…….won’t you please join us for 2nd Thanksgiving.
1st Thanksgiving being Canadian Thanksgiving which we celebrated with family and friends back in October. I know, it’s a little late to join us now – the turkey is reduced to sliced meat and broth but maybe next year. Here’s how we do the Tickle Trunk thanksgiving and how it played out this year:
Always start the day by setting the table because that’s no fun to do when you are juggling food later on. (I googled turkey juggling and was most disappointed – I could only find one video of a person juggling raw turkey and they were actually chickens or dwarf turkeys and another of a juggling festival located in Turkey. All that, when there seemed to be thousands of videos of chainsaw juggling. Wonder which one is more hazardous, given the high risk of salmonella on supermarket turkeys.)
Get to know your turkey. Meet Jennie-O. This will be the first turkey I have cooked in many years. You can read why here: Beachball from Hell. It seems kind of mean to name the beast if you are going to eat it later but I don’t think this 18 pound frozen bird is going to make much of a pet so why not. When brother-in-law Willie raised pigs we always joked about how we were eating Arnold and in a way it was kind of reassuring to know exactly what we were eating and how happy it was until its demise. I digress.
Turkey is not turkey without giblet gravy. So first one must hunt down the giblets. The bird was still full of ice crystals so this was kind of like searching for a bag of squishy things in the bottom of a slushie.
Don’t recall ever finding one of these giblets back when I was cooking turkeys on a regular basis. Kind of looks like something you’d get if some Art Modern fell into your 3-D printer. I’d be tempted to save it for re-purposing if it wasn’t covered in turkey juice.
Once the giblets were a-boilin’ I popped the turkey into the oven for its afternoon sojourne. No photos of that because, well, again, the turkey juice. Sigh, Thanksgiving is such a sad day for birds everywhere.
And four hours later, voila. The bird she is cooked.
Carve and chow down. Our roasted fowl was far from foul; it was moist and delicious with gravy and simple sides of mashed potato, brocolli, and cranberry sauce. My hips told me they wouldn’t be chipping in on the cost of new pants or muumuus if made stuffing so I didn’t. And I used to make cran-raspberry jello salad but I am off food colouring forever if I can help it so I just stewed up these ingredients to make a yummy side:
For dessert
Because Id rather have cake than pumpkin pie any day. Lance gets to eat all the little fondant pumpkins because, like I said, food colouring.
When you don’t have company for Thanksgiving it is nowhere near as festive so make it a special occasion with a batch of conversation prompts.
My prompt was “What was your favourite movie this past Year?” We were unanimous on this – the best movie so far of 2019 was The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Oh those Coen brothers just keep delivering. Lance’s prompt was “If you could be an animal, what would it be?” I chose the Iberian lynx and if those are extinct, the ocelot. Lance’s response? “I would like to be the lion that lay down with the lamb.” Oo, that is so Lance.
After dinner we fought off the effects of the tryptophan and watched “The Irishman”, which now rates as my second favourite movie of 2019 so far even though I did sleep through a bit of it after I exhausted myself with cravings for digestive bitters. Cut me some slack here, the movie was three and a half hours long.
So all in all, a very Happy American Thanksgiving indeed. Now off to join the YMCA.
© Judy Parsons 2019
BTW I have figured out the “click on picture for larger view” but have not yet applied to all photos. Stay tuned….
Delish, and I managed to keep from overeating at dinner. But I did accomplish that later when carving all the meat off the carcass, since the most moist and flavorful parts are what you have access to once you are down to the bones. Oh, my. But I stayed awake all through the Irishman.
There was still a remarkable pile of meat that I took off the bones once they had boiled for 3 and a half hours (hmmm, the length of the movie), and cooled down, not to mention the gallon bag and 2 plastic containers put in fridge and freezer from the initial disarticulating.
Yes, I’d say a very satisfying Thanksgiving.
Ah but will you be saying the same after your tenth turkey meal? We’ll have to get creative.