Thanksgiving time

I love Thanksgiving time. I know I blog every Thanksgiving and every year I say, "This is the best holiday." Really, especially for a food lover such as myself, it is, especially since it has about zero hype. People are generally more excited about using it to kick off the Christmas season. But not me. I love it for what it is - sitting on the couch and eating good food.

(Sidebar: Did I tell you that I am not going to hate Christmas year. Dillon's was selling real, baby Christmas trees and I almost thought about buying one. I didn't but it at least crossed my mind. I know. Whoa. Who am I?)

The only thing I don't like about Thanksgiving is that it's really hard for people who live very far from family to see them on the actual event. Since Christmas trumps Thanksgiving, we save driving across the country for the end of December and stay home in November. And it feels as if you have to be baller in order to buy a plane ticket home for the weekend of Thanksgiving. Levent and I are not ballers.

So this year, I didn't "run up to Iowa" (like my sister and I have done in the past to visit my Grandparents) and we didn't go to Hutch to be with Levent's grandparents. We just stayed home.

Even though I missed my family, it was nice really to do our own thing. The day had no pressure attached to it, which is the best kind of holiday. However, when you don't hang out with your mom or Grandma on Thanksgiving that means you have to make all the food yourself.

Yikes.

Levent and I just roasted a chicken and made some sides to go with it. Pretty simple, right? Well, we still spent most of the afternoon in the kitchen. I love cooking, but there is still this child side of me that just wants my mom to do it so I can do nothing. (Sorry, Mom, for never helping in the kitchen on holidays). I also don't know how people roast any type of large meat chunk for any non-holiday meal. Yikes. It's a ton of work!

But it was worth it in the end. The chicken and good flavor and wasn't too dry (which was nice for my first one) and we served it up with cornbread stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy and green beans.

A couple weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, I had sworn off desserts in a desperate attempt to get myself back in shape. (Let me tell you, traveling for work + and aging metabolism is not the best). So I had been waiting and waiting for Thanksgiving evening so I could eat a slice of this Chocolate zucchini loaf cake and vanilla bean ice cream.

It wasn't even the best cake recipe around (it was a new one) but it was still delightful.

Happy Thanksgiving weekend everyone! I hope yours was as relaxing as mine.

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