Give thanks for Thanksgiving!

November 28, 2003

Thanksgiving went off pretty much without a hitch…uh…thankfully, I guess is the word I’m looking for. I came over here to my Dad’s on Wednesday afternoon so that we could go to the store and pick up the last ingredients that we needed for cooking on Thursday, and that gave us a chance to eye the turkeys that were there. We finally decided on a nice 15-pound frozen one that we figured would feed five people, and I grabbed the extras I needed for the stuffing and the like. That concluded my Wednesday.

Thursday was another story. I woke up around 5 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep, as I had a lot of things on my mind. Did we get the right kind fo meat for the stuffing? How was I supposed to do X? Could I do Y right? That, and my Dad had been watching TV in the family room and it had kept me awake, but everything else didn’t help. So I got up, showered, and tooled around until about 9 AM when I began the tedious cooking procedure.

My first object was to make sure everything was tip-top with the turkey. I had left it in the cool garage overnight that I knew wouldn’t let it go bad but would defrost it, but upon checking in the morning I found that there were a few parts of it still frozen. I proceded to take it out of the wrapper to get the giblets out before I soaked it, not to mention I needed them for recipe number one: turkey stock. The turkey stock was the easiest of all the recipes I used–essentially, add everything to a pot and simmer. Just some veggies, the neck, and the giblets, and the liver after an hour. To my surprise, however, I discovered that our turkey was giblet-free. I started the pot simmering, and then ran up to the store (this was barely 10 AM, I might add) to see if they had any extra giblets and livers. The man I talked to was surprised, and asked me if I’d checked the cavity. Sure, of course I had. The neck cavity, too? Uh…of course I did. I bought some extra giblets just in case and had Cindy put the giblets from the neck into the stock-in-progress while I drove home. No sweat, just some extra-turkeyfied stock, that’s all.

The next step after I finished and reserved the stock was to start on the stuffing. That took a bit longer, as it required cutting up a lot of bread into tiny cubes and then preparing the other ingredients, one of which was a small turkey breast. The recipe I used for stuffing called for sausage–either pork or turkey, most people prefer turkey sausage in the stuffing, however–but I couldn’t find any at the store. Instead, my Dad bought a one and a half pound smoked turkey breast and we used an attachment on his mixer to make our own, albeit pre-cooked, sausage. With all the mixing, cooking, cutting, dicing, mincing, chopping–you name it, I did it–I had to make sure I had plenty of time to get the turkey into the oven in time so it would be done by the time we ate around 6 or 7. That meant with a five-hour cooking time for a 15 pound bird, it had to go in no later than 1:30.

Stuffing is a BITCH to make. It’s even worse to get into the turkey once you’re done making it. I didn’t realize you had to practically sew the turkey shut to do it right. That required some last minute alterations after I spread the baste on the bird and the stuffing was already in the cavities. I have much to learn, but my Dad came up with a solution that worked in the nick of time. The turkey slid into the oven at exactly 1:30 PM, right on schedule. I decided to check on it every 30 minutes, baste if necessary. First time I checked, it seemed to be doing well. The over seemed cooler than I thought, but hey, it was on a fairly low temperature. It wasn’t until about 50 minutes after I put the turkey in that I was notified that while I had correctly set the temperature, I had neglected to actually turn the oven ON. Whoops. I was tired, though. Getting up at 5 AM and doing all sorts of complicated procedures don’t mix well.

That was the only snare, though. The already-cooked turkey breast became sausagified pretty well–it came out all crumbly, which is the texture of the meat in the stuffing I wanted, anyhow. I took the opportunity to take a nap, though, knowing the my turkey was actually cooking for once. I only slept for an hour, but it recharged me. After that, I checked on my turkey fairly frequently and discovered that it was cooking faster than anticipated. My Mom and sister came over around 5, and the turkey was done by 6–long before I’d expected it, even with a 50 minute delay in there.

And thankfully, it all came out very well. The turkey wasn’t dry, and while I hadn’t been able to fit all the stuffing into the turkey (in fact, I got only about 15-20% in there), the rest cooked well in the oven but sadly wasn’t as moist as the in-bird stuffing. Oh well. As I said, it all came out well. And despite my early morning, I didn’t retire until about 12:15 or so.

And that was my Thanksgiving in a nutshell. Today has been much more laid-back. I got up around 10, and since about noon I’ve been working on my Dad’s problematic computer that we’ve been trying to get fixed for a couple of months now. I thought I’d finally discovered the root of all the problems, but alas, it turned out not to be what I’d hoped. So tonight I’ve been running thorough tests on the RAM in his systerm, and while all put together the RAM generates errors, individually it causes problems. So I’m testing just about every combination I can think of to try and figure out what’s going on. I’ll get it sooner or later. But I’ve still been working on that for about eight hours today, and I have work yet to do. Ug.

And that’s what’s been going on for me. I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving, but for now I’m going to let my Dad’s computer run its tests while I watch the end of Blade II on Encore. I’m pretty tired from having worked with the computer all day, but as I said, I have work yet to do. Take it easy, all.

Posted in Geekery, General