Thanksgiving Feast

We had such a delicious feast. The brined turkey was amazing! It was so juicy and flavorful. I did a lot of research on the turkey cooking process and I think it paid off very well. That Alton Brown is a genius! Seriously, the white meat was even juicier than the dark meat. We had our feast with 4 of Mckay's engineering classmates, at the house that a few of them live in. I made most of the food and there were a few other contributions, like spanish rice, Pillsbury biscuits from a can, and jello that never set up properly. Our lovely food selection is pictured below.

I made carrots, Julie's AMAZING sweet potatoes, asparagus, turkey, gravy, and cranberry sauce.

The food was quite a hit with the boys. I'm guessing it's probably been a while since they've had a really good home cooked meal. One of the guys said he didn't like sweet potatoes, but Mckay made him try the ones I made. He liked them and even went back for seconds. It's amazing what soaking something is sugar and butter for 3 days will do. Thanks for the recipe, Julie! (Or I guess thanks to Christian's grandma.) Even though we somehow missed a few essentials like stuffing and mashed potatoes, we managed to stuff ourselves quite well.

Of course, I had to make some pie. It felt weird only having 2 pies for Thanksgiving, but I wasn't about to make more than 2 for just 6 people. We went with some classics: pumpkin and pecan.

We stuffed ourselves full of food, watched some football and played cards games. Dallin enjoyed crawling around and getting into stuff. Single guys don't really have baby proof places, but Dallin kept himself entertained with a 30lb weight, empty soda bottles, pizza coupons and a screw he found. We all had a really great time.

Today I had a great Black Friday experience, with no waking up early and waiting in line out in the cold. We've been needing a vacuum cleaner for a while, so I've been searching online for good black friday deals on vacuums.

It's like the stars aligned and the vacuum gods paved the way for me to get this great deal. I left home at 9am for Target. The parking lot was packed but I found a close parking spot as soon as I pulled in. I walked right into the store and got the last Dyson DC17 on the shelf. There was no tag on the shelf anywhere, no DC17 model on display, but I knew what the sale ad had printed. I went to checkout, waited no more than 30 seconds in line and got my vacuum at the sale price. Normally $449, I got my dyson for only $269. That's $180 off! And Target was offering a $10 gift card for purchases over $100 before 10am. So I saved essentially $190 on my vacuum. Pretty awesome. It's a lot to spend on a vacuum but I'm hoping it will live up to the Dyson hype and keep us happy for years and years.

Dallin was pretty excited about it...

...until he realized it was a vacuum. His strong sensitivity to loud sounds (related to Williams Syndrome) makes him hate it when I vacuum. He starts to cry when he sees a vacuum. He had fun playing with the box and packaging while I set the vacuum up. But when I had it assembled and rolled it around on the floor (before I had even turned it on), he realized what it was and got really scared and started to cry. It got worse when I turned it on. (If people try to tell you that a dyson is a quiet vacuum, they're wrong. It's still a loud machine that Dallin is scared of.) But beside all that, I'm pretty happy with it so far. It picked up A LOT of dust from our carpet and our apartment looks semi-decent now.

Yay for good Black Friday Deals!

And Yay for yummy food!