The day after

This was Woot's T-shirt of the day for Thanksgiving. Our 19 pound monster of a turkey (if my cholesterol-overloaded brain doesn't fool me, the brand was a young "Tom Turkey", much better than Butterball!) didn't give us QUITE as much trouble, fortunately. Nicely filled with quartered oranges, onions and carrots and rubbed with the herb butter from Cook's Country magazine's recipe (1 stick butter, softened, mixed with 2 tablespoons dried herbes de Provence, 4 minced garlic cloves, 1 Tblsp grated lemon zest, salt and pepper), stuck into a Reynold's oven bag and roasted for a mere 3 hours. Juicy perfection!

Add to that the gravy: Based on the Cooks Illustrated recipe, I roasted the neck and the giblets in some olive oil until browned, then took out the meat and added some butter and flour, constantly whisking for several minutes until the butter was deep brown. Then I slowly added hot broth and some dried parsley and let everything cook for a while. THEN I added the handy little gravy package from inside the turkey, cooked a little longer, and voilà! Loads of deep brown gravy.

For the carving of the birdie we used this instructional video from Cooks Illustrated. For its transport, loads of aluminum foil, bath towels and a laundry basket.

What am I thankful for? A bird that comes without nunchucks. A patient hubby. And leftovers!

P.S. oh, we already had the first bit of snow here. Didn't stay around for long, but pool season's definitely over...

And another scorcher!

Woohoo, we've had another nice, warm weekend. Unfortunately, it was cloudy, so when yesterday at 4 p.m. the sun finally started to peek through, we raced to the park to get some fresh air. Man, it's getting dark fast now! We had about 20 minutes to enjoy the place, then I got too worried that we'd get locked in since the park closes at dusk. Well, I don't actually know whether they would lock people in, but there IS a big, sturdy gate at the entrance so we didn't want to risk anything...

Autumn

Almost 70 degrees on Sunday! Beautiful day for a walk in the forest. Which is exactly what tons of other people thought, too, so it was a little crowded and we hardly saw any animals (apart from a few birds and one huge, very relaxed squirrel which probably could have taken on either of us).

Belated Boo

I made some BATS out of black (and a little white) polymer clay, based on this tutorial.
They're very cute, especially hanging from the front door. Also, they seemed to be so lifelike *cough, cough*, that they scared off any trick-or-treaters quite effectively - we didn't have a SINGLE kid ring our doorbell. Mostly because there's hardly any kids here where we live. Thank goodness I anticipated this and only bought candy that I like to eat myself (1 large bag of Twix bars, which seem to have magically, eeriely almost disappeared by now...)