Thanksgiving 2014 + Matt's Birthday

Matt's birthday fell on Thanksgiving this year. We celebrated his birthday Turkey Day Style, which meant he got to go play football in the morning and came home with a battle wound injury to the hand. It's been almost a month and I think he's finally recovered now.

Since we were spending Thanksgiving with a group of friends, everything was divvied up and we were in charge of cranberry sauce, a dessert, and loaded mashed potatoes. I did two ways- 1) caramelized onions and roasted garlic with parmesan, and 2) bacon and white cheddar. For our dessert I chose a cranberry orange upside down cake, and Matt requested Oreo truffles for his birthday treat. I spent most of the day in the kitchen. 

I cried buckets of tears chopping up these bad boys. Sweat and tears went into food prep, thankfully no blood this time.

Kids table!

 Adult table

 Turkey man Nathan made a beautiful bird. He did one roasted and one smoked turkey.

 SO much fooooood. 

 Everyone shared leftovers, and I think we might have actually come home with just as much food as we brought. We had thanksgiving feasts for the next three days.

Happy 32 to Matt!

I really did miss sharing the day with family. We've been without our immediate family on several Thanksgivings, but it was our first time being away from extended family too. Everyone was invited to share their own family traditions with the group to make it feel more like home. Our contribution was reading Lincoln's 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation. It was fun sharing in our friends' traditions too; we're lucky we got to spend the day with a great group of people.