Our Thanksgiving Dinner: A Pictorial

I decided it would be a lot of fun to photograph and share the recipes for our Thanksgiving dinner! Yes, it is only Monday and Thanksgiving is not until Thursday... Well, my husband works on Thanksgiving so we decided to celebrate early at home on his day off instead! None of my photos are edited, so you will see a true mess by the end of this! Honestly though, I think most people make a mess when they are cooking all afternoon long!

Normally on Thanksgiving we just make the most basic turkey ever and slather the thing with butter, throw it in the oven and call it good! This year I decided we should probably actually try. I looked around a bit online and found THIS recipe for an herb roasted turkey. I had just purchased a Bountiful Basket from the co-op and had most of the ingredients for it already, the picture made it look appetizing, and the steps didn't seem too hard. Okay, we found a winner!

I ended up getting a turkey pan at the Dollar Tree, for a buck of course! We got a 12 lb. turkey from Winco. It was the smallest turkey we could find. Only feeding two adults and one child, a twelve pound turkey was more than enough! I had a few sprigs of fresh sage and thyme, so those are the herbs we used to stuff the turkey's cavity with and also place in the bottom of the pan and baste the turkey skin with. For the aromatics I used one orange, one Honey Crisp apple and one small yellow onion. Here is the turkey ready to go, before cooking.

At the forty five minute mark, having been cooked at 450 degrees; This is what the turkey looked like before being wrapped in tin foil to finish cooking at 350 degrees.

And lastly, here is the turkey carved up in a messy fashion, fully cooked and ready to eat. We forgot to put it on my beautiful turkey serving plate. It was just us though, so we didn't go all out with the decorations and presentation. My son was ready for a nap by the time dinner was ready. We ended up eating most things out of the pans we cooked them in!

Next, the sides. We decided to make home made mashed potatoes. If you have never made mashed potatoes, basic ones are really very easy to make! We just used regular brown Russet potatoes. Peeled about 8 potatoes, and cut them up into a handful of pieces and threw them into a pan with water. Boil the potatoes until you can squish them with a fork. When they're squishy, drain them in the sink with a collandar and then put back into the pan. Add a splash of milk and we used an entire stick of real butter. Squash them all up with a potato masher or if you prefer you can use a mixer. We used the masher because it makes clean up a lot easier. Less dishes, et cetera.

Here are the finished potatoes. We did not add pepper to the batch, we usually pepper our own to taste.

Every single year for Thanksgiving I make a green bean cassarole. They're really easy to make, filling and most people enjoy it and only eat it around the holidays. You can get the recipe for it off of the back of the container of French's french fried onions, but I made it easy for you and decided to give you a LINK! I did everything that this recipe calls for except for the last part, I did not add the extra french fried onions as a topper and cook the additional five minutes. I find there is enough of the onions in the mix that I do not need to add more. Of course, that is my personal preference. Also, they have regular cut green beans pictured and I used fancy french cut green beans.

My Bountiful Basket ended up having a bag of fresh cranberries, so we had to decide what to do with them.

My friend shared a delicious looking recipe for a dessert that I really wanted to try. I would have had to go to the grocery store again during Thanskgiving week, so I decided to go with a recipe off of the back of the bag of cranberries. There was a recipe for Cranberry Coconut Macaroons and a recipe for Holiday Cranberry Sauce. We had all of the ingredients for the cranberry sauce. While I never cared for cranberry sauce before, my husband was very excited for it. So we made that!

I could not find this particular recipe online, so I will type it out for you. The cranberry brand is Naturipe and it is a 12 oz. bag.

Holiday Cranberry Sauce

2 cups (8 oz.) fresh cranberries

1/2 cup pure apple juice

3/4 cup packed brown sugar

1/4 teaspoon ground allspice

Wash and drain cranberries. In a pot, combine all ingredients and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium and simmer for 15 minutes. Cool and serve.

I kind of thought the smell of the sauce smelled like incense while it was cooking. It was the allspice. I also tried a fresh raw cranberry and it was extremely tart. My pet rats ate some without much fuss. I do not recommend fresh cranberries alone. Being a sport, I decided to try the cranberry sauce when it was finished. To my surprise it was extremly delicious. The sugar balanced it out. It reminded me of Craisens in a sauce. I ended up eating a bunch of it with my turkey! I would make it again for sure!

We decided to save time and buy some pre made turkey gravy. Here it is, and it was very tasty. Kind of salty, but I like salt.

Here it is, all on one plate! Ready to be eaten by this very eager cook! And I couldn't have done it without the help of my husband!

Last but not least, I made an apple pie the night before. A Dutch Apple Pie that I found a recipe for online. This is the first pie that I have ever made. I went in halfsies with my friend on forty pounds of apples. So I ended up with 20 pounds of honey crisp apples.

I followed the directions on this pretty well, except I used slightly less apples than the recipe called for because I wouldn't have been able to buy anymore in the Marie Callander's pie crust that I bought. Yes, that is kind of cheating, I bought the crust. But hey, most of this meal was home made!

At first I was dissapointed and thought I messed up the recipe, because when we cut into the pie it was very runny. Well, apparently that is because we cut into the pie directly out of the oven. It smelled so good we did not give it a chance to cool down and set. Here is the picture of our impatient runny pie.

Despite being runny, it was super delicious! To our surprise and delight the pie thickened up and cut perfectly today! Here is the perfect pie slice!

I will most definately be making this pie again and it has inspired me to try making other types of pies as well! I might even make my own crust next time!!!

Luckily, there are enough left overs for tomorrow and then some with the turkey!

I hope that you've enjoyed my Thanksgiving menu and pictures and hope that I was able to help you out and inspire you for your own dinner! Now I must go and clean up the aftermath!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

I am an Influenster. Do you want to learn how to be one too?

So you want to learn more about this product review stuff, huh? Well, I'd like to tell you about Influenster! I'm still learning about it myself, but I am starting to get the hang of it and have recieved some of their "VoxBoxes" to try and review.

A few months back I "discovered" this new great site called Influenster and starting actively using it. (When in actuality I joined in 2012, but I don't remember doing it!) Influenster is a website of consumers, most of which are very active with social media. Influenster allows you to recieve full size products to test and review, take part in Twitter chats to learn more about products with experts and even celebrities, and you can even recieve great discounts from various places/companies/brands! Here is an example of the screen you will be welcomed with if you have not already clicked the above link.

When your'e on the main screen for Influenster, in the upper right hand corner you will see 3 stacked green lines. When you click that you will get a salmon colored menu. It will say reviews, The Hub, why join and about us. The "why join" and "about us" sections are very helpful and will answer many of your questions.

If you're a new user, you will need to sign up. It is really very easy to do! You can sign up with e-mail or Facebook. After you've signed up, you can also sign in both ways.

Once you've signed in, there's a few things you need to do. First go to your dashboard (you can see the button in your upper right hand corner of the screen, looks like a little black circle with a person in it) and link your social media accounts to Influenster. This is so you can share your "influence" (opinions) with your other friends and followers. After linking all accounts, you will see an impact score. This just shows how far your reach goes. Influenster doesn't share without your permissions, you manually do all of the sharing. So do not worry about that! Here is what your dashboard may look like (mine is all linked up). You will also see on the left that there are other catagories!

Make sure that you completely fill out your settings and your "about me" section. The about me is very very important! That is one of the ways they decide if you will be a good match to recieve a VoxBox! The VoxBox is the name for the box they send you with your items to review! They also have virtual VoxBoxes, which means it is a challenge that is online. You get points for doing both and you still can win prizes from Virtual Vox Boxes! Here is an example of my public profile. It shows your about me, your score, your reptuation (which I am still figuring out how to get points there, so mine is still at a zero), and you can earn badges for completing tasks/missions with brands. Another thing you need to do to make sure you are considered for a VoxBox is fill out your "snaps". Snaps are short questionairres that you take so that Influenster can get to know you. You will find your Snaps on the left hand side of your dashboard.

Now you are ready to look around! The Hub is cool because it features blogs and articles written by the top members of the commuinty, there's all kinds of interesting things to read there.

There is also a review page! This is great for discovering new products and getting and giving opinions on them.

One of the physical VoxBoxes I recently was sent to review was a Braun No-Touch Fore Head thermometer! This was a great item and you can read my review and see my photos in one of my past blogs HERE! I've also had a few virtual VoxBoxes. One was for Degree deoderant, and it was as easy as doing a few instore challenges. I did not even have to purchase the product.

Thank you all for reading about Influenster, please feel free to ask me any questions and I would be happy to help you out!