Friendsgiving on a budget

In lieu of Thanksgiving festivities, I appropriately cooked a Thanksgiving feast! Eleni was paper-writing all night, so I phoned Annie to help me out for the night. Something I didn't realize until yesterday was the grocery store sales due to traditional holiday feasts. I suppose Thanksgiving yields the most of any one food group bought at a time, but these sales could also be repeated with ham and cabbage after Easter, and big serving pans after Christmas. Anywho, the turkey breast I purchased was 75% off. A $4 breast, talk about bang for your buck!

Annie came to my house around 8:00 P.M. bearing a butternut squash and stuffing ingredients that matched the recipe she brought. I fought the six o'clock customer traffic at Shaw's to get ingredients for the turkey, mashed sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and apple crisp. The total cost for those ingredients was a whopping $10, and Annie said she spent less than $10 on her ingredients. 

With our combined forces, we were making a whopping 6 dishes, not including the byproducts of the turkey, gravy and turkey stalk. To add to the chaos, I finished off the seaweed sheets from the last cooking endeavor and made sushi to take to work for lunch the next day. With a load of laundry in the washer, I think I have a pretty good idea of the daily life of a working mother. Not gonna lie it was kinda intense. 

cranberry sauce and mashed sweet potatoes

My iPod touch web browser was ridden with recipes for each dish I was preparing. Despite the extensive research, I now tend to skim recipes, whereas when I first started cooking I used to study recipes as if I were preparing for a manufacturing exam. I started the cooking endeavor with washing the turkey breast, then rubbing a mixture of wine, olive oil, and spices underneath the skin. After covering the breast with tin foil, it went in the oven at 375 degrees Fahrenheit  I then skinned and cubed the sweet potatoes and put those in a pot filled with water to boil. Cranberries went in another pot, three parts cranberries to one part water and sugar. The apple crisp and sushi I have made previously so I'll spare you the details. I honestly didn't have much to do with the stuffing and squash, maybe Annie can fill you in on the details sometime.

stuffing stuff!

squash cubes!

The fun (and exhausting) part of the night was that there was always something to be done - whether it be chopping, cleaning, or tending to the dishes. We thought we would need a second oven at first so we contacted some neighbors down the street, but we were able to fit the turkey, squash, stuffing, and apple crisp in the oven all at once.

Spilled some oatmeal :(

The turkey came out juicy and tender, thanks to Annie's basting throughout the night. The sweet potatoes were perfectly mushy after sitting on the stove for about 30 minutes, and the stuffing came out exactly the way Annie planned. The squash was not as cooked as Annie would have liked it, but I thought it was perfect. Annie made a gravy with the turkey drippings, and the dregs from the breast were put in a boiling pot to collect turkey stalk. The gravy turned out just fine despite some issues with clumpy flour, and the cranberry sauce was still kind of saucy and a bit tart, but was delicious nonetheless. The apple crisp was awesome, per usual.

On basting duty

B-E-A-Utiful!

After eating, we did the dishes and boxed the leftovers for what seemed like days. I'm still in disbelief as to how easy and cheap it was to make such a delicious treat! Didn't really learned much during this cooking endeavor, except maybe that we were able to pretty much wing a turkey dinner in about 3 hours total.

  

OM NOM NOM

Til next time, little chefs!