Thanksgiving!

I know its not Thanksgiving yet, but on Saturday my friends at church got together and had a Thanksgiving potluck! The Bereans, which is the name of the group of us at church who are past undergraduate (so grad students and young career), got together for a Thanksgiving Feast.

Unfortunately I forgot my camera at home. I think some people did have cameras so I will try and get my hands on some of the pictures. We had a big Turkey, which I helped prepare and bake. The Bereans is very progressive. I say this because three guys prepared the Turkey...lol. Actually it was pretty fun in an exciting, nervous anticipation way. None of us had fully done this on our own. Of course we have watched our mothers do it, but never by ourselves! (Thank goodness for Google!)

Then we got real adventurous and decided to make homemade gravy! Again, thank goodness for Google! We had the laptaop right on the kitchen island..lol.

Just a hint for other people. We had to use a disposable cooking pan, and we didnt use a roasting rack or anything. That was a mistake because about halfway into the cooking, the pan filled up with drippings and spilled over onto the bottom of the oven! We opened up the oven and a big plume of black smoke came out and the entire house filled up with burnt smell and all of the fire alarms went off. The three of us ran around opening all the doors and windows we could. It was pretty funny. We took the turkey out and poured all of the drippings out of the pan. But, we decided that we would just have to keep cooking the turkey in the oven, even with all of the burning of the overflowing juice. There wasnt time to clean the oven, so we forged ahead. The oven kept "leaking" smokey smells for the rest of the cooking. Fortunately we were able to get the burnt smell out of the house before all of the people showed up.

The "spread" was quite amazing considering the crowd we had. I believe everything was "homemade". We had turkey, stuffing, dressing, gravy, multiple salads, mulitple breads, mashed potatoes, mashed and whole sweet potatoes, and apple and pumpkin pies. Everything looked and tasted amazing. Even the turkey came out really well. It was very juicy and didnt taste or smell like smoke..lol. The reason I said "considering the crowd" is because most of us in the group are single and a lot of them are still in school along with the fact that the vast majority of us were asian. I was actually surprised by the fact that we didn't have a single asian dish, everything was very traditional Thanksgiving food.

I love my new church and the people in it. Since our church used to be the English ministry of a Korean church, the majority of the members are Korean, along with a few chinese and japanese, and even fewer white people. We also have an extremely "young" church. Most of the members are in college or starting their careers. I would say that most people are in their 20s. There are several families that come to our church, but most people are either single or just married. What's I like most about this church is how well everyone gets along.

Well, as soon as I get my hands on some pictures, I'll be posting them, so come back soon to see!