Thanksgiving/Anniversary 2012

I hope you guys had a great Thanksgiving!

Mine was pretty good! I was a terrible blogger and didn’t take nearly enough pictures, but that’s okay I was enjoying time with my family. Plus it spared me from explaining what a blog is to my technologically-inept 86-year old grandfather, who still doesn’t know how to use a cell phone (even a jitterbug!), you gotta love him.

Wednesday morning my family hit the road for a 5 hour drive down to South Carolina. I managed to sneak in a 2 mile run before we hit the road to save my sanity. I get so antsy on car rides. I also managed to get in a nice hour and a half nap, car naps are the best.

My mom made a huge crock pot of vegetarian for dinner to make things easy, which was a genius idea on her part because who really wants to cook the night before Thanksgiving?

 

Plus it makes all the omnivores (my parents), vegetarians (me and my brothers) and the gluten-free-er (me!) happy. She got the recipe from Vegetarian Times I think. It’s got a ton of ingredients but from what I can remember it has: black beans, dark and light red kidney beans, diced tomatoes, shredded carrots, mushrooms, diced onion, diced bell pepper, red wine, salsa, ground meatless crumbles, garlic and seasoning. I think that’s everything.

The chili made tons of leftovers which are now residing in my apartment freezer. I’m pretty sure I have enough for dinner for the next two weeks, and I’m super excited I have dinner covered for a little while (:

Thursday morning was a made rush to cook/thaw/reheat everything for our Thanksgiving meal. Even though we get a lot of our food pre-made from a local restaurant we still cook a couple of side dishes (aka, I complain that our meal needs more veggies that are not slathered in cheese and butter and cooked with bacon and roast a huge pan of brussel sprouts, oh and someone makes mashed potatoes but I’m weird and don’t like those).

I attempted to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade as things were going in and out of the oven but I managed to only catch a a few commercial breaks. Boo. The parade is on of my favorites parts of Thanksgiving! I did catch a few a broadway performances and the Rockettes so I will survive until next year.

 

I did manage to snap a picture of (part) of our spread. Clockwise from the red pot is mashed potatoes, turkey, blurry greens beans, baked mac n cheese, dressing, peas and broccoli casserole, plus some sweet potato casserole, ham, roasted brussel sprouts, yeast rolls, corn and cranberry sauce that hadn’t made it too the table quite yet. Don’t get too jealous of my grandfather’s taste in interior decorating, I see you eyeing those ceramic ducks.

I enjoyed a plate full (okay, several) of roasted brussels sprouts (seriously they were like 2/3 of my plate!), corn, cranberry sauce, broccoli casserole, plus a baked sweet potato and baked tempeh I made for a little extra staying power.

Dessert:

(source)

 

This cheesecake is crazyyyy good. I had every intention of being good and scooping out the filling to avoid a tummy ache from the graham cracker crust but… that didn’t happen. It was worth it though. I highly recommend this cheesecake to anyone who loves pumpkin (aka all healthy living/food bloggers) but not to people who don’t enjoy eating a whole cheesecake in one sitting because this one will make you want to do that.

The rest of the day was spent nursing our food babies, looking through all the Black Friday newspaper ads at the sales we fully planned on sleeping through and enjoying Thanksgiving round two with the leftovers at dinner time.

It was wonderful to spend time with my family, I only get to see my extended family around the holidays so I was thankful to see them all again! I’m also really thankful for everything, seriously everything. I have a great family, go to a great school, have great friends, I’m so lucky to have everything I have and I really tried to concentrate on that this Thanksgiving rather than just stuffing my face full of food, but don’t get me wrong, that definitely happened too.

Friday morning we packed up the car and headed back home. I had another great car nap on the way home too, I’m on a roll with the naps lately. We made a pit stop in downtown Chapel Hill to grab some lunch before we got home.

 

We stopped at the Mediterranean Deli. One of my brothers and my parents had eaten there before but it was my first time and it was really delicious! I got a three plate sampler which let me pick 3 of there vegetarian deli items. It was a tough decision because they had so many delicious looking options but I ended up with Chickpea Salad, Avocado and Feta Salad and Sauteed Cauliflower. It was all delicious! I was so sad when I finished everything. I need to figure out how the made the cauliflower because it was awesome!

One of my favorite parts about the Mediterranean Deli was that all the dishes were well labelled, listing all the ingredients and whether a dish was vegan, gluten-free, nut-free, etc. I don’t see that a lot but it’s really helpful, especially for someone like me with a few eating restrictions. I hate going into a deli and having to guess if something is vegetarian or gluten-free.

Overall I’m super jealous my brother goes to school in Chapel Hill and is so close to this little gem. Though I guess I can’t complain because Boone has some pretty awesome restaurants too.

As soon as we got home I turned around and high-tailed it to my boyfriend’s place so we could celebrate our 6 year anniversary! I hadn’t seen him in over a month and it was so good to be reunited! We did things super low key this year which we both seem to enjoy a lot more than trying to plan some over the top date. We grabbed dinner at Qdoba.

Recycled photo from our last Qdoba trip, I got roasted veggies this time instead of guacamole, poor decision, always go with the guac.

Which is actually kinda funny because for our 5 year anniversary we went out for dinner at Moe’s. Apparently we love casual tex mex meals for special occasions, we’re just classy like that. Actually it’s probably because it’s one of the few restaurants that makes a hungry meat-eating man and health-freakish gluten-free vegetarian happy.

After dinner we stopped by Trader Joe’s and picked up some Three Buck Chuck:

(source)

and Chocolate Covered Almond Clusters:

I’d be lying if I said we didn’t polish off the entire container
(source)

Chocolate and wine, could life be better?

We then enjoyed an evening at home watching stand-up comedy. It was low-key and perfect. Sometimes date nights at home completely trump a night out and it was such a wonderful way to end the night.

How was your Thanksgiving?

Do you prefer low-key or fancy dates?

What’s the best thing you ate this weekend?

Posted by greensandcoffeebeans on November 26, 2012

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