Thanksgiving Dinner 34, Seahawks 9

Next, we started on our sausage loaf. Much like meat loaf, we mixed the ground sausage, egg, oats, celery, thyme, and celery-onion pulp in a bowl. The recipe called for ketchup, but we used Fruity Sauce.

What is Fruity Sauce, you ask? It’s a British condiment from the people who brought you HP Sauce, HP Curry Sauce, and HP Brown Sauce. If you are a Canadian, and a furious homophoe, well there may be a reason you enjoy HP Chicken & Rib sauce so much. Anytime we knew of anyone going to England we made them come back with some bottles. However, now it can purchased at the Ballard Fred Meyer’s English food aisle....Where are you going?

Once all in a bowl we mixed everything with our hands, and then let the neighbor’s dog lick our fingers clean.

The meat dishes were done and we could finally turn our attention to the nine pounds of potatoes soaking in a bowl.

Six were removed for garlic mashed potatoes, and our friend suggested that instead of baking the garlic on a pan for thirty-five minutes, we slice them open and bake them in tin foil while the potatoes boiled.

This also taught us another very important lesson; make sure you don’t get a chunk of garlic deep under your fingernail. Wow, that hurt, and continued to all night long.

We’ve had our problems with mashed potatoes before. However, with a Kitchen Aid Mixer, milk, and cream cheese the result was fluffy goodness.

The final three pounds were used for Seattlest Rachael’s cheesy potato dish. We are proud of ourselves for only calling her twice from the store (Yes, get heavy whip cream. You’ll need about two cups of cheese), and once the actual day, it was only one call (one and half hours of baking time).

This was not what we wanted to hear. We were aiming for a 3:30 dinner, it was now 2:40 and we still had our sausage loaf (another sixty minutes) to cook.

After about ten minutes of panicking while watching Matt Hasselbeck get thrown to the ground, we had a sudden realization.

Wait, we can cook more than one thing at a time. The potatoes joined the sausage in the oven; our brother quickly staggered them so more heat could un-bacteria each dish.

Phew.

Alright, one last thing to make (if you don’t count the corn, which was just a matter of opening the bag and heating it in the microwave): ginger green beans.

You can add cooked green beans and carrots to the epic list of foods we don’t like. However, at our work Thanksgiving we were guilted into trying a cooked carrot, and it was delicious.

Here is the recipe we copied into our head. Cook some green beans in a pan, add ginger and continue to cook until you can smell nothing, but well, ginger. Then add a little balsamic vinegar and syrup. It takes five minutes and it is freaking good.

Finally, at 3:50 it was time to eat and watch the end of the game, which produced only one highlight: a pretty nice punt return from former Husky quarterback, and we’re pretty sure, the first Garfield Bulldog in the NFL, Isaiah Stanback.

As for drinks, we mixed cranberry juice with the hard stuff most of the day. At one point, my brother was drinking a beer from Mexico and our friend was drinking one from England. We felt bad about this, on the most American of holidays, so we all switched to Red Hook ESB, even though their radio ads are some of the worst things we have ever heard.

With the cooking behind us we ate so much that we ended up back home on our couch with severe stomach pains sweating Fruity Sauce and watching Mr. Conservative unable to move. Hot damn, do we love Thanksgiving.

NEXT WEEK: Seahawks vs. Clam Chowder, 1:15 p.m.