Tom.The.Turkey.

I passed a big milestone in my life this weekend. I cooked my first turkey! After years and years of watching, eating and celebrating all that is Thanksgiving I had never actually taken part in the turkey prep. Our neighborhood has a big Thanksgiving social every year and this year we volunteered to donate and cook a turkey (side note-David got elected onto the board of our neighborhood HOA and that same weekend he said "sure" to us preparing a turkey)

Well, he buys a 13 pound frozen turkey and put it in our fridge to thaw and we go about our week as usual. Friday I painfully realized three things...
#1: David has to work on Saturday from 10-3
#2: Turkey needs to be put in at about 1:00PM
#3: I will have to prepare and cook Tom by myself. YIKES!

OUR first turkey in the new house, of our relationship, and in my life I have to figure out on my own...this means I am a nervous wreck over this dumb bird!
The "thanksgiving day" went down like this, 8:30 pull the turkey out to realize it is still frozen (wonderful) we begin its warm soak. I go to our great amazing life saving friends (parents) house to hang out before getting my last minute groceries and they give me an awesome turkey roasting pan to start my journey. I get home with my pan and my supplies around 12:30 to discover this damn bird is still freezing. Alone, freaking and positive I am single handily about to poison the neighborhood I call David who also some what freaks and tells me to call his mother. I talked to his mother then to mine and they both walked me through the process (thank god)  I found the neck and pulled it out, I also found the little bag of gross goodies and almost yacked into the turkey. I would have called it stuffing but I got through it, cleaned it and put that sucker in the oven.

This is our pale strange looking turkey even the dogs weren't interested in begging for Tom yet, that all changed once he got into into the oven and started tanning.

Tom getting his tan on about 2 hours in...

  Here he is all cooked and tan and Oh.My.God. delicious! We loaded him up and carted him to our social where I stood nervously wondering how he would cut and serve and taste. I may have played my cooking card to soon, I fear that now I will have to supply social dinner staples from now on based on how well may very first turkey tasted. I probably should have botched it so that they would not expect much from me or would never ask me to cook again! No, I knocked it out of the park and I am super excited to have done my first turkey well.