day at the Hardy home. It's Daniel's favorite holiday and we always treat it with style. We were disappointed when we found out Daniel would be working a night shift over Thanksgiving and considered different options for the day. I wanted to celebrate the weekend before that actual holiday. My mother suggested having a dinner before Daniel went to work instead of lunch earlier in the day. Daniel didn't want to change any of our traditions and insisted that he would be fine with our traditional celebration.

The desserts were the first course to come together. Wednesday morning I put together a pumpkin cheesecake, cherry cream pie, lemon cream pie, pecan pie and pumpkin pie. The pumpkin pie was a never-before-tried recipe featuring molasses and I ended up throwing it out. (We all tasted it by digging in during desssert. I'm sure my mother was mortified by us each sticking our forks into the pie instead of each slicing a piece.) It was so horribly wrong, and I'm glad the pumpkin cheesecake was there to save the Pumpkin Day. 

Wednesday evening before heading out to work, Daniel put together the dressing, readied the turkey, cooked the cranberries and made some tea. This is where the maladies began. As he poured the hot tea into a glass pitcher, the pitcher bottom cracked and split the pitcher in two, leaving tea everywhere, even in the island's cabinets. 

Thursday morning, Daniel arrived and began readying the feast. Normally, I do my best to stay out of his way on Thanksgiving. I take care of the pies and side dishes, leaving the major parts of the meal to him as he is very particular about the meal and prefers to do it himself. Since he had insisted on doing everything the same as we always have, I continued with this. I put together my sweet potato casserole (which was awesome, thanks to the best recipe from Ted Moore - father of our great Maggie) and green bean casserole. Daniel didn't seem to be in much of a rush as he lounged in the living room watching the parade with my family and the kids. We had planned to have lunch at 12, so at 11 I nervously began questioning him about some of the items he normally takes care of. I asked about the bread, Wheaties rolls he always makes with a recipe from his grandmother. I assumed he had mixed up the dough the previous day and wanted to know if it was time to begin baking it. However, I had assumed wrongly, as Daniel had completely forgotten to make the dough. It was now too late and we were headed for our first Wheaties roll-less Thanksgiving ever. Then, I asked about the ham. He hadn't thought of it either. I immediately took it from the fridge and found that it unfortunately needed to cook at least two hours. I hurriedly prepared it and threw it in the oven, but was disappointed that the meal was already being pushed to the afternoon, as Daniel needed to get to bed. (Fortunately, this was the best ham any of us had ever eaten. Whew!) I then began boiling water and searching for the potatoes to peel for mashed potatoes. Daniel had insisted that we had potatoes and removed them from my shopping list earlier in the week, but that was a mistake because there were no potatoes in the pantry. Another item was scratched from the menu. 

Then, Daniel began his turkey frying, which is absolutely delicious, but the fourth malady of this event. For the first time ever, he mistakenly removed the bird too early as this was the biggest bird he'd ever fried. As he was quickly trying to carve the bird and commence the meal, he realized it was not thoroughly cooked. 

As Daniel was realizing the pinkness of the bird, I was taking a plate from the cabinet and also pulled down a small glass bowl someone had mistakenly placed atop the stack of plates. The glass bowl fell from the cabinet and shattered into many pieces in the sweet potato casserole and green bean casserole. You guessed it, Daniel is the one who many times puts dishes whereever he wants to in the cabinets and had hidden this gem of a bowl in the wrong place, only to be discovered at the very wrong time. I began cleaning glass from the floor while my mother, father and sister were removing glass chunks from the caseroles. I was sure they were inedible, but they all kept insisting the glass had been removed. My dad thought that shining a light directly on the dishes would help us detect the glass easier. We couldn't find a flashlight anywhere (yeah, Daniel's surely getting a set of flashlights from my Dad for Christmas) and resorted to a living room lamp with the shade removed. 

We decided the dishes had been salvaged and fortunately didn't have any mishaps during the meal that resulted in internal bleeding or trips to the ER for injested glass shards.  Daniel also salvaged the turkey by putting it back into the fryer, and it was delicious.  Overall, the meal was wonderful and we all survived and even enjoyed ourselves.  

Daniel did get to catch a couple of hours of sleep before heading back to work that night and the rest of us cheered on our Longhorns to a great win over the Aggies.