Have A Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all our friends and family!

And, on to the pictures!

Since our holiday was going to be impersonal with just us 3 and Mark (close friend and Katrina's Godfather), we decided to 'mess with the menu', so to speak. We bought 10 pounds of stone crab claws, gave some to Uncle Frank and Aunt Martha, and used some of the rest for T-Day recipes. Luann chose to make a crab dip for chips and crackers, I made a leeks, crab and chardonnay white sauce over lingine. Well, that was different.

Here we are, hard at work in the kitchen. We're getting close as you can see the 'guest of honor' has freshly come back from his visit in the deep fryer (deep fried turkey is something of a southern tradition, I am told). Meanwhile, Luann is working on cracking open some of the crab claws with a hammer so we can make the dip and linguine. At the end of the day, we still had a few pounds of crab left, so we gave them to Mark to take home.

If anyone is curious, deep fried turkey is not oily at all and is quite juicy and flavorful. We just use an injector on the hapless bird to maninate for a day before his fateful dunk in the fryer. We've been making deep fried turkey on Thanksgiving for about 4 years now. After our first experience with a borrowed gas-fired monster, we decided to buy a thermostatically controlled electric unit that is much safer and convenient.

Here we are, all set up in the living room. There was more than this, but we couldn't get it all on this little table. We decided to do it this way because we wanted to introduce Mark to Jeff Dunham, a ventriloquist comedian, by playing a couple of DVDs of his we had bought. Since we had so much fun at a show he did in August (see here: http://thenieborgs.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html), we decided to buy tickets for all 4 of us to attend his new years eve show. What a way to ring in the new year, laughing all the way...

If anybody from my family is looking at this photo, you can see that we are continuing the family hors devoures tradition with the cheese, meats, pickles, olives and cocktail onions "on a steek". Jeff Dunham has a puppet called Jose Jalapeno - on a stick. And with his Mexican accent, it comes out as "on a steek". Funny guy. Funny, funny guy...

We did pretty well and it wasn't so crazy getting things together for this holiday, which was nice for a change.

Oh, when we visited Uncle Frank & Aunt Martha, we got to see their new RV. It's really nice inside and well-appointed. Now, this is how to retire in style!

We also saw how they were using these really neat racks to hold their DVDs, so we just had to copy their idea. You can see in one of the pictures above how we put them to work...