thanksgiving

sorry to take so long to post about thanksgiving, but i just now woke up from the turkey coma. and if you believe that, i've got a bridge i'd like to sell you. :)

well, thanksgiving was wonderful!!!! yum-a-dum-dum! the turkey was so great that i ordered another for christmas (since it was frozen it was $10 less - mad savings! not!), and i am already looking forward to it! we had excellent company and our own private bartender (thank you dave!) i had three versions of a sidecar, a cocktail i had never before drunk but it's really darn good! dave seriously has a gift for mixing drinks, and that's not something to be taken lightly. anyone can mix a drink, but not anyone can mix a drink like dave can. whoever happens to be mixing your drinks, don't be like me and start drinking it when dinner is almost done and you haven't eaten for a good five hours. i had to stick it in the fridge half way through because i was getting tipsy, and nobody wants a tipsy person making the gravy or mashing the potatoes.

without further ado, here is our turkey before going into the oven.



this is the heritage turkey we got from reese turkey farm. as farmer reese says, the best way to save these rare breeds is to eat them, and i am happy to say he has recruited five new volunteers to eat these birds into every day commonness. seriously though, we paid a lot of money for our 11 lb turkey, though we weren't just paying for the turkey: we were also paying for preserving and helping to foster genetic diversity, which is very important to us, altruistically and from an enlightened self-interest standpoint. farmer reese's turkey was so good that we'll never get another turkey from the supermarket if we have anything to say about it. fortunately for us, we do! i brined this bad boy for twelve hours using williams-sonoma apple & spices turkey brine, mostly using water but also about six cups of apple cider. i made a maple syrup and herbs (sage, rosemary, thyme) compound butter, which was rubbed not only on the skin but also under it. i worked the skin loose from the meat, which it tougher to do on a heritage bird than a conventional one, and then deposited dollops of the butter underneath. if you look closely you can see some lumps under the skin. they're easy to see on the legs. stuffed the heck out of him with my usual stuffing and we were off to the races!

and after a few hours, this is how he turned out:



pretty magnificent, huh? we sure thought so, and for those of you reading here, can i just tell you how great the heritage turkey was? i thought i'd discovered the secret to making delicious turkey when i discovered brining, but a heritage turkey goes up to eleven, maybe even twelve. on its own, it must be wonderful, brined it was just paradise. i seriously didn't know that turkey could taste this good! i wasn't sure about brining, as a lot of sites said not to, but for strictly comparison purposes i thought i should, otherwise it would be comparing apples and oranges. i also read another blog where the cook faced a similar dilemma and decided to brine and her turkey turned out great, so that clinched it.

the biggest differences that i noticed between heritage turkey and conventional ones (i.e. factory or even organically raised broad-breasted whites) is that the meat in general is darker, even the white meat. the legs are a little longer and the wings are much more developed. also, the skin is a lot thicker on the breast, perhaps because these turkeys live normal lives doing normal turkey things, like flying, running and scratching around (and even having - gasp - sex!!!!) if you're a big fan of the skin, the breast skin doesn't crisp up where it's thicker like on a conventional turkey, so you'll want to get your crispy skin fix from the legs or another part of the bird.

of course, we had great company and i had many helpers, so here are a few more shots for your viewing pleasure:

preparing mr. turkey for his date with the oven:



a chef is only as good as her sous chef! his people might not know potatoes like mine, but he can sure peel a mean potato!



mashing the spuds. i have to make a product plug at this point. i'm an easy mark for williams-sonoma. i drool over the catalogues, wanting one of almost everything, and if i were ever to get stuck working retail again, i'd want to work there. always looking for new gadgets that will make food yummier and easier to make that way, this year i tried out the potato ricer that williams-sonoma was selling (it's not available on their site anymore; hopefully that's not a permanent situation.) folks, if you like mashed potatoes, you need this gadget! you still mash them up with a masher once they're through the ricer, but that ricer makes them so smooth and so light... i never knew mashed potatoes could be like this, and i'm irish!!!!



we all need somewhere pretty to eat.



how's this for happy diners? diane and dave were nice enough to join us (trump is taking the picture)



mmmmmm.......... pie......... mmmmm!!! one mincemeat and two pumpkin, with fresh whipped cream of course! kind of hard to tell but i bought these cute little pie cookie cutters for that i used to decorate the crusts. another williams-sonoma product... it includes a maple leaf, oak leaf, acorn and pumpkin cutter. if you look very closely at the crusts you can kind of see the shapes, and i used the oak and maple cutters for the steam holes in the mincemeat pie.



and as herbie demonstrates, this is what happens when you eat too much turkey.



i hope your thanksgiving was just as good and just as much fun as ours!!!!