Turkeypocalypse.....

Thanksgiving....

Turkey....

Apocalypse....

In my kitchen?!?!

Not this year!

Surprisingly enough, my kitchen survived Turkeypocalypse, or Thanksgiving, without any major damage this year, as did all personnel manning said kitchen!  I do believe this is the first time, out of 6 attempts, where we have successfully pulled off a Thanksgiving without the kitchen look like WWIII hit it.  Let's do a quick tour, just so I can brag on how wonderfully successful we were at Turkeypocalypse, ahem, I mean Thanksgiving, this year:

For one, at the end of the day, instead of looking at the 16 lb turkey we bought because it was such a good deal and saying, "It was only $0.50 a lb, we can trash the rest of that heap and still come out ahead," we actually picked the carcass clean and sorted the goods....  We wound up with 3 bins: one for clean meat (tacos and sandwiches), one for soup, and one for stock.  There's a first for everything, folks, and this was a BIG first for us!

As an aside, poor dear Tina Turkey (who started off as Ted before we thought about it and figured out our turkey was probably a she rather than a he) did not get out much.  She really could've done with a little healthy exercise.  There was all together too much fat on that animal.

Anyway, back to photographic evidence that this year, we go to bed after Thanksgiving with merely a packed fridge and not a packed fridge and a ton of clean-up  left....

This is the little breakfast table in the kitchen.  See how clean and uncluttered it is!  All that's on it is our cornucopia of fruits and veggies to last us through the week, a pepper grinder, a cheese grater (that's out because I promised an "egg pie" (real men don't eat quiche) if some cheddar were grated and the other palate wanted to make sure he knew where said grater was), and a fish bowl, because Alpha the Betta died today and I'm letting the tank dry out on the table before putting it into storage.

The island under the sun / moon is back to its usual state....  I don't know exactly why there's a Christmas ribbon on the water tank, but there is and has been for a good long while and sometimes you just clean and don't ask too many questions.

That may look cluttered to an uncultured eye, but to me that's the best organization I've seen of this space since, well, three weeks ago.  In detail:  the water bottle is where it should be in the kitchen - easy for me to grab should I get parched, the knob to the garlic roaster easily accessible should the other palate in the household have a chance to glue it back where it should be, the salt close to the stove, the tea kettle ready to rock and roll, the olive oil bottle right where it should be, the steamer above the microwave so I won't lose it somewhere in the cabinetry and be unable to find it, the coffee pot cleaned and loaded up set to start itself up automatically tomorrow at 8AM....  and two beer bottles and a kitchen rag I just noticed.  We haven't had beer in quite sometime, so those bottles must have been there so long as to have become part of the scenery.  That's a tad disturbing!  Which reminds me that I still need to bottle that IPA from many moons ago.

This may also look like another cluttered photograph, but I love the clean white sink in the lower left corner.  Yum.  What this image indicates is industry!  The dishrack is full so we had to pull out a kitchen towel for spill-over clean dishes.  Not only that, but it's by no means my typical, "We have time to kill, so go do a bunch of dishes," shot, it's only a few dishes!

I have many, many things to be thankful for today, and one of the big ones in this family is the lack of Turkeypocalypse in the kitchen tonight.  

A word from the other palate:  Another thing we have to be thankful for tonight is fresh baked bread.....

... On the topic of which, he swears the reason we have only 1/4 a loaf left right now is because of the sneaky raccoons coming back for seconds.  I think I'll happen to bake another loaf tomorrow and see if those raccoons come back for thirds.

Darn raccoons, stealing my corn, tomatoes, and sweet pepppers, now my bread?!  Ha ha ha....

Stay hungry, and a better post on Turkeypocalypse, ahem, Thanksgiving, soon!