Thanksgiving Long Weekend (November 2017)

Hi Everyone!

So it has been a while since I last put up a blog post. In August, I started back at work full-time. I’m still trying to navigate an appropriate work-life balance and I haven’t quite figured it out yet. But, not to worry, I’ll get there in the end.

For the first time ever, Josh and I decided to throw a Thanksgiving party. Our friends, Meagan and Ryan were visiting us for Thanksgiving and in their honour, we decided to cook a turkey. We also invited some other friends who didn’t have plans that day (Kelsey and David). You should know, the whole Thanksgiving thing put a little pressure on us. For starters, neither of Josh nor I had ever cooked turkey. We decided to start off right by buying the correct herbs.

Very conveniently, the supermarket near our house were selling pots of herbs that we would need. With this purchase, Josh and I were set for herbs and we also felt like this might be the start of our veggie garden (maybe…). After that, we bought the turkey.

We bought this bad boy frozen from the supermarket and it took about three days to defrost in the fridge. When we pierced the packaging, it was a good thing there was a tray underneath because an avalanche of liquid erupted from the packaging (not cool!). I obviously didn’t take a picture of that because you would probably never eat turkey again. After we cleaned the turkey and wiped that sucker down, it was finally presentable enough for a picture.

With our handy herbs, we made a whole heap of herb-y butter …

… and slathered it all over the turkey and underneath its skin because everyone knows a dry turkey is a bad turkey.

This bad boy was now ready to go into the oven. We cooked it for about 3 hours covered with aluminium foil and then another 2 hours without covering to brown. The first couple of times we took the turkey out, I was not confident it would ever look right. However, in the end, it turned out a beauty.

Because of his excellent knife skills (you have all heard the abattoir stories), Josh took point on carving the turkey.

Our friends also provided a number of dishes and that is why when we eventually sat down, the table looked like this:

Needless to say, we were all very happy to dig in!

Lots of eating and drinking happened. In classic Delaney fashion, after dinner we moved on to board games.

Josh and I decided our first Thanksgiving was clearly a success. The next day, we decided to do some driving around with Meagan and Ryan.

There was a historic lighthouse on Point Reyes which is where we headed. The scenery was amazing.

And when we finally got to the lighthouse, it was really cool.

The funny thing was you had to walk down a whole heap of steps before you got to the lighthouse. As you were about the descend, there was this warning sign about the stairs:

All four of us thought it could not be as bad as they said. We were wrong. On the way up, we had to stop twice to catch our breath. This tourist attraction is not for the faint of heart…literally. After surviving our near-death exhaustion, we got back in the car and drove to Tomales Bay. Tomales Bay is known for its oyster fishing. We managed to find an area when oyster farmers had dropped their catch and you could buy bags of oysters. While Josh and Ryan bought the oysters, I lay in the sun. The sun was really quite warm, I nearly dozed off.

We bought a dozen oysters. We also got a glove and a shucking knife to open the oysters. With a drizzle of lemon, we sat on the grass and ate. It was awesome. We bought the medium oysters but I would have classed them as huge.

Personally, next time I think we’ll skip the lighthouse and go straight for the oysters. You can buy bags of 50. People were all around us with picnic blankets, sitting and eating oysters and drinking white wine.

I think it would be a great day out. We were ridiculously exhausted by this point so we jumped back in the car and had a low key night. For the rest of Ryan and Meagan’s stay, we stayed close to Oakland and San Francisco.

On a final note, Josh and I are going to be back in Australia from 12 December to 2 January. I’m pretty sure we have already made plans to catch up with most of you. For those of you who weren’t aware, please message me because Josh and I want to see you while we are in town.

Can’t wait to see all of you.

Sim & Josh