Our Thanksgiving Feast!

Hey everyone!  Happy Black Friday -- at least I hope it's happy for all the retailers!  I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving with family and friends.  Our son and sweet DIL hosted our family feast this year, and it was fantastic!  The Man and I contributed the turkey this year, which our son picked up on Tuesday.  

We ordered a 20lb. "Free Range" bird from Sprouts Farmers' Market.

   

Ours didn't look like this.

 

Our turkey got cooked in the wood-fired pizza oven.

Michael built this wood-fired pizza oven from his own plan after doing a lot of research.  He's still working on the facade, but the actual oven has been finished for awhile.  I'll share photos 

when it's all finished.

The bird getting his temp taken!

Michael removes all the dark meat from the turkey prior to cooking.  He perfected this technique several years ago in one of the restaurants -- he forms the dark meat into a roll and wraps it tightly in foil (also wraps the legs in foil) and starts cooking all of that first, because it takes longer to cook the dark meat than the breast.  This way, the breast meat doesn't get all dried out.

Okay, no one said it was pretty!

But it certainly was delicious!

These are all the sides that we had.  Everything except the Cranberry Salsa and Potatoes were cooked 

in the pizza oven.  

After 40+ years of always cooking Thanksgiving dinners, I have officially handed over the reins to Michael and Ally.  It's their favorite meal to cook, so they have asked to do the honors.  It was a bit strange not having those wonderful smells in my house, but I got over it! 

Ally's table was lovely, but I almost forgot to take a picture.  Her table runner was a painter's drop cloth folded and then layered with the lovely glass hurricanes and candles, some branches & leaves, and various, pumpkins and squash.

We had these 4 charmers to keep us entertained.  Our oldest, Riley and Taylor, and our youngest, Flynn and Avery.  Our other two grands, Parker and Phoebe, were with their mother for Thanksgiving.  It isn't easy, but we have to share.  

It was such a wonderful day for us, and I hope your day was the same.  Thanks so much

for stopping by.  Tomorrow I will be making a little announcement, so stay tuned.

It's going to be a good one!!!