Saturday smells like...Turkey and all the fixings

Y'all knew what to expect for this week's "Saturday smells like...", didn't you?  Well, in case it's a surprise, I've got a post chock-full of pictures to take you through our Thanksgiving dinner.  The smell, and taste, of everything was amazing.  I hope your Thanksgiving Dinner was half as good!

We started with the Turkey.  I shared the brining picture in Wednesday's post.  That was followed up by coating the skin in a combination of Olive Oil Mayonnaise and herbed duck fat.  The duck fat was also squeezed under the skin of the breasts so that it would drip through the meat while cooking.  Here is the pre-cooking picture:

And the post-cooking picture:

In addition to turkey, we had roasted parsnip puree (in process here):

and the potatoes romanoff I mentioned Monday.  Six potatoes, an entire block of Vermont white cheddar and a large container of sour cream.  Yum.

We also had W-S focaccia stuffing, made with italian sausage, onions, and turkey stock.  So savory!  I don't seem to have taken a picture of it put together, but here is one of the onions sweating (on the left burner) and the turkey stock warming (on the right burner):

And stir-fried roasted-chili garlic broccoli. 

Here is everything on the table we set up as a buffet (obviously there was way more food than room on the table!):

From left to right:  The parsnips puree, W-S Apple-Organge Cranberry Relish, the broccoli, gravy, potatoes romanoff, focaccia stuffing, the awesome apple-cranberry sweet potatoes our friends B & D brought, and the turkey.

And here's where we ate:

After we ate, we had the best dessert.  While I've typically gone the more traditional pecan or pumpkin pie route, this year we decided to try something diferent--pumpkin ice cream.  J made a fabulous cinnamon chantilly cream to top the ice cream, and we accessorized the ice cream with gingersnap cookies and a drizzle of Applecreek Orchards' Bourbon Caramel sauce.