Thanksgiving at Colgate

I spent my first Thanksgiving at Colgate this year. California is just too far to go in such a short time since more than half the day is spent traveling there, and almost all of it is used to come back given the time change.  It'll be great next year when we have a full week, oh wait we're graduating...

Anyway, my boyfriend and I decided that instead of going to the free Thanksgiving dinner hosted by the international student office, we were going to make the whole shebang ourselves.  Neither of us had  ever had a hand in making Thanksgiving dinner before.  But we were optimistic!

Our plan was this: one 3 lb turkey breast, a Martha Stewart recipe for stuffing, garlic mashed potatoes from a box, stir-fried green beans, homemade cranberry sauce, and one apple pie with store-bought crust.  Okay, so it might not sound overly ambitious, but aside from the boxed mashed potatoes, we hadn't made any of these items ever before. And if we failed, we'd starve. Okay, not really. But Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, so to me, failure was not an option.

We seasoned the turkey with parsley, lemon juice, chopped onion, oregano, and some salt and pepper.  We were planning on using chopped carrots, too, but the baby carrots on my fridge were a little bit too far over the hill.  We were also supposed to use celery tops, but I accidentally bought topless celery.  So we replaced those two ingredients with oregano, because you can't go wrong with oregano.  After taking the Butterball turkey out of the package, we debated for a while on whether to take off the net thing holding it together.  We hesitantly left it on.

My mom told me over the phone how to make the cranberry sauce: cranberries, two squeezed oranges, and honey in a saucepan.  But careful of over sweetening! Okay, so we paid close attention to how much honey we used.  But the orange factor evaded us; out cranberry sauce turned out pretty sour. But watching the cranberries explode in the pan was worth the less-than-cranberry taste we got out of them in the end.

Our most ambitious creation was the stuffing.  Martha Stewart called for a white wine reduction, which we had never done before, so it sounded like something really complicated.  But it really is just pouring wine in a pan and waiting a few minutes.  Thanks to Martha, our stuffing was, in my opinion, the tastiest part of the spread.

Our Thanksgiving dinner was a success. Nothing was burned or undercooked.  And even though some things tasted only close to what they were supposed to, this was the best Thanksgiving meal I'd ever had.  Making it, not just eating it, with someone I care about made it special. And even though our apple pie ended up resembling more of an apple pie, I would gladly do it all over again.