Thanksgiving Feast

 Happy Thanksgiving! We went down to visit the family for about a week, and here's a big bunch of pictures of all the food we ate! Since it's a holiday all about feasting, this is mostly just food pictures, so a little warning if you're hungry right now.

At least this first picture is not very apetizing. Unless you are a squirrel. We made sure we put out a full fresh piece of corn-stuff out for the squirrels, so that they could also have a Thanksgiving feast while we were away.

Stopped in Delaware for lunch on the trip down. Is that the Monopoly Guy on the wall over there? He's checking his watch, because this had to be the slowest Burger King you could imagine. I might have been in some kind of eternal-time-prison while waiting for my order.

They did let me use my New Jersey coupon though, which was cool. And fun fact: No sales tax on fast food orders in Delaware! I took a picture of the receipt because I thought the cashier's name was rather unique: %f. That's like, one of the most original names I think I've ever seen.

Dinner that night was Golden Coral. It's been Years (+1 for Covid) since we've been to a Golden Coral, but my friend still remembers his "pattern". First up is a salad which is basically cheese, black olives, and tons of thousand island dressing.

Next up at Golden Coral, the highlight of the buffet: Pot Roast and Nachos. Golden Coral has the best pot roast, and no place else can you combo that with some nachos. My friend had no idea how much he missed this.

They also have steak on the buffet. The mashed potatos looked good, and honestly you could just eat the rolls all by themselves the entire meal. There's so much yummy stuff on the buffet! What do you choose? That's what they call a "good problem".

My friend realized the steak fries with cheese usually go with the steak, he had forgotten, so he got some anyway. This time with some roasted chicken. Notice the portion sizes are getting smaller as the night goes on.

The covid problems solved by mask-wearing while roaming, and mandatory disposable gloves while handling the buffet spoons. Pro tip: Grab a soup bowl to take over to the ice cream machine.

Except today the ice cream machine was not working. D'oh! That's like, half the reason we came! Well, the rest of the food was great, so we'll let it slide. The fudge squares were dense and delicious, covered with caramel ment for the ice cream. And they had cotton candy!

Next day we went over to the KFC, which is a treat for us since it's so far away from us in New Jersey now.

Simple home dinner while watching Survivor with the family, who also happen to be fans. What are we playing for? How about a nice ham sandwich? With chips... and shredded cheese.... and all the soda you can drink. Worth playing for? Let's draw for teams! Minty wins immunity, and reward!

Thanksgiving Day! It took a great deal of restraint to get a picture of this moment. The moment when the yell from the kitchen says: "Who wants some skin!?" Because anybody who knows about Thanksgiving will usually tell you; this is the best part.

Yay! Awesome meal with awesome family. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

After Thanksgiving meal, a very odd "dessert". A 2020 Paqui One Chip Challenge chip for my friend and his nephew. they had planned on doing this a few months ago in North Carolina, but chickened-out due to the feared "revenge" on the stomach, and the possible conflict with planned activities we had the next day. One of the tips was to eat it on a full stomach, and that was right about now after the Thanksgiving um... stuffing.

The chip was from back in 2020, and had a "best by" date of Feb 2021 on it. So it was most certainly a very stale chip. You can see over there the glove used to pick it up, recommened because of the danger of the dust on fingers might get into dangerous places like rubbed on your eyes or nose or something. The package contains all kinds of fun descriptions of the pain, and a little banner to hold up for the inevitable selfies you'll take.

So how was it? HOT! It's very typical for consumer-level products to over-sell the hotness of things, but my friend nibbled on the chip to prolong the flavor and get a real sense of... yup, it was indeed pretty hot. The mistake was reaching for the iced tea. The chip was sooooo dry and stale, my friend was just plain thirsty. He was doing "okay" with enduring the hot-ness, but once the iced tea hit his tongue, it was like some kind of trick-evil magic spell that increased the heat by magnitudes! The bread helped a lot, resting on the tongue, and by the time he got one spoon of ice cream, it was all over. His crazy nephew was visibly sweating, but managed to last a whole hour before reaching for the bread!

Whew! Real dessert chocolate pie. Much better than a stale hot chip. I mean my friend was glad he did the chip, because now it's a fun story, but this chocolate pie was welcomed happily.

Bowling at lunch time the next day. We forgot to take a picture of the bowling-alley pizza, there was only one scrap of crust left when we remembered we were trying to get food pictures to post.

Technically we were bowling on a "Senior's Day Out" event, but we did not yet qualify as "Seniors" for the raffle tickets or goodies, like this fruit cup with cookie. Funny enough to get a picture though.

We were trying to decide where to Door Dash food from while watching a movie, but that wound up being a lot more expensive than actually GOING to the chinese buffet, so we just plain old drove over to the buffet! General Tso gots some great chicken, and of course it's been forever since we've had the chicken teryaki on a stick. 

The highlight was the Mongolian Barbecue which is where they put your stuff on the big flat grill and walk circles around it while it cooks. Awww yeah, another thing we've not had in a very long time.

They do have ice cream at the buffet, in the little cups. We had a couple of these. A cup-le?

Have some fortune cookies! I thought it was fun trying to convince my friends that their fortune was telling them to visit US in New Jersey! Thanks for having my back, cookie fortune!

The next day My friend grabbed lunch with his other nephew at Five Guys before marathoning the entire Fate: Stay/Night Heaven's Feel movie trilogy. Based off of a "visual novel" game, this movie series is basically following a separate story than the first series, Unlimited Bladeworks, did. So you really need to see that first, as this one never stops to explain things you knew from the other series.

Between movies, dinner was classic Thanksgiving Leftovers. So it's amazing all over again! No One Chip Challenge for dessert this time.

Texas Roadhouse... for lunch? Since it was still a holiday weekend, they were opened for lunch time. We could not think of a better place to go, so why not? Good luck topping this, dinner!

Again, a few bites into the steak before we remembered we were getting pictures. In the picture, this looks like a regular steak, but we are at a Texas Roadhouse so obviously this is instead an AMAZING steak.

After the super lunch, we wandered through the new Ikea store. Got the dollar ice cream cone, seen here on top of the Ikea... Lego set, that we bought for some reason.

There was no way that dinner was going to come close to beating lunch, so another simple home Ham Sandwich on Rye it was. So we kinda had a lunch-dinner and a dinner-lunch that day. Ate it while watching the Sunday night football game.

One final dessert of Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream. Ice cream twice in the same day? Not the first time, and probably not the last time, either.

Chicken McNuggets on the trip back home. We had a conversation with our friend that if you've not had McNuggets in a long time, when you have them again, they will be soooooo gooooood! And... Yup, that statement is still true! Hope you enjoyed lame internet food stories and that you also had some tasty stuff for Thanksgiving.