Happy Thanksgiving

 

…to all.  A nice weather day here; in the low eighties.  I have to point out that when we got up this morning we were 70 degrees warmer than our kids in Colorado.  A walk on the beach.  Some football on TV.

 

There are great group get-togethers here for Thanksgiving, but this year Judy and I decided to just have a quiet thanksgiving at our house.  We measured, and figured out that the microwave convection oven will hold a 12 pound bird, so we got a fresh one a couple days ago at a local butcher.  Know what happens when you go six or seven years without cooking a turkey at home?  You can’t find the turkey baster.  It probably ended up out in the outside cabinet to service the batteries.  No harm.  We thought our way through the process yesterday, noticed the missing piece, and bought a new one.

 

We’ve never cooked a turkey in a convection oven before.  We expected it to take less time than in a conventional oven, but how much less?  Hard to tell.  You just put the bird in the oven, punch the Compu-cook button, and trust the force.  We made our best guess as to when to start the cooking.  We punched the button.  Nothing.  Nothing happened because the turkey filled up the oven so we had to turn off the turntable.  It was too big to rotate.  Well, it turns out that if your bird can’t rotate, it can’t be cooked on Compu-cook.  No problem; we’ll just override that and tell it to cook manually.

 

Know what else?  If your bird is so big it fills up the oven and almost touches the top, it’s going to cook very weird in the convection oven.  After 90 minutes the top was crispy but the bottom was undercooked.  No problem.  We pulled the meal out of the microwave, flipped it over, and finished cooking it upside down.

 

We were happy we hadn’t invited anyone else over for Thanksgiving.  We’ll consider this a learning experience.  Next time we’ll cook something smaller.  The top part of the turkey was inedible; overcooked.  The bottom part of it was wonderful though.  We just didn’t end up with as much properly cooked turkey as we expected.  There’ll be enough for a turkey sandwich or two tomorrow anyway.

 

Turkey, dressing, cranberries, potatoes, gravy, and homemade pumpkin pie.  Football, good company, nice weather, a comfortable house, and a cozy faux fire.  It was a grand Thanksgiving.