What's Thanksgiving Without Cranberries?

I love fresh cranberries and they are so easy to make.  A lot of people don't know how easy they are, so I'm going to show you.

First, buy a 12 oz. package of fresh cranberries.  I buy whatever kind the store has in stock, this time they happened to be Ocean Spray....

Rinse the cranberries and pick out any smooshed ones....

The directions on the package call for 1 cup of water and 1 cup of sugar.  I tweak it a little and use 1 cup of water and 2 cups of sugar.  I am a rebel like that!

Pour the water, the sugar and the cranberries into a pot.  Turn up the heat.  Start stirring.  The cranberries will start to pop and get soft.  I start to crush them against the side of the pot at this point....

Turn down the heat and keep stirring.  They will easily boil over if you don't keep an eye on them.  I keep boiling them until they cook down and start to get thick.

Turn off the heat, pour into a container and refrigerate.  You can eat them hot or cold.  I prefer them cold, on my turkey.  I really like it on toast, with mayo and sliced turkey.  Yum!

In between cooking, look out the window and admire the lake....

Chablis helped me cook this year and she made the broccoli rice casserole and the green bean casserole.  And yes, I cheated and used instant potatoes.

This cute little bird kept hanging around the back deck...

The turkey took longer than expected to cook, but it still turned out....

Louie, Chablis and Kyle weren't shy about digging in.  This was a hard year for me - Tony decided to spend the day with his girlfriends family.  It was the first time in 18 years that our little unit of 4 wasn't together.  I know they have to grow up and do their own thing, but it was still hard for me.  Than goodness for Facetime - at least I still got to see him for a few minutes.  My nephew, Kyle, came and spent the day with us tho, so that was really nice.

Afterwards we all drove out to the hunting property and sat in the deer stands.

Here's a short video I shot tonight.  This is the first time I've tried shooting video on my camera and it's also the first time I've tried to upload video to the blog, so we'll see how well this works....

Can you see the deer in this picture?  We didn't shoot any, but it was nice to sit out in the woods and enjoy the quiet of the evening.

It was a nice Thanksgiving.  Hope yours was nice as well!