Just Beat It Beat It Beat It Beat It No One Wants To Be Defeated - Take 12

Operation: Cook a Salmonella-Free Turkey Dinner was a huge success. I was overwhelmed (in a good way) by all of your suggestions; I didn't know which recipes to choose. I ended up using Nigella's method for cooking the turkey because Nigella can do no wrong. The turkey was delicious but to be honest, I'm more of a side dish kind of gal.

My dinner, in all of its gluttonous glory:

Clockwise from the top:
turkey with cranberry orange sauce, garlic smashed potatoes with gravy, Meg's brussel sprouts (steamed and then sautéed in butter, brown sugar, and pecans), maple balsamic roasted beets (ewww beets but also yay! December beets!), sweet potato mash with an unfortunate topping of burnt-ass (why yes, that is the technical term) marshmallows, and not-cooked-in-the-bird stuffing of my own recipe that featured bacon (heck yes), dried cranberries, apples, and caramelized onions (which is just a fancy way of saying that I burned the onions and was too lazy to chop more so I used the burnt ones.)

For dessert (because we weren't already bursting at the seams) we had pecan bourbon pie with bourbon caramel sauce and pumpkin chiffon pie. It was ridiculous.

The pups were being irresistibly cute so more than one person slipped them a few morsels of turkey, resulting in what may be the cutest thing I've ever seen, the Puppy Turkey Coma:

Tryptophan Overdose

I'm glad that I attempted the full turkey dinner but I seriously doubt I'll do it again. It took two full days of cooking to finish everything and I still ended up an hour behind schedule, forcing my dad to make the gravy and carve the turkey while I drank bubbly wine and set the fire alarm off with my unfortunate marshmallow / broiler incident. It was a tad stressful. I had leftover pumpkin pie for dinner last night though, so I'm not complaining.