Thanksgiving

Usually Phil and I spend Thanksgiving with our respective families, but this year I decided to join Phil and his family. His family doesn't start their celebrations until early evening, so I stopped by my mom's house for a light lunch and some Trivial Pursuit with Mandy and Tam.


In the evening we arrived at Phil's Aunt's house in northern NJ. As soon as we arrived all the guys went straight to work on the Wii - staying far far away from the kitchen.

Meanwhile the girls were busy at the "juice bar" mixing up various fresh fruit drinks. There was even fresh pineapple and coconut to make pina coladas - a drink favorite for the Aunts.

We didn't really have a recipe for the pina coladas, so Lydia and Lea used trial and error. It took a couple tries, but they came up with a nice blend. And we discovered that finding a good balance is much easier if you use canned pineapples, but shhh don't tell anyone...The juice bar was so popular we tripped one of the circuit breakers in the house and temporarily lost electricity. Thankfully we were able to reset it, otherwise that could have been the end of Thanksgiving!

Here's the Thanksgiving turkey in all its glory, just waiting to be eaten.


Phil used to tell me how much food his family has for Thanksgiving dinner, but I don't think I was sufficiently prepared. There was shrimp cocktail, jelly fish, pumpkin muffins, biscuits, stuffed mushrooms, scallops, mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, steamed asparagus, meatloaf...
and lobster salad...a nice mix of your traditional Thanksgiving fare along with some Chinese dishes.


And then there was dessert...oh boy was there dessert. There were close to a dozen different desserts. First we had the baked apples stuffed with granola, which sadly I was too full to try, but they looked delicious.


The rest of the table was full of chocolate cake, pumpkin pie, Chinese bakery cake, strawberry poundcake, poundcake with strawberry sauce, mini cupcakes, 4 different flavors of homemade ice cream (coffee, tea with milk, mango chile, and cantaloupe), almond cookies, and fruit...I feel like I'm missing something, but yea, lots of dessert...


Here I am with Phil's mom and his cousin Lucia - the 3 birthday girls. Not all on the same day, but all close enough to Thanksgiving to celebrate.

After dinner we all hung out around the TV or played with the little kids that were there. And of course there was the customary post-dinner nap for Phil. Although I think he crashed harder than usual this time, probably partly from the massive amounts of food and partly because he was still getting over a cold. How he was able to fall asleep in that position I'm not entirely sure...


That was definitely some good Thanksgiving eating! I hope everyone else had a delicious Thanksgiving too. ^__^