Ever since Nate became an FSO, we’ve been fully embracing every holiday that comes our way, knowing it’ll probably be our last in the USA for the next several years.
So this year for Thanksgiving, we cooked a lot of amazing food, used the fine china and crystal, and hosted a relatively fancy dinner party. We even made a seating chart and place cards. Place cards! Never in a million years did I ever think I’d be googling “homemade Thanksgiving place cards.”
You can’t really see it in the photo, but I wrote each person’s name on a leaf with a silver sharpie. Yes, I am someone who apparently makes place cards.
I also created a spreadsheet timeline with all the different recipes and tasks (like washing the china, making the cornbread for the stuffing, making pastry for the pie, picking my sister up from the airport, etc), which we generally followed. Thank goodness we’d planned everything out in advance, because it didn’t all go perfectly.
But how boring would life be if things went 100% as planned all the time?
First, there was the ice cream. My sister Bridget and I decided to make maple walnut ice cream, and instead of tempering the eggs, we scrambled them. Have you ever tried scrambled eggs with cream, milk, and maple syrup? Don’t; it’s gross. So we made an emergency run to Trader Joe’s on our way to out dinner on Wednesday night and made a new ice cream base when we came home later that night. It chilled in the fridge overnight and we churned it the next morning.
Thanksgiving desserts! Our ice cream is in the top right corner.
Then there was the gravy. Nate made the gravy on Wednesday night, and on Thursday afternoon we heated it up on the stove top. I tasted it and it was oddly sweet. We looked over the recipe to see where the sweetness could be coming from, and the only possibility was either from the bacon or the sweet paprika, neither of which are actually all that sweet. It also wasn’t very thick, even though Nate had added a third of a cup of flour. We added some lemon juice to cut the sweetness, which didn’t work and only made it taste lemony. I suggested we add some more flour to at least try to get it to thicken up a bit, so Nate started adding flour one teaspoon at a time.
And that was when I realized what the problem was. He was adding powdered sugar.
The powdered sugar is kept in a clear plastic container, which I never bothered to label because I’m the only one who uses it. I felt pretty bad because flour and powdered sugar do look similar. Luckily we still had enough ingredients to make the gravy from scratch again and it wasn’t a big deal.
So, yes, it was definitely a Thanksgiving to remember. We finished the night off by watching the beginning of A Muppet Christmas Carol, and ate left-over pumpkin pie for breakfast. We all did our Black Friday shopping early in the morning, came home, and put pajamas back on. And then we ate some more, because that’s what leftovers are for!
According to Athena 