Yum! Turkey Dinner!

After church on Sunday, Christmas Day, we returned to Gracie and started cooking our Christmas Dinner. We had done the prep work for a few of the dishes on Saturday (dressing, sweet potato casserole, and the turkey) so they were ready to go into the oven, but all the baking was yet to be done...

We got a 19+ pound Butterball turkey -- we like leftovers!

Miss Kitty chose to sit on my laptop keyboard, so if anyone got any strange emails, I'm pretty certain she sent them, not me!

The turkey was supposed to take a little over 3 hours (foil wrapped), but our oven doesn't heat up to as high a temperature as desired, so it ended up taking about 5 hours before the temperature probe indicated it was cooked.

For those who do not know, we have only a microwave / convection oven. Most of the time, it works fine as an oven... most of the time...

After the turkey finished, we had dressing, sweet potato casserole, and green bean casserole to bake in the oven -- they also took longer to cook than would be normal, we think because we had so many items in the oven at the same time.

While I made gravy and mashed potatoes on the induction cooktops (yes, we have two currently in Gracie)...

Carl continued carving the turkey...

Carving up the dark meat.

Carl's "sampler" plate!

It all turned out really good. The turkey is moist and tasty, and all other items were good when they finally got cooked! Total of 7 straight hours of oven time between the turkey and side dishes! It sure was nice when that oven finally cut off (since it is a convection oven, it has a fan that runs continuously). After we finished cleanup, we calculated that the meal prep and enjoyment was a total of 10 hours long! But, we have *lots* of leftovers for the coming days!