Thanksgiving

The entire month of November was kinda crazy for me because, on top of my performance duties, I helped form a committee to put together a Thanksgiving meal for everyone in our company - about fifty people.  This wasn't any Thanksgiving meal; we didn't want it to be catered, we wanted to cook the food ourselves.  This posed all sorts of unforeseeable issues.

The idea was to contact churches to see if we could use their facilities to prepare the food and then we'd bring the food back to the hotel where our company was staying and eat in a banquet hall there.

Easy, right?  Nope.  NONE of the ten churches we reached out to came through.  They either didn't have a kitchen or they didn't even get back to us.  We started looking into our catering options...  

So, it was back to the drawling board (we are a week away from Thanksgiving at this point).  We eventually come up with the idea to rent a house for the night on homeaway.com. Finally, success!

We drove through the night from Shreveport into Galveston to the house where we made our feast.  I navigated while another guy drove.  We got into Galveston around 4AM, dropped out bags off at the house, went to the grocery store and bought about $500 worth of groceries, and started cooking!  The plan was to serve dinner at 6PM and we did it!  I was shocked.  It was like that show dinner impossible.  We worked with your standard kitchen: four burners, one oven, a microwave, and a grill.  We had a pretty eclectic menu too:

SAUSAGE CHEESE BALLS 

CREAM CHEESE ROLL-UPS 

DEVILED EGGS

STUFFING 

SWEET POTATO CASSEROLE 

GREEN BEAN CASSEROLE 

CORN CASSEROLE 

MASHED POTATOES

MAC 'N' CHEESE

COLLARDS

ASPARAGUS 

HAM

TURKEY

RASPBERRY JELLO

COOKIES 

ASSORTED PIES

All in all we had good laughs, amazing food, and tired bodies.  Well worth the time and effort to have a home-cooked meal on the road!

Sunrise after shopping Thanksgiving Morning

Some of the groceries