Our Very First Thanksgiving!

Hello all!

This week we had our very first Thanksgiving as a married couple! Since a lot of family was out of town, and since both Christian and I had friends who didn't have anywhere to go, we made our own Thanksgiving dinner and invited our friends! It was an adventure. We made (almost) all the required fixin's: turkey, stuffing, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potato balls, pumpkin pie, Bavarian strawberry dessert, and more. Christian was disgusted by the thought of giblets in his gravy, and both of us think cranberry sauce is revolting, so we went without those. I made the sweet potato balls, the strawberry dessert, and some of the green bean casserole, but Christian and his friend Chris made everything else. Chris slept over at our place the night before to help make pies and other stuff. Pretty much everything turned out great! Thanskgiving morning we went to Chris's apartment (much bigger than ours and a lot more room to cook in) to cook our turkey. We followed a recipe on Allrecipes.com for our turkey. Here's a picture of it cooking in the oven after we took off the foil.

Christian got to make the first slice in the turkey. :) My hero. Here's the picture to document it:

Sadly, when we started carving the turkey, we discovered that it was all done to perfection except the legs, which were still bloody. Which was weird, considering that the meat thermometer had been in the leg and it got up to 180 degrees. We tried to nuke it in the microwave, but the only microwave we had access to was probably made around the time of the Vietnam War, so the nuking didn't work out too well. We just threw them away and dealt with only having white meat. I think we took off the foil too late, and that's why the legs didn't get cooked and it didn't all get very browned. Oh well.

This is the amazing pumpkin pie that Christian and Chris made all by themselves at 5:00 am the day of Thanksgiving! It was delicious to the taste, and very desirable. :D And yes, it's homemade (except the crust, which was too daunting of a task for us to try our hand at). I'm proud of them.

After dinner, we all played games. Guesstures was especially amusing. Here's a video of Chris trying to convey the word "flirt" to Sarah (my roommate who came for dinner). Sorry it's so dark; I don't know how to fix it. And sadly, my little point-and-shoot digital camera doesn't record sound. So all we have is the video.

We have lots more pictures from the day, too. Most of them will be on my Facebook, since we don't want to fill up our entire post with pictures. Feel free to go look and comment. http://www.facebook.com/bfroggy326?ref=profile The day was great :)

On Saturday, while Christian was at the BYU/Utah football game, I went with Mary (my sister) and Derek (her fiance) and my aunt Laura to do a live session at the Salt Lake temple. It was fun to be able to spend time with them. I can't believe they're getting married in less than a month!!! Wow.

I will now let Christian write about how BYU OWNED UTAH at the football game on Saturday:

ZOMG it was such a great game! Utah brought out a quick lead with two field goals in the first quarter, and shut us down until we came back in the second quarter with a field goal of our own, and to everyone's love and adoration a touchdown. Then 4 seconds before halftime, we scored another field goal bringing it to 1 3-6 at the half. The bands then took the field and we each performed separately, and then following a 30-some-odd year tradition the bands shared the field to create the Red, White, and Blue band, and performed a patriotic song with a huge American flag that was unfurled in the middle of the song. It was awesome. The third quarter was slow, but BYU scored another touchdown bringing it to 20-6. In the fourth quarter I guess we got a little cocky, because we let two field goals and touchdown with a 2-pt conversion go through, bring it to 20-20. OVERTIME!!!!! Oh the crowd was going SO crazy. It was intense. On the first overtime, the Utes went first, and were able to crack out a field goal, much to our pleasure. All we needed was to score somehow to win, or tie it up again. So our quarterback, on the final down, passes it right up the middle to the tight end. Two Utes dive for him, and nab him. We're about to get ready for the next down, when he BREAKS THE TACKLE and all that's left is a clear field ahead of him. TOUCHDOWN COUGARS!!!!! As soon as he passed the goal line, the fans started clearing the stands. An almost literal sea of blue covered the field. The fans were picking up the players and started crowd-surfing them. At the peak there were probably 20k people on the field just crowding everywhere! It was so intense and the roar was so loud! It took probably 30 minutes to clear enough field so that they could do some senior recognition thing at the end. The band didn't really like that, because we had to perform as everyone was leaving after that 30 minutes. But oh well. Totally worth it to see such an awesome game. Vegas here we come! ~CM

The new joy of our life: a space heater! Aunt Laura gave us a spare one she had and it's been SOOOO AWESOME. We don't have to wear sweatshirts around the house anymore!!! It's AWESOME. WE LOVE IT.

Sorry, no recipe this week; we haven't really tried anything new. We were Thanksgiving-ed out. We are trying a new "Lasagna Roll-Ups" recipe in a few days, so look forward to that in our next exciting installment! Same Bat time, same Bat channel. :D