Happy Holidays!
Most of our friends in Vancouver have gone home for the holidays, so we knew we'd be having a quiet and private Christmas day. Plus, our schedule is now completely nocturnal (go to bed at 7am, wake up at 5pm), so it wouldn't sync up with any normal people anyway. Despite all this, on Friday evening, I decided I wanted to do *something* for the holidays, and decided to get the ingredients for a nice Christmas meal.
Josh was (is) still working on a paper for one of his classes, so this was something to do to keep from bugging him while I sat around the house being bored and antsy. Plus, our supermarket gives away "turkey dollars" during the month of December, based on how much you spend, and I had amassed $12 worth of turkey. So on Saturday I went to the store and got a small turkey (about 10 pounds) and various other ingredients.
Today, we woke up around 5 pm, talked to our families, who had kindly waited to call until we would be up, and then started working on Christmas dinner. The bird went in around 8pm:
Around 10:30, it was done and ready to be carved. Ever since our Thanksgiving in Ireland, we swear by the "oven bag" method of turkey cooking, along with slathering the bird in herbed butter. Yum!
Josh carved it:
And I prepared the remaining dishes: Sweet potatoes, homemade stuffing, herbed cheese bread, cranberry sauce, gravy, and a salad with beets and nuts. Add a bottle of wine, and we were good to go:
And we've got a pumpkin pie made with Splenda's new brown sugar mix. It's darker and stickier than a regular pumpkin pie, but hopefully it will taste good! Not bad for a small, somewhat spur-of-the-moment Christmas dinner.
Now we're planning to play some Magic:The Gathering, eat some pie and hit the Boxing Day Sales at 6am to close out the day. We hope to get Final Fantasy XII and Guitar Hero I/II as Christmas presents to each other. We've also ordered a number of books (thanks to a generous gift from Josh's parents), and Josh is getting new monitors to replace the eye-breakingly blurry things he has right now. Then it'll be off to bed!
Josh was (is) still working on a paper for one of his classes, so this was something to do to keep from bugging him while I sat around the house being bored and antsy. Plus, our supermarket gives away "turkey dollars" during the month of December, based on how much you spend, and I had amassed $12 worth of turkey. So on Saturday I went to the store and got a small turkey (about 10 pounds) and various other ingredients.
Today, we woke up around 5 pm, talked to our families, who had kindly waited to call until we would be up, and then started working on Christmas dinner. The bird went in around 8pm:
Around 10:30, it was done and ready to be carved. Ever since our Thanksgiving in Ireland, we swear by the "oven bag" method of turkey cooking, along with slathering the bird in herbed butter. Yum!
Josh carved it:
And I prepared the remaining dishes: Sweet potatoes, homemade stuffing, herbed cheese bread, cranberry sauce, gravy, and a salad with beets and nuts. Add a bottle of wine, and we were good to go:
And we've got a pumpkin pie made with Splenda's new brown sugar mix. It's darker and stickier than a regular pumpkin pie, but hopefully it will taste good! Not bad for a small, somewhat spur-of-the-moment Christmas dinner.
Now we're planning to play some Magic:The Gathering, eat some pie and hit the Boxing Day Sales at 6am to close out the day. We hope to get Final Fantasy XII and Guitar Hero I/II as Christmas presents to each other. We've also ordered a number of books (thanks to a generous gift from Josh's parents), and Josh is getting new monitors to replace the eye-breakingly blurry things he has right now. Then it'll be off to bed!