Related Posts

Thanksgiving Weekend…

I took an extended weekend starting Thanksgiving day. Typically it’s slow at work on the Friday following the holiday, so it only makes sense to use one of our “floating” holidays to avoid making the trek to work for one day. And so I’m back from a four-day weekend.

Traditionally, our family of about twenty people gets together on Thanksgiving. It’s one of the two times a year we see everyone and something a lot of people look forward to. This year, however, no one was willing to volunteer their home for the big event so we decided to all have separate dinners with our respective smaller family units. Wifey™ and I hosted the dinner for our small segment, including my aunt and her boyfriend.

Having a smaller dinner afforded us the ability to do a few things we normally can’t do with a larger group, like having dinner at the dinner table. Typically, in order to accomodate a group of twenty people, we’d either have to serve the dinner buffet style, with everyone sitting all over the house, or we’d have to move all of the furniture out of our living room and dining room and set-up folding tables down the center of the room. It’s crazy. This year, we were able to setup our dining room table, bust out our china and silverware and have a normal dinner. We were even able to bring the food to the table where everyone could serve themselves. Crazy.

We’d planned our menu out about a week in advance and wanted to do something a little bit different than the usual turkey with stuffing. We decided on a Salvadoran Turkey (aka Pavo Salvadoreño), a recipe that we’ve had around for years. It was given to my family by a family friend and my mom had made it a couple times many years ago. The closest recipe I could find online is at this site, with the following exceptions. The night before you have to coat the turkey with a mixture of 1 cup of mayonaise and 1/2 cup of mustard. Once the turkey is coated you’ll refrigerate it overnight. Also, instead of making the sauce into a gravy or salsa, you’ll actually pour half of it over the turkey and continuously baste with the sauce while the turkey is cooking. You’ll also add the capers and green olives with pimento filling to the cooking pan, rather than adding it to the sauce. What you end up with is an extremely flavorful and moist turkey that’s certain to give you plenty of good tasting leftovers for sandwiches.

We also made some mashed potatoes and stuffing, also from a family recipe which we altered to include chicken-apple sausage. My aunt brought a salad and my mom brought a homemade cheesecake. Dinner went very well and was pretty relaxing. Some even mentioned that they enjoyed the smaller Thanksgiving dinner more than the larger family event.

Friday, I spend most of the day with my sister’s boyfriend hanging my mom’s new 42-inch plasma to the wall above her fireplace. The process was fairly simple and the most time-consuming was re-routing most of the wiring to behind the television. We were pretty lucky and only made one hole that needed to be patched, along with three other holes that we used for the electrical boxes. Also, there was an electrical outlet about six feet away from our destination, so adding a piggyback to that was fairly easy. The only thing left is to patch the hole after I add wiring for future speakers and an additional cable for future kitchen use. These wires will be much easier to conceal since I can tack them to the outer wall and then cover them with crown molding. Tip: If you’re going to install crown molding, make sure to do all of your wiring ahead of time. Any electrical, cable, ethernet, or speaker or phone wiring. They also sell crown molding that can be installed on a track, so you can access behind the crown at any time. I prefer to set it and forget it though with caulking to give a more finished look. Anyhow, the hanging of the television went fairly smoothly.

Over the weekend, Wifey™ and I tried to do some of our Christmas shopping. Very little. As I said before, I try to avoid malls and shopping altogether, but there were some things we had to get so we ventured out. Surprisingly, we found that most of the malls were managable and not that crowded. There were also some deals to be had if you looked. I had made my way to the Best Buy on Friday to buy the mounting hardware for my mom’s television and while there found a DVD player for $30, which will be a perfect gift for my grandmother. All of our home movies are burned to DVD these days, so having to figure out how to get it onto a VHS tape is a pain. I also found a 2GB thumb drive for about $30—regularly over $100, but it had a $70 instant rebate.

One of our stops was the new Westfield Shopping Center in San Francisco, near Union Square. The building housed the old Emporium and had been vacant for years. Recently, they refurbished the entire building, even restoring the glass dome, which was the store’s centerpiece.

We also took a quick walk over to Union Square to see the giant Christmas tree…

And then a final trip to see the displays in the Macy’s store windows. This year they set up small rooms with cats and dogs up for adoption—like this guy that had already had a rough day.

 Print This Post
  Link to this Entry