Thanksgiving Cooking

There is almost nothing I enjoy as much as putting a well-planned supper on the table.  The prep work, the actual cooking, and even the clean up are all enjoyable tasks for me.  One of the reasons I like to cook is the immediate sense of accomplishment I take from the process.  Cooking keeps my hands busy while my mind wanders, yet another reason I enjoy it so much.

I'm a girl who would enjoy nothing more than making supper for a crowd of family and friends.  So it's one of life's ironies that my family is on one side of the continent and while JT and I are here on our own in the midst of the most densely populated state in the nation.

Happily, the two of us are more than capable of making a celebration on our own.  And so that's what we did for Thanksgiving.  Two people can't possibly do justice to even the smallest turkey, so we opted for fried chicken instead.  I served it with green bean casserole (a Pioneer Woman recipe that I highly recommend), roasted carrots, and rosemary rolls.  We had pumpkin pie for our dessert.  At my house, absent family is present in the form of new and antique dishes that set my table.  My grandmother's pepper shaker joins my great-grandmother's vegetable bowl and her relish platter.  They play nicely with the yellow plates that my mother helped me to select a few years ago and the antique dishes I began collecting when I lived in Tennessee.

Our Thanksgiving supper was hardly traditional, but I'm quite sure that the pilgrims would approve.  And JT and I enjoyed it together, for which I am most thankful.