Thanksgiving dinner

I decided to host Thanksgiving this year for 7 people. I learned two important lessons from this experience. Lesson number one is that you better enjoy cooking because you may spend 12 hours preparing the meal, but it will be eaten within an hour.  You may spend forty five minutes making sure the fresh cranberry sauce has enough lime zest in it to counter balance the sugar but the people eating it will throw it on there turkey whether it's from a can or you make it fresh.
I really had a great time preparing this meal. I enjoyed going over the menu in my head two weeks before hand, shopping for everything, making the soup, peeling the twenty potatoes, and brining the turkey Wednesday night. I even woke up at 3am in order to flip the turkey for the brine and couldn't fall asleep until 4am because I kept thinking about how my free range turkey would taste.  In the end the turkey was moist and delicious and i'd like to think that the sides and soup were as well. The best thing about my Thanksgiving dinner was that the most important people in my life were with me around my dining round table.
The second lesson I learned is that take it easy when adding flour to make your gravy. I spent the most amount of time preparing my gravy, thinking if the turkey was dry and tasteless the gravy would be there to save the day. I fried up the neck and giblets of the turkey with onions, garlic, and shallots. I added chicken stock and fresh herbs and boiled this mixture for two hours. I then took that stock and added it to the pan drippings from the turkey until I had created the tastiest gravy I could. I then started thickening it with flour, and more flour, and more flour. Eventually it started to thicken so I was happy. Unfortunately it didn't stop to thicken until I had what resembled a jello mold of gravy. So the lesson learned is to be patient when making gravy because if you don't you will end up with a jello mold of gravy which doesn't pour well over turkey and or mash potatoes.