Turkey Day

Since I have hosted Thanksgiving at my house for the last 4 years one would think that I would have cooked a Thanksgiving turkey before, well one would be wrong.  With our first Thanksgiving in our new home I decided that this would be the year for me to defeat the beast that is the Thanksgiving Day Turkey!  I searched Pinterest, cookbooks, and internet cooking sites for the perfect recipe.  I had my "a-ha" moment on Allrecipes.com when I found a Maple Roasted Turkey.  I had to try this recipe, and since this was going to be my first Thanksgiving turkey I couldn't have a Griswold Christmas Vacation experience, so I had to do a trial run.  After the trial run, I knew this was my turkey!  The recipe for this turkey can be found HERE.  After the trial run I decided to double it based on the size of my 18lb turkey. 

I was terrified the whole time that the turkey wasn't going to fit in the our oven, which is by chance the world's smallest oven.

No Griswold turkey reenactment here, it came out perfect.

I was so excited this year to not have to rent tables and chairs for Thanksgiving.  I actually have a dining room and a breakfast room that was able to seat everyone.  Fancy dining room called for fancy place setting as well, I used my wedding china and wedding silver for the occasion.

I discovered the best benefit to cooking the turkey is getting to make turkey stock!  I was able to make a ton of it and have it frozen for future use.  I have already benefited from it and made turkey soup, yum!