Basted to Perfection

With Thanksgiving a week behind me, I feel like I have come to a place where I can blog about my experience. That said, one of my strong suits is actually my ability to look at the whole picture, rather than viewing an experience as a sum of the parts. In the end, the meal turned out great and love and thanks was shared among family and friends. While it was an interesting journey getting the turkey to the table, I guess all is well that ends well. I woke up early to clean, stuff and prepare our twenty-odd pound free range turkey. I got it into the oven without a hitch, did the prep work for all of the other dishes I would be cooking to accompany the beast and in record time! The house was clean, the turkey was basted and I was showered and ready for guests in record time. Sounds like things were shaping up well.

Thanksgiving day was the day our breaker box decided to throw in the towel. The only way to keep the oven on without blowing the breaker was to turn off and unplug every other appliance in the house. Even then, it would sometimes decide to flip sporadically. So I cooked, in the dark, with a flashlight in my apron pocket, ready at a moments notice to fly down the stairs and battle with the unruly breaker box. By the time the guests arrived to a dim candlelit home the smell of turkey filled the air, and I was more than flustered. My outfit was blotted with food stains, there was sweat on my brow and my hair do had quickly flattened.

Dinner was served just over an hour late, the turkey took a little longer than anticipated to cook, the guests were starving and I was exhausted. But, all trials and tribulations aside, dinner was delicious! In the end, the food was ate, the wine was drunk and the guests left happy. I went to bed paranoid, certain the power would go out in the middle of the night, we would miss out alarms for work and the refrigerator would shut off leaving me with a kitchen of spoiled food. But, thanks to the wine and the fact that I was exhausted I fell asleep nearly as soon as my head hit the pillow. Ahhh. Bliss.

Good thing that this was just a warm up for Christmas.