In the United States, today is Thanksgivings Day.

I think we all know the drill by now; “I’m thankful for my family and friends.” Seeing & hearing that does get old after a while, but it’s okay because the sentiment is still there. I really am thankful for my friends and family, and if I get a few days off from school (while the adults get some time off of work) so I can stay home and have a really nice dinner with my family…well then I’m satisfied!

Although there are times where I feel really negatively towards my family, there are also times when I feel so lucky to have them. My family does not usually eat dinner together, so Thanksgiving is actually very exciting for me because it’s one of the few times we will sit down and share a meal.

For the past few Thanksgivings we usually buy a Thanksgiving dinner package from a little place called Honey Baked Ham. Their meals really are the best I’ve had (that are store-bought) and we always enjoy ordering our Thanksgiving meals from them.

However, this Thanksgiving my mom and I decided to cook our own Thanksgiving meal for the first time ever. We were a little nervous because we never made our own before, and didn’t want to eat bad tasting food! I decided to look up for some popular recipes (based on 5-star reviews from like 1000+ people!) and used those for our meal.

Results? Well, you probably guessed it from the picture I posted (Why would I post a picture of bad food? ) …it was a success! As a personal reminder and for anyone who’s interested, I might post up the recipes later.

The turkey was bought fresh and it was an organic, free-roaming turkey. We cooked it in our oven for about 5 hours. We made our own stuffing, and I have to say, it was the best stuffing I’ve ever had (I normally don’t even like stuffing that much). I also baked some butternut squash – it caramelized really nicely and tasted very sweet & rich. Made mashed potatoes from scratch for the first time LOL; we used to just make it from a box, but I don’t think we’ll be making that anymore now that we tried the real thing. And for a “dessert” I made this sweet potato casserole. It had a crunchy/sweet topping that caramelized nicely and had pecans in it. I was afraid it would be too sweet for the adults since they don’t like dishes too sweet, but they complimented it and I was super happy.

Not gonna lie, I was really happy about how our Thanksgiving meal turned out. First time cooking it, and it turned out really great. I think the stuffing was the most popular and will be gone before tomorrow. Everything else is almost gone, too. Next time I’ll definitely double the stuffing.

This year we invited my cousins over. Their family has four members and mine has a total of four people as well (I always thought it was so perfect because our families have the exact same proportions: 1 mom, 1 dad, 1 daughter, 1 brother). Then later this evening I invited my boyfriend over to try some of our food. Apparently he’s never eaten Thanksgiving food before. Then we watched some Korean drama (LOL how Asian of us). Currently he’s napping on our sofa as I blog, haha.

I’m super happy right now. Today really was great. I see why people would want to go through the trouble of baking and cooking all this stuff. At the end of the day you just feel really accomplished/happy and it tastes damn good too.