My First Turkey

For Christmas this past year, I received a 16 lb turkey from work. Now if you know me, you know that I am not a cook as it is, but I couldn't wait to cook this and hope it would turn out better than that dry turkey from National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.

We finally unthawed the turkey and the day that I cooked it, I was feeling horrible. I came down with an unusual case of strep throat. Not unusual in presentation, but I have been staying at home with Austin and have never had strep before, so this just suprised me that I even caught it!

I put the turkey back in the fridge thinking there is no way I am going to get up the urge to cook it, but around noon that day, I was feeling better and decided to give it a go. I decided to stick to the recipe out of the Southern Living Christmas book I also received at Christmas time.

First thing first, I had to take out the neck and then all the giblets. Now even though I get to touch brains at my job, this doesn't mean I enjoy touching odd objects! I put on dish gloves and took everything out.....ick is all I can say!

The hard part for me was that everything online and in books talks about how the wings are usually clipped. Of course I would get one of the birds that doesn't have clipped wings. I couldn't get them behind the head so I resorted to YouTube to find a video of how to put these darn wings behind the bird's back. It said that you want the wings to make it look like the bird is sun tanning. Easier said than done with my bird. I pretty much had to suffer through breaking the wings practically to get them tucked behind.

I ended up making gravy from the book as well. Jason brought home a box of stuffing since we didn't really plan on me making the turkey that day, so we weren't as prepared, but everything turned out amazing! We have already enjoyed making new dishes out of the leftovers!

Excuse how crazy I look, remember that I have strep throat!

Stepping Up The Front Porch

Jason has been wanting to re-do the front porch floor for a long time now. We have thrown across so many ideas since anything is better than what it was. Old outdoor carpet was just not doing it for us......yet somehow we kept it for almost 5 years!? I guess other projects always took precedence. We did try to at least make the stairs look better in the beginning by having Lowe's match the paint with the beige vinyl siding. Even the Duramax paint couldn't withstand the use of our front stairs.
BEFORE:

We had an interest in our house this week, even though it's not even on the market. In thoughts that the people were coming back and possibly going to make an offer, Jason got an urge to start and finish this project in a split second! I thought Jason was going to come back from the store with just some outdoor carpet that was nicer, but of course he found some good deals and decided on tile!

Here were the two options for how he was going to use the tile and composite decking:
Option 1:

Option 2:

We chose Option #1!
Then Jason continued onto the stairs with the composite decking. He started the project on New Year's Eve when it was 50 degrees outside but then had to of course finish it while the weather quickly changed to 20 degrees and snowing!
AFTER:

Here's a before and after looking from inside the house out onto the porch.

This project was well worth the 100$ spent!