Thanksgiving Leftovers

What do you do with all of your Thanksgiving leftovers?  Since it was just Andy and I we had a ton of leftovers.  Of course we reheated the food for lunch for days on end.  My favorite Thanksgiving leftover food is making turkey and gravy over biscuits.  I look forward to this meal every year.  It is definitely one of my favorites.  I have made it other times of the year before, but it's just not the same.  If you don't have leftover gravy or not enough, just run to the store and pick up a jar of the Heinz turkey gravy.  Poor the gravy in the pan and chop up some turkey and toss that in the pan.  Heat that up and poor it over biscuits when done.  YUMMY!

My other favorite thing to do with Thanksgiving leftovers is make turkey, cream cheese and cranberry sandwiches.  I put it on the whole wheat sandwich thins.  Very yummy!

Tonight, Andy is making turkey enchiladas.  It's going to be yummy!

Black Friday

We are definitely not Black Friday shoppers.  I know plenty of people who join in on the craziness of shopping in the middle of the night and standing in long lines, but not us.  That does not sound like fun to me.  We decided to sleep in on Black Friday, but then Andy found an ad for a Christmas tree at Home Depot for $50 and said the store opened at 5am.  We were definitely in the market for a Christmas tree and I really wanted to get one this weekend to get it decorated.  I thought $50 sounded great, but 5am does not sound so great.  I thought there was no way anybody would rush to the HD at 5am for a Xmas tree so I told Andy we could get there at 6am and that would probably be ok.  He set the alarm for 5:30am and as everyone already knows, I did not get up.  I told Andy that I was tired and a tree isn't worth getting up that early on my day off of work.  Since he was already up he went to get the tree and arrived at 6am to find out they were already sold out.  Bummer! Kudos to Andy for going though.  He then decided that he didn't want to spend a day with me checking out trees in various stores to find a good price and the right tree, so he went online to Sears and purchased one for pick up.  The tree he purchased already had white lights on it. 

By the time I got out of the bed our tree was purchased and all we had to do was pick it up and get decorations for it.  Our first stop was the annual trip to Ryan's Pet Warehouse to get the animals plenty of toys and treats.  It's been two days and they already tore through three of the new toys.  I did save a couple of the toys for the girls to open on Christmas morning.  Such spoiled puppies!  After Ryan's it was on to Sears for the tree and then Target for the decorations.

I always like the trees that are decorated in two colors and have somewhat of a theme.  So, I went with various gold and red bulbs, gold beads to string and then I decided to make a topper out of red ribbon.  I figured it would be easy to make the tree topper...right?  We got home and decorated the living room and got the tree all put together and it was time to make the tree topper.  Hmmmm....I had no idea what to do.  Thank god for YouTube where I could find an instructional video on how to make a bow.  All I needed was the ribbon, twine (or twist tie) and scissors.

Here is our tree all decorated for the holidays.  I am pretty proud of this tree as it is my first every Christmas tree and it is my first tree with Andy as well. Our first tree together!!!! 

Notice the homemade tree topper!

All lit up!

We are hoping that all animals stay out of the tree and don't cause any damage to it.  So far so good.  Captain likes to use it as his hiding grounds as he likes to lay on the tree skirt in the back and stalk the dogs.  The dogs just sniff it...so far!

Happy Thanksgiving

I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving yesterday.  We did as it was a very relaxing Thanksgiving day for us.  We decided to stay home, relax and make our own Thanksgiving meal for just the two of us.  Now some might think that sounds sad and lonely, but we both really enjoyed it as it was a very stress free holiday.  We woke up and made the traditional grandma's buns.  I blogged about them last year.  I don't think they turned out as great as last year, or as good as grandma makes them; however, they were still very yummy.  We doubled my grandma's recipe so we were supposed to end up with six dozen rolls.  I know that sounds like a lot for two people, but Andy thought it would be great to freeze them to have them around for a while.  One thing is grandma's recipe is for dinner sized rolls and we made more sandwich buns so we ended up with about three dozen rolls, which was definitely plenty.

Andy took care of the turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes while I made the cranberry sauce, corn and sweet potatoes.  I am very lucky to be married to someone who likes to cook and likes to take over on Thanksgiving and make the main items of the Thanksgiving meal.  I have never made cranberry sauce before and I grew up with the canned jelly stuff on the table for Thanksgiving, but I wanted the real deal.  I don't like, ok I hate, the canned cranberry sauce...sorry mom!  I looked on the Food Network and found a few different recipes I thought were interesting and so I took pieces from each recipe to make my own.  It's very simple to make...hey, I made it and it turned out awesome.  I was very impressed with myself.

Not only did we get a turkey meal, but so did the doggies.  They went nuts when Andy put a small helping of turkey on the floor for them.

My very yummy turkey dinner complete with red wine! I hope you have a relaxing and nice Thanksgiving dinner like we had.

Pinterest...What?!?!?!?

Ok, so I keep hearing about this website called Pinterest.  I keep hearing my friends talk about it, seeing comments on Facebook, etc.  It was time to check it out.  Plus I hear people find great recipes on this site and I am always looking for new recipes to try.

This website is apparently a place for people to "pin" things they like on their page.  Hmmm...interesting.  I check it out and I spent some time perusing the site and left the site very confused.  I just didn't get it.  I then decided to give it another chance.  Nope, still don't get it.  On a positive note I did find two new recipes to make.  I still don't get the site though so I can't really say much else about it.  Since I found new recipes I will give it another chance.  Until then here are the two I found and made.  These are not my photos since I forgot to take pictures of the dishes before we ate our dinner.

The first was a Hawaiian chicken that was BEYOND EASY to make.  I loved it, but Andy thought it was way to sweet for him.  Here is the recipe.  It calls for the Hawaiian BBQ sauce, but I used the marinade instead.  Again, this is not my photo as I took it from their website.

I also made a beef mac bake that was extremely yummy.  This taste even better the next night for leftovers.  I baked for about 20 minutes and then broiled for almost 10 minutes since I did not make ahead of time and chilled like the blogger did.  Here is the recipe.