Thanksgiving Recap

I really really honestly wanted to do some ingenious posts just before Thanksgiving with tips and tricks for entertaining but the fact is, I was serving 17 people and I had a lot of tips and tricks to take care of on my own.  Instead, we'll have to settle for a little recap.

As I mentioned, we had 17 people for dinner.  That's a LONG table...  Things I learned:

• When you do a pot-luck, everyone will always bring more dishes than you assigned them.  When you do pot-luck with more than a handful of people, the number of dishes can get out of hand quickly.  :-)
• When serving 17 people (or over 10, really), consider a buffet for the food to allow for more elbow room at the dinner table.  It's not as quaint as passing dishes family-style, but it's more orderly and you'll be thankful to be doing fewer dishes.  Also, buffets can have heating devices (slow cookers, chafing dishes, etc.), making reheating food that has traveled less of a burden on the kitchen equipment that is already occupied.
• Two turkeys cook faster than one of an equal number of pounds.
• Bread stuffing tastes great with a handful of re-hydrated dried cranberries tossed into it.

Home-Preserved things I got to use:

• Cranberry sauce from last year's stash (both jellied and whole berry)
• Peach sauce (this one was a hit with one of my wife's cousins)
• Roasted Red Peppers in a delicious Roasted Red Pepper Dip

All in all, I'd say it was a very successful and enjoyable day.  I really do enjoy seeing the entire family all in one place and just being able to hang out and chat with them.  I thank everyone that contributed to the day and I really couldn't have done it without all the help.

With that, I'll leave you with some photos from the day...