Turkey Turkey

We hosted our first big holiday dinner this weekend; 16 people in total (including Alyssa). 

My sister and her boyfriend came out early Saturday to help with the cooking and cleaning, since Danny was working all day.  My grandma arrived about 5 minutes before them and helped set up the turkey (stuffing it and taking the rest to make at her house) and pointing us in the right direction. 

There has been some concern about my oven since I had make cookies earlier in the week and they took 10 extra minutes to cook.  We monitored the oven a few days before, with an oven thermometer, to see how hot it actually was (it's slow to pre-heat) and figured out where the right temperatures were. 

We did the math with a 20lb bird and with the oven figured out we knew the turkey had to be in the oven between 11-12 for it to be done for a 5:30-6 dinner.  By 11:30 the big ol' bird was in the oven. 

At 3:05pm it was done; 90 minutes ahead of schedule. 

By 3:45 we were calling everyone to see where they were to decide what we were going to do; serve dinner early or keep it for the set time.  After much debate we decided to aim for dinner at 5.  We started potatoes and the vegetables (all which cooked in about half the time there were suppose to).

Just after 5:30 we all sat down and feasted on a yummy dinner.  We spent the next 4 hours talking, eating, drinking, playing games, and having a great time. 

It was a great evening with great food and company.  Looking forward to doing it all again in 2.5 months - we'll have the timing down a bit better then.


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Look for my first Linking Party on Thursday.  I'll have more details in the next day or two.