Unearthing a life.....

I remember many a Thanksgiving dinner where I went back for seconds on practically everything, but yesterday I found myself struggling to clean up one plate. I did notice, while trying to load the holiday plates into the dishwasher this morning, that they stood too tall and interferred with the rotating 'blades'.

There was a lot of promotion of the 'blast furnace' turkey-cooking method this year. Safeway was promoting the 'Two Hour Turkey', The New York Times Food Section published a slightly variant procedure, and Gourmet Magazine jumped on the bandwagon this year. So I thought "What the Hell, I'll try it." I went with Gourmet's method (to 170 degrees) because Safeway's finishing temperture (160 degrees) seemed a bit low to me. But Gourmet's time was for a 12 to 16 pound bird and mine was 21 pounds .... so I did a little tap dance on the calculator and figured I should go three hours and fifteen minutes (at 450 degrees) .... but check the temp at 3 hours. There must have been something missing from my calculations because the temp was 185 degrees at 3 hours ... a tad bit overcooked, wing tips blackened, perhaps a little dry. I'd cook it that way again, but start checking the meat temp 30 to 45 minutes sooner.

The six guests all brought food and drink and we laid on a lavish feast starting with ham wrapped asparagus appetizers at 3:00 PM and ending with pumpkin pie around 7:00 PM. If eight unexpected guests had crawled to our door, we could have fed them till they popped (on the leftovers).

[I guess if I want to sequence pictures, I should start with the last and work forward.]