Thanksgiving

With one American Thanksgiving up my sleeve (where I gave thanks to great sales, and great friends who were dragged around the outlet mall when sane people are in bed), my very first Canadian Thanksgiving was another sort of mad rush.

My mission was to roast a turkey, plus a three-course dinner. To add to the stress of never having cooked turkey, we invited Gord's parents over to taste my potentially screwed up Thanksgiving dinner.

I thought the hard part was cleaning and stuffing the bird, but boy was a I wrong. My turkey was baking without a hitch at 450F for half an hour before I bring it down to 350F. An ofcourse, the oven starts playing up. It won't let me press "3", "4" or "5" buttons to set the temperature! Thank god we have a second oven upstairs in our second kitchen (as you do), so we carry the bird upstairs, whacked it in the spare oven, and voila, the oven door doesn't close. The bird gets run downstairs again, we play with buttons a bit more, and finally we resort to cooking at 299F because the "2" and the "9" button was working fine (go figure). It took a bit longer to cook, and it didn't help that the bird was laid to rest breast down and needed to be flipped halfway through roasting, but it got there in the end.

Infact, it was branded the "best turkey of the season". Roasting the turkey on slow cook actually did the turkey favours… it's common for turkeys to get overcooked and dry, which is why some people brine it, or inject butter. My little Butterball overcame all that and came out nice a juicy! Although it was ready just after the main, the four of us did a good job digging into our second dinner, there weren't as much leftovers as anticipated. I once thought using the drippings to make gravy was gross, but my god it is tasty!

So here are a few pics of the star of the show...

... I mean the one hanging by the wings...


... fresh out of the dysfunctional oven


... did I say this was our second dinner?


.. and to top it off, a traditional pumpkin pie, which was surprisingly good.