Friendsgiving

This marks our third and final thanksgiving island style.

I'm a lil sad, but once we move off the rock, we will hopefully get to spend a holiday with our real families. I say that now, but you know how family holidays go, well at least my family get togethers are interesting to say the least.

Our first "married" Thanksgiving in 2009 was just Chris and I, but our second and final Thanksgiving we had a house full of good friends.

I brined my bird for a solid 36 hours, ensures it stays juicy, and slathered it in herb butter. It came out much prettier, and by that I mean more evenly golden, than last year, which was my first attempt at cooking an entire bird.

In my family, cooking the turkey is the job of the elder married women, I guess I finally joined that club. My cousin Jeff, who is a bomb chef, gave me a great tip to ensure an evenly browned bird. He told me to start the turkey on 400 degrees for like 15-20 minutes and then cover it with foil, leaving space at the top for the steam to vent, and knock it down to 325 degrees for the remaining time. It worked great! My bird was lookin' amazing. I even dressed him up a lil =)

I stressed out last year, trying to get it all done in one day. Now that I had one Thanksgiving under my belt, I applied all my lessons learned from the year prior and kicked Thanksgiving's butt this year! Yeah, I called Thanksgiving out and I won. Boo ya!

I made PW's Creamy Mashed Potatoes, PW's Sweet Potato Casserole, Paul Dean's Green Bean Casserole, my own apple (I learned a sweet trick from Chef Robert Irvine to keep the bottom crust from getting soggy: slather a layer of butter on it before adding in the filling. It worked like a charm!) and pumpkin pies (okay, I didn't make the pie doughs from scratch), my own butternut squash soup all the night before.

The day of I slathered up the bird (at 6 a.m.) and popped him in the oven, and once he was out and resting, I warmed up the soup, made the stuffing (I am only allowed to make Stove Top at our house, per the hubby's orders), reheated all the sides, made the Crescent rolls and the gravy.

I turned many of my female guests into domestic goddesses and we got the food on the buffet line like a well oiled machine.

Well, sorta. We left the gravy on high heat so it boiled over, but luckily Kerri got it under control quickly.

While the ladies slaved away in the kitchen. The men did what they do best on Thanksgiving...

Once we had gotten our eat on, it was time to digest with a Hawaii tradition; a rousing game of Catch Phrase. We played for several hours before calling it quits and playing Apples to Apples, which we played late into the night.

Catch Phrase Highlights:
Hilty's word was Montazuma. He was trying to get his team to finish the lyrics to the Marine's anthem by saying "From the walls of ..." when Matt chimed in to answer with "From the halls of MONTREAL!"

Matt's phrase was "It is what it is." His attempt to beat the buzzer was futile. He kept making references to sex, which boggled us all. He was trying to connect "it" with "Doin' it." Fail.

This was a Thanksgiving to remember for sure.