It’s Thanksgiving Eve, and all through the house….

…not a creature was stirring….

wait..wait…wrong holiday.

I gotta say though, it kinda feels like that other holiday-eve. The house is pretty clean. There are a few lights around the windows.

There’s food filling the fridge ready to be roasted/tossed together/crock potted:

Those are fresh, chopped green beans above the turkey – ready to be created into a green bean casserole that will be slow cooking in the crock pot for six hours tomorrow. I saw the recipe for this essentially from scratch version of the classic side dish and couldn’t resist trying it. The turkey is brining in this:

Using a recipe from Skinny Taste I prepared the brine omitting the salt. I did use apple cider for part of the liquid. While this was boiling and then cooling down this afternoon the kitchen smelled SO FABULOUS! I did get the brining bags from Williams Sonoma as the recipe recommends and they are pretty damn thick and up to the task. Of course I still put a pan down just in case of any leaking. We will have to turn the turkey over once to coat it evenly. Tomorrow it will roast in this:

My mom gave me this years ago and while we have used it a few times, just by virtue of it’s size, it needs to be stored in an upper cabinet out of the way which means….it’s out of the way and we forget we have it! But it’s perfect for tomorrow. It will cook the turkey in almost half the time (it will be done faster than the green beans!) and it frees up the oven for other goodies. And since I only have one oven (grumble), I am very happy that I can use this, the crock pot for the beans, the stove for mashed potatoes and keep everything spread out nicely around the kitchen.

Because I’ve got all the more laborious prep work done today, tomorrow will move about in nice stages from one dish to another without very much hassle at all. Alex is here, but..well…you can imagine the kind of help a 15 year old will be! If I can get him to clean a pot or two I’ll be lucky.

The tables are not entirely set, but they are in place:

Seating for 10, all set!

The cats are ready in their own way – Chip is as confused as ever and will most likely spend the whole day in my room under the bed though he did inspect things down here for a little while: