Our Thanksgiving Feast

It's the last day of November 2014.

Our Thanksgiving is over!

We had a nice celebration and hope you did too.

  I cooked a turkey for the first time in years.  

Actually I've only cooked two oven turkeys in 40 years of marriage.  

We always traveled to be with family every Thanksgiving (and most holidays) so there weren't many times when we were home.  

After my father-in-law passed away over ten years ago we decided to finally stay at home for Thanksgiving.  

Since then I have fixed nice meals for my Hubby... just not a turkey.

  

But I missed having the turkey dinners with all the fixings.  

I love turkey!

Then I saw on Pinterest a pin about cooking a turkey breast in a crock pot.  

I thought I could do that and that would be perfect for us. 

 I bought a frozen three pound Butterball turkey breast.

I never even knew they came that small.

I cut up some carrots, celery and onion and rubbed the turkey with olive oil, seasoned it and dumped the gravy pack that came with the turkey over the meat along with 1/2 cup of water and turned my crock pot on "high" for an hour then turned it down to "low".

I have this neat thermometer that I used to track the interior temperature of the turkey.

It had to reach 140 degrees within four hours (it did) and once it reached at least 165 degrees it was considered cooked properly.

Around 5 pm it reached over 165 degrees and the instructions said it wouldn't hurt to cook it longer so I did.

In the meantime I fixed mashed potatoes, Stove Top Stuffing, frozen white corn (which I forgot to fix even with my list), gravy and cranberry sauce.  

I cooked three Yukon baking potatoes and mashed them.  

I learned for just the two of us, three potatoes was two too many.

Oh, and the turkey was so moist and delicious! 

We can't eat as much now so we had enough left-overs for three more meals.

If you don't want to heat up your house with a turkey in the oven all day, and you only need a small turkey, this is a wonderful way to prepare your turkey.

I swear it tasted better than any of the ones I roasted in the oven. 

  

Later in the evening we had homemade pumpkin pie with whipped cream.   

Our Thanksgiving meal was a great success!

 Hubby was so pleased - although to give him credit he said I didn't have to do a turkey.   

I was tired but very happy!

And now the Christmas Season begins tomorrow!

It's going to be tough on me because most of our Christmas decorations are in storage so I won't be decorating our home as usual.

You know how much I love Christmas!

But we have so much going on with our home being built in Ohio and preparing our home here in PA for sale.

I decided to skip making my Christmas Sugar Cookies this year too.

And now my neighbors have started putting their Christmas lights and decorations out.

It looks so pretty and I want to decorate too.

I'm tempted to have Hubby buy two strands of colored lights to put on each side of the front slab.

This will be the first time in our married life we won't have a Christmas tree up (sob!).

But I've realized I have to pace myself as I get older.

I do have a few Christmas things I can put out from my Christmas cabinet.

Next year I can go crazy decorating in our new Ohio home!