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Last year, our family Thanksgiving Day dinner missed one member, one of our two grown children, who was kept in L.A. for the internship-related obligation. This year, our nuclear family celebrated Thanksgiving together.

Initially, I planned to cook the whole dinner by myself and thus shopped for the ingredients accordingly except for popovers which my husband planned to cook. However, one day before the Thanksgiving dinner our grown children insisted on cooking the dinner as they did twice in the past. So I put away the groceries I purchased and decided to let them cook. My husband was looking forward to making popovers but since the special pan for popover did not arrive in time he decided to make them some other time. Our younger child planned the menu and our children together cooked a gourmet dinner. As it often happens on a Thanksgiving Day, the fire alarm went off each time we were preoccupied with the phone calls from the relatives on East coasts and Midwest. (It is easy to understand why Thanksgiving Day is the day when most residential fires occur, statistically.)

The dinner started with Pumpkin Cornbread, which was followed by Potato and Leek Soup. Then we had Goat Cheese Stuffed Pears Wrapped in Bacon. The main entre of Roasted Turkey Breast had the sides of Stuffing, Homemade Cranberry Sauce, and Roasted Asparagus. For dessert, we had Homemade Spiced Cider and Gateau Basque from our local bakery. Our children invested great effort and energy to preparing this sumptuous dinner. It was delicious!

After the dinner my husband checked the online to get the rough idea about how caloric a Thanksgiving dinner might be. He said that the calories content of the average Thanksgiving meal is 4,500 cal! Needless to say, we were rather shocked.

Then, as usual, we decided to go to our local movie theater to see a movie. We decided on seeing the most recent James Bond movie, Spectre. The action film was fun in that it introduced us to different cultural events and locales. My husband and I enjoyed seeing spectacular versions of the Day of the Dead festival in Mexico City, the mountaintop Skiing resort in Austria (I think this locale appears rather often in Bond movies) and the train ride in North Africa (Tunisia or Morocco?).

All things considered, we are thankful that our family is doing well and thriving.