Happy Friday!

Since it was “technically” the weekend, Tony made me another amazeball breakfast.  Spicy eggs over a crunchy blue corn tortilla with hash browns made from half a baked potato mixed with a bit of cheese.  This ended up being my breakfast and lunch since we planned on having our Turkey day dinner around 3:00.

I had every intention of getting a walk in, but here’s the deal.  I didn’t even start cooking anything for turkey day dinner until nearly 11.  Years past I would have agonized over the menu, made pies two days before, etc.  But I didn’t want the extra stress this year.  My Mom was our only guest and I think it’s the first Thanksgiving in a long time that I just relaxed and went with the flow!  My Mom was expected around noon, so my window to walk kept getting shorter, and I just declared yesterday a rest day – no regrets.

First thing I had to do was get the pies going.  I use this pie crust recipe – never fails.  The only thing I do differently now is throw everything but the water in the food processor, pulse until the butter is like pebbles, and then pulse in the cold water.  It comes together in a matter of seconds and you know it’s done when it pulls away from the sides of the processor bowl.  I think it needs at least 30 minutes in the fridge before using to make sure the butter is cold, although I’ve never tried making it after this stage, so who knows?

Pecan pie is Tony’s favorite – I alternated regular pecans with roasted and salted pecans.  This pie doesn’t taste like ass at all.

Another secret to a flakier crust is to roll out your dough through saran wrap – that way you don’t need to add any additional flour to the dough and the dough doesn’t stick to the rolling pin.

I think my Momma wanted pecan pie for an appetizer!

We decided to grill our turkey this year.  We can’t remember if we saw it on Diners Drive-ins or Dives, or if I saw it on The Chew, but we saw a method of putting a seasoned mayonnaise over the top of the bird.  Huh?  I usually use butter, but we thought we would give it a try.

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We initially had coals on either side of the turkey, but they weren’t catching, and the bird was so big, we couldn’t put the bird on a cast iron pan like we do roasted chickens, so Tony decided we should put the coals all on one side, then just turn the bird around half way through.  Look at the skin color the mayo mixture gave the turkey!

I put the thermometer probe in the leg joint (dark meat) and we only got up to 136 degrees before our coals died down on us – we decided to see if we could cook the whole bird with the coals we had on had, but it didn’t work out – no worries – to the gas grill the turkey went to finish!  We pulled the turkey off at 155 degrees and let it sit before carving.  Tony used his carving skills to cut up the bird.   We sat down to eat at 3:20 – not too far off our goal!

My splurges:  I had one sliver of the pecan pie and 1/4 of the baby apple pie.  So good!

My Mom left around 7:30 and I spent about 30 minutes cleaning up the kitchen.  It was a great day!

Now I am just about to make some protein pumpkin pancakes – supposedly each one is only 64 calories, if they turn out, I’ll post the recipe tomorrow.  Today I am back at the gym for legs and cardio.

How was your Thanksgiving?  What do you do with your leftover turkey?   I saw this recipe for turkey enchilada soup that looks really good!