The Thanksgiving Scrooge (or freaking out in non-sequiters)

It's not that I hate Thanksgiving. It's just that I hate people. Ok, maybe I don't hate people, I just hate, well, cooking for people. Cooking when I need to, not when I feel like it. Because the moments when I feel like it or I have time to are few and far between, so I don't want to make food, I don't want to have people over, I don't want to clean my apartment. I want to crawl under my covers and re-emerge on January 2nd.

And now to the cooking. This is what I have made so far, and maybe this is why I am feeling the way I do.

Girdlebuster Pie - There is a lot of base for my pie dish. It wasn't clumpy enough to be able to push it far up on the sides, but the worst part is that my ice cream doesn't freeze and neither does my base. That 'gorgeous' florentine that the pie gets when the ice cream pops out is all over my pie, not to mention my freezer is full of graham cracker crumbs. The pie is NOT beautiful, but I'm thinking graham crackers plus chocolate plus ice cream plus butterscotch sauce ain't exactly a bad thing, so I'll just shut up now, serve it, eat it, enjoy it. Enough.

Christy's Sweet Potatoes - So excited by this recipe, and the filling turned out really well, but the skins were too thin and ripped. Why why why didn't I let them cool completely?! So now I have a lot of filling and not sure yet what to do with it. Bought some lovely gourds (have had a lot of fun lately using that word inappropriately at work with my coworkers) in order to gut and stuff with said filling, but they are just too beautiful and I couldn't cut them, no I just could not. So they will be the centerpiece, I think (channeling Martha Stewart). My mom thinks Liam will want to play with them, which I'm fine with. I hope he doesn't throw it at my TV. The filling, well, maybe I'll bake it in my Le Creuset (bless my ceramic baking dish obsession), sprinkle some pecans (rhymes with fans) and sage on top. Mashed sweet pots cum sweet potato casserole. Oh, who fucking cares?!

Cranberry, Orange and Almond Pudding - I panicked about the girdlebuster-pie-that-refuses-to-freeze so I made this pudding in 2.2 seconds. It's the fastest I ever put anything together. I had leftover cranberries so this recipe made sense. I tweaked it a tiny bit, but it looks like something I'd just love after the huge meal we'll have tomorrow. Even snapped a pic. (Hate my pictures lately -- I am a slave to natural light.)

Redder than Red Cranberry Sauce - Easy easy easy. Beautiful. Can't wait to have it with turkey.

Brined Turkey? Not so much. - I wanted it to happen. I PLANNED for it to happen. It's not happening. Picked up my turkey. My mom and I marinaded it this evening in olive oil and garlic. It'll be delicious. It won't be MY turkey, but it'll be delicious. Brining? Maybe next year. I couldn't face buying a huge bucket and finding room in my constantly disappearing fridge.