As always, the actual thanksgiving day menu turned out a little differently than we planned. For one thing, we totally forgot to make cranberry sauce. That's ok, though; we had plenty of food, and I personally have never been into cranberry sauce anyway. Cranberry bread is much, much better. Of course, now we have a bag and a half of cranberries kicking around the freezer, but that's not exactly a terrible problem to have.

What else was different? We didn't make the biscuits, but that one was a conscious choice due to the overabundance of food and the possibility of running out of olive oil. I also made the grain salad with lots of bell peppers instead of chard. Otherwise, we were just about entirely on track. Go us!

Check out the soon-to-be-roasted veg:

Those are carrots, radishes, sweet potatoes, yellow onions, and brussels sprouts, all tossed with trusty vinaigrette and sprinkled liberally with salt, pepper, and fresh rosemary I tore out of the hedge while walking by city hall. Ah, the glories of California. Also, I roasted them.

Table panorama:

The fruit bowl contains finally-in-season satsumas, purple plums, and fuji apples. To your left, you will notice the field roast Chrissy and Ben brought. It's essentially a big seitan roll with a lentil and bread stuffing in the middle. We destroyed about 3/4 of the roast among four people. In the glass bowl: mashed yukon gold potatoes with garlic. There weren't a whole lot of those left over, either. In the pink dish: cooked barley with chopped raw red pepper, orange pepper, parsley, green onion, and (again) said trusty vinaigrette. Using the vinaigrette twice worked really well since we cooked it in one dish and left it raw in the other, so the two tastes were not at all similar. Nice.

Here we have the already semi-decimated side of the table. In the white bowls: lots of delicious Tuscan white bean soup. In the little green bowl: fragments of cashew left over from mid-cooking snacks. In the red bowl: lots and lots of olives, also left from the cooking period. In the blue bowl: red grapefruit and avocado salad, which was awesome and pungent and delicious.

My initial plate:

Mushroom gravy: hooray! Also, note the lonely corner saved for the roasted vegetables that were still in the oven. So sad. That's ok, however, because look how great they ended up when actually done!

Those are some VEGETABLES.

So we ate it all, drank four bottles of wine, and had pumpkin pie, of which there are zero pictures on my camera: boo!

When we were all too full to move, we played some rousing games of Boggle. Ben won.