bring on the holidays!

A couple weeks ago, I was thinking about the upcoming holiday season, and how nice it is to not have to worry about finals, like I did for the many (oh so many) years that I was a student. A big perk of being into the real world is not having finals and projects hanging over my head at the end of November and beginning of December. Unfortunately, I forgot about the whole grant cycle thing; grant applications have a tendency to be due in December. And then there’s the academia attitude of “what holidays?” With a fairly big grant due on Dec 7, work has been quite busy the past 2 weeks. This means I haven’t had much time for thinking about holiday preparations at all, sadly.

But I finally escaped work and am free until Monday! Tonight I sat down for some Thanksgiving strategizing. The plan is to keep it simple, as it’s just dinner for my husband and me. Last year was our first year attempting the full Thanksgiving dinner. It went well, so to make things easy I’m using the same recipes. I had the foresight to buy most of the groceries over the weekend, including the smallest turkey we could find – an 8 lb butterball. It should be totally thawed by tomorrow, and only take a couple hours to cook.

Here’s the plan of action:

• Morning: bake the pumpkin cookies. Gotta do the dessert first, since it’s my favorite part of the meal ;) Plus that means energy food for the rest of the cooking! These cookies are some of Steve's favorites. And they are healthy - really healthy, not like the cupcakes :)
  
• Starting around 2 pm: put everything in the slow cooker for these slow cooker rosemary garlic mashed potatoes. This recipe is great because you just put everything in and then forget about it – don’t even need to peel the potatoes. The potatoes get nice and soft after cooking for 3-4 hours, so they mash quite easily and voilà – creamy mashed potatoes. Additional bonuses are that they stay warm right up until served, and they don’t have excessive quantities of butter.
• After sticking the potatoes in, we’ll make the caramelized onion stuffing. This recipe was super tasty last year – the onions add some really good flavor. Since it takes a little while for the onions to caramelize, we can put those on, chop up the veggies, and then start prepping the turkey. Once the stuffing is finished, just have to stick it in the bird and put it in the oven to bake for ~ 2 hours or so. Just before dinner, we’ll throw together a salad with dried cranberries, and we’re ready to go.

This all went quite smoothly last year, and hopefully it will be much the same tomorrow, since I’m looking forward to a relaxing day with just the two of us. Maybe there will even be some time to start thinking of preparations for the next holiday… internet shopping anyone?

Hope everyone has a happy, restful Thanksgiving!