Gearing Up

On Tuesday I was supposed to pick up our fresh, local, free-range turkey at a farm about an hour away from my house. I ended up taking a subbing job for an elementary music teacher Tuesday morning, so my mom picked up the turkey, then brought a few supplies to my house - like her huge crock pot for keeping the turkey warm while my dad carved it, dessert plates, and goodies for the little girls. And a surprise for me - a new card table, which is still in its box in the garage because we were able to scrape together enough chairs for all 11 people. But next time we need them, we'll be thankful for a new card table with four matching chairs!
My mom also brought a cornucopia, which we used as a wedding decoration last year, because Adele loves cornucopias. Her first job when she got to my house was to find the cornucopia.

Michael and I had spent many hours the previous weekend cleaning and getting set up - I even put the china out on the tables to see how it looked (then put the china back in the cupboard until Thursday afternoon without having taken a picture). Michael didn't realize we had gotten such nice linens as shower/wedding gifts last year.
Wednesday while working at the law firm I was keeping an eye on the weather, as our out 0f town family members were traveling down from Minneapolis and up from Indianapolis. While central WI was in a relatively clear zone (although we had some very heavy rains in the morning) both sets of relatives were driving through mixed snow and rain, with a little ice thrown in the mix for good measure. I had been planning to do the grocery shopping after work, but I'm terrified of driving in ice, and Michael works right down the street from the grocery store, so I asked him to pick up the groceries instead. It goes a little bit against the grain of my control-freak nature to ask him to do the shopping for me, and make decisions about what kind of crackers to get or the size/type of orange juice, milk, and cream cheese containers . . . but he did an amazing job. (And brought home LOCAL, ORGANIC, Pasteurized (not Ultra-Pasteurized) milk in the process! I wanted to cry when I saw it. Of course, that milk was $6.00 a gallon instead of the $3.57 I paid for the non-organic variety of the same brand, but it was not ultra-pasteurized. I was pretty tickled.

We were pretty hungry Wednesday night, and I'd been trying to keep the fridge relatively empty of non-Thanksgiving-related food, so we ordered Chinese, watched on episode of The Office on Netflix, and got to work. Michael finished vacuuming and picking up, and I started in with the baking - a loaf of bread for stuffing (in which I forgot the egg, even though I had it sitting right on the counter - oops),

dough for rolls,
which I decided to make with half whole-wheat flour this time (I don't know why I played with this recipe for a holiday meal - although they turned out mostly okay),
and the pumpkin pie. (This time I made it with half whole-wheat flour instead of all white.)
Oliver is sure interested in lard.
My first try at the crust didn't turn out so well. I had to ball this back up and roll it out again. It worked much better the second time.
Here's another picture of my grandma's old (1960s) Tupperware dough rolling mat, and her rolling pin too. I have my own rolling pin and dough mat that I picked out with gift cards from our wedding, because I didn't get my grandma's until this past spring. I tried to give my newer ones to my sister this weekend but she wasn't interested. I guess she'd just as soon I make the pie. (I went in to the museum on Tuesday night and had a conversation with several of the members of the museum's Advisory Board about our Thanksgiving plans. One woman gave us her perfect recipe for turkey: "My sister makes it.")
I saved a little bit of the pureed pumpkin for Anna - who heartily enjoyed it during our big meal on Thursday.
My recipe said to stir the pumpkin, brown sugar, and spices until shiny. The pumpkin and sugar were already so shiny when I added the nutmeg and ginger that this picture turned out very white, even though I used the cuisine setting on Michael's camera.
That one is actually milk and cream.
I put the rolls together while the pie baked.
Then while the pie cooled I did dishes, put the root beer and diet coke on ice, brought frozen vegetables into the house,
took appliances I would not be using into the basement, found outlets for my mom's coffee maker, her crock pot, and my crock pot, baby-proofed the kitchen, bookmarked all of my recipes, pulled pots and pans out from their nooks in my cupboards, and cubed the bread for my stuffing.
That was a lot of bread. And of course I made way too much stuffing.
and washed all of the potatoes.
I finally headed to bed around 1:00, with plans to get up again at 7:00 to bake another loaf of bread (in case Adele needed a sandwich), soak the potatoes to lower the potassium level (my dad has problems with high potassium), and get the turkey in the oven by 10:00.