We pray that everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday and that you didn’t go over budget with the Black Friday spending. We had a beautiful day and we were so blessed to have family and friends to enjoy it with.

The kids did a lot of work to help with our Thanksgiving dinner and preparations. We counted it as Life Skills and they were happy that it wasn’t ‘bookwork’. They have asked if we can have more lessons like this.

The weeks before Thanksgiving the kids helped to plan out the menu, check the pantry for supplies, and help order the groceries. Then they helped to organize the recipes and pull out the dishes and serving trays that would be needed. They did a pretty good job as you will see in the pictures below.

We made a lot of our favorites and we tried a few new recipes like:

• Mashed potatoes with turnips… so good and you couldn’t even tell they were in there! This idea came from Christ-Centered Thanksgiving** and it has us thinking of other possibilities for using turnips!
• Orange Congealed Salad – so easy to make!
• Keto Cheesecake – I added 1 T of lemon juice to mine and it was delicious!
• Keto Candied Pecans
• Smoky Maple Walnuts
• Smoked Salmon Dip – a variation of my Smoked Mullet Dip

The kids also make some Lemonade which was a big hit and they have been asking if we can grow some lemon trees of our own as well as the herbs that we need to make our homemade ranch seasoning.

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It all turned out so wonderful and we are so very thankful for the family and friends who came to join us. They all brought some wonderful food as well and we ended up with an overabundance… we insisted that everyone take to-go plates as our fridges were stuffed full!

Things didn’t go quite as planned as our stove had a major malfunction and we weren’t sure that it was going to make it through Thanksgiving Day. The day before Thanksgiving I was baking away and the oven had a ‘runaway temperature’ malfunction and completely shut down. We cut the breaker off for a couple of hours and then when it came back on the oven liner caught on fire… thankfully we got that taken care of and it decided to work well enough to finish our preparations. Mr. Awesome ended up cooking the turkey on the smoker and he did an AMAZING job with it!

This major malfunction caused me not to make my favorite Pumpkin Cake and it caused a disaster that almost brought me to tears as I had been working for two days to recreate something I had recently seen on a FB post:

So pretty! I really wanted to try one and I had been working on the sourdough croissant recipe from Farmhouse on Boone… it was a bit of a tedious task and it really worked out my arms but I was so excited! However, it just wasn’t meant to be:

The second attempt went better even though we had to keep a careful watch on it as the oven just can’t be fully trusted as the temperature isn’t regulating well now. We didn’t have any croissants but we did use our favorite rolls and we used our new favorite bread recipe to make rolls as well as adding some extra honey and oats to some of them to create a honey oat sourdough… mmmmm! The recipe should be posted soon for the bread recipe! I will update it to include the honey oat version as well. This bread is so good but the rolls were so fluffy and delicious as well. The dough had been sitting in the fridge for two days so the flavor was extra amazing as well!

When I saw this screenshot from the Little House on the Prairie posted it reminded me of the fact that we just need to be thankful for our blessings:

Dinner would have been just as wonderful without the cornucopia but I thought it was a pretty special centerpiece and the kids absolutely loved the fact that they could tell everyone about it… definitely a Thanksgiving story to remember… The Thanksgiving that mom broke the oven!

The kids also did their Five Kernels of Corn presentation and it was a success. It helped remind us of all of the blessings that we sometimes take for granted.

Now we will be working towards making our Polar Express party a reality… this is kind of our ‘gift’ to our family as we invite them all to attend and it gives us a chance to get together before Christmas so we can spend time with our families at home on Christmas Day. We were super excited about the possibility of a Polar Express prequel but it seems that we may be waiting a while as it was probably ‘fake news’... sniff, sniff.

For now, though I am going to try to rest a little and maybe check out a few cyber sales as I try to narrow down the gifts I would like to purchase. I’m really hoping to stick to the 3 gifts rule this year and maybe try to do one ‘BIG’ item like an experience gift.

Family, Friends, Faith, Food, Freedom, and Five Kernels of corn… so much to be thankful for!