Thanksgiving Recap

Well, it took me a couple of days of rest to recover from Thanksgiving, but I'm ready to post my blog updates from our big meal :)  Overall, I think it was definitely a successful thanksgiving.  My parents arrived in Chicago around lunchtime on Wednesday, and then they came over to our condo with my sister, Kristen, after stopping by her place.  Then once Kevin got off work, we started the weekend off with a couple of beers at The Map Room.  This place has a really great variety of beers, and my dad has been wanting to go there for awhile so we stopped off there for an hour or so.

Later that night, we all went out to dinner (which was nice because I didn't have to cook the night before thanksgiving!).  We went to a restaurant called Folklore, and at dinner it was Kevin and I, my parents, Kristen, and Kristen's boyfriend, Tom.  My steak was cooked perfectly rare, and the portion sizes were huge so we had plenty to bring home as leftovers!  Definitely a good night before thanksgiving :)  We brined the turkey when we got home from dinner, and then went to bed.

The next morning, we all began cooking away.  In this post, I'll just post pictures of the things that I'm not going to do a seperate blog post for.  Around noon or one o'clock, we started with the appetizers.  For appetizers, we had some crab stuffed mushrooms that Kristen made, baked brie, and coconut shrimp.  It was nice eating our appetizers around lunchtime because then we were plenty hungry by the time dinner rolled around.

We ate around 5:30ish.  Here's a couple of pictures of my table (which I was excited to use our fine china for!) and some of the food:

Great thanksgiving, and I had a great time with everyone!  The only thing I didn't get a picture of was the pumpkin pie (I used this recipe).  Afterwards, we had a game night and played Taboo and Catchphrase which is always fun.  I'm going to call my first year hosting thanksgiving a success :)  The thing that surprised me the most is how many dishes we went through during the day while cooking!  Every time one load from the dishwasher finished, we were ready to start another load!  Well, now it's time to start getting ready for Christmas :)