Thanksgiving

Ryan promised a post on our Thanksgiving cooking adventures, but he never delivered, so here it is. We had an excellent turkey breast: Honeysuckle, the best there is (according to my Aunt Freeda), basted in vegetable oil and rubbed with garlic powder and some other spices that I can't remember. It was very moist--we think the secret was wrapping it in aluminum foil for the first 2.5 hours of cooking and then keeping the aluminum foil beneath it for the rest of the time, which kept the juices close to the turkey (keeping the foil beneath it was an accident--I had not thought about wrapping it in a manner that would make the foil removable from a steaming hot turkey breast in the middle of cooking...). We also had excellent Green Giant Nibblets Corn with Butter Sauce, Pillsbury Crescent Rolls (my mom sent us a coupon), raspberry jello, cranberry sauce, and chocolate cheesecake. Our friends Melinda and Justin brought the potatoes--two kinds, "heart-attack potatoes" and mashed potatoes (including the skins--the best way to make them!), the green beans with almonds (not out of a box, as I grew up with, but they were just as good except for missing the soaked-in-salt water taste that I enjoy in the boxed kind--I do think the almonds were better than the boxed ones), the pumpkin chiffon pie (Melinda's grandma's recipe--it was very good--and I don't like pumpkin pie), and probably some other things that I can't remember because it was two weeks ago and today is the last day of the semester before finals week.