Happy Thanksgiving

Hope all of my US friends had a great Thanksgiving.

Here at the house of flyball dogs, the dogs had turkey yesterday morning for breakfast. Each one got two turkey feet, a turkey heart, a turkey liver, a turkey neck, and turkey gizzards. All courtesy of a friend of my mom's who was awesome enough to bring by the scraps from butchering his turkeys. A good bit more bone than normal, but evened out by boneless meal the day before.

My car spent all day at the shop getting fixed up, then I drove out to my mom's at 7. And, her awesome friend had dropped off two five gallon buckets of elk scraps from the elk they butchered earlier that day. Very little fat or connective tissue, just lots of good, clean red meat. Which meant that the dog's breakfast this morning, Thursday, Thanksgiving, was the elk meat left over after I ran out of ziplock freezer bags.

I bagged up the elk meat for the freezer in the time while my rolls were rising. We traditionally go to our community potluck every year. Each person brings the dish that to them is essential for Thanksgiving, because otherwise, you may be without it at all (we have had years of no turkey, or no mashed potatoes, or no gravy, or no rolls). I did a rosemary currant roll that ended up being a really nice crusty roll, but without the strong rosemary taste I was hoping for (I even soaked the crushed rosemary overnight in the olive oil, then added fresh rosemary to the dough).

Overall, the potluck was great. Plenty of turkey (including a wild caught turkey), stuffing, green bean casserole, home made cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, gravy, and more. We pulled out Jenga (the tower game) and Guesstures and various groups took turns having some fun with those.

There were only two downsides to Thanksgiving this year: The first being an explosion of Pyrex (after it was set on a hot burner by someone who just arrived and was making room for the dish on the serving table) which shot glass everywhere, including into some of the food dishes, which had to be scrapped. No one was hurt by the glass though, and more people arrived shortly to replace the ruined food. The other downside was that while there were cookies, cinnamon rolls, pecan pie, and blackberry cobbler, no one brought a pumpkin pie.

Which is why we have a pumpkin pie in the oven right now. Which we will eat for breakfast tomorrow.

We made a turkey for ourselves (so we can have leftovers) and have the bones all in the crockpot making stock. In the morning, we will be getting up early, straining the stock and putting together a Turkey Stew in the crockpot, and heading to the beach. A few major storms came through recently (one is on its way through right now), meaning that if we get to the beach early in the morning during the low tide, there should be tons of awesome treasures to find. And, we will probably be home in time to have turkey stew for lunch before I have to head back into town to go to work.

Hope everyone else had a great Thanksgiving, and wishing luck to those brave souls venturing out into the Black Friday shopping.