Thanksgiving

Is it too late to talk about Thanksgiving?  It was a beautiful, unseasonably warm Minnesota November day.  We tied the high temperature record of 59 degrees.  I went to my parents house where there was 26 people there. We had a delicious meal including all of the usual suspects; turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, corn, cranberries, salad, rolls and pie including pumpkin, apple and french silk.  I don't know how you guys roll at your Thanksgiving dinner but there are so many of us so we just help ourselves and mostly everything is in slow cookers.  What do you guys do?

My sister made this super cute turkey out of veggies.

Let's rewind to a little earlier in the day when I was still at home. Everything was going my way and I had lots of time to get the green bean casserole into the slow cooker, make a honey-orange broccoli salad and roast some sweet potatoes. I even made a pumpkin pie (for the first time) and it smelled so delicious when it came out of the oven.  I set it on a cooling rack on the counter and when I opened the counter above it, a few spice containers fell down and ploop...right into the not-so-cooled but now ugly pumpkin pie.  I bawled my eyes out.  Michael had to comfort me and now looking back at it, I was so emotional about something so silly.  I do hope that the homemade whipped cream that I made made up for the couple of divots on the pie's surface.  I don't eat pumpkin pie but my Aunt Terri attested that it was delicious.     

I didn't get a pic of the pie post baking, pre-accident so an in-process pic will have to do 

While I would have liked to have been with M and his family, I'm thankful I was not.  Why?  Because 11 out of 14 people (except for one family) at their Thanksgiving got sick with food poisoning...or Norovirus...or the flu....or who knows because they can't pinpoint what it was but either way, M was spewing from both ends and I was his nurse, cleaning up puke and well, you know. You know you love someone when you can clean up all that stuff.  My poor baby.  I felt so bad for him but in less than 48 hours, it was done and over with and he was his good old self again.