Tag: turkey

Thanksgiving 2024

Plans change. Our original plan was to host Thanksgiving dinner at our house, but with part of the family hunkered down in Bishop with Covid, we opted for “Plan B,” to take the turkey and fixings to Aunt Sue’s place in San Jose, arriving Wednesday afternoon, with time to get a jump on preparing the food. I’ve become an advocate for spatchcocking and brining the turkey. Here you see the spatchcocked turkey in a pot with brine ready to go into the refrigerator to sit overnight.

You can also see Aunt Sue attacking a squash with hammer and knife, and Joann getting the resulting squash pieces ready to go in the oven. Not shown here is the cranberry relish which is a tradition for us, raw cranberries, an orange and sugar, all thrown into a blender. We much prefer this raw recipe to cooked cranberries. The challenge here though was finding a working blender. I threw all the ingredients in Sue’s blender, hit the switch and nothing happened. I then grabbed her immersion blender, hit the switch, and nothing happened. I dumped the goods into her food processor, hit the switch and the motor whirred but the blades didn’t turn. Broken. A text message to my daughter Amy resulted in a blender that finally got the job done.

The 14 pound turkey went into the oven at 10:00. At 11:15 it came out looking quite delicious and juicy.

There we six of us for dinner. Amy brought a homemade apple pie. Yum! And while the turkey was in the oven, we entertained ourselves with a board game, Top Dog.

While we missed the Bishop contingent of our family, we had a festive time with enough leftovers to keep us going for a couple more days.

Giving Thanks

This is a day when we stop and give thanks.

We have a tradition here in America of getting together with family for a feast we call Thanksgiving. More people travel at this time of year than any other time to be with family. This year, with the coronavirus wreaking havoc on our lives, traveling is a challenge.

Thanksgiving is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November in the United States. It is a time to give thanks and to share the blessings of the harvest, although for some it also signifies the conquest of Native Americans by colonists.

For our family, Thanksgiving is about family and counting our many blessings. This year we decided to celebrate early with a get-together on November 21, a few days ahead of the official holiday. With the challenges we faced this year there was much discussion about how we might manage the risks of COVID-19. We decided that an outdoor event in Aunt Sue’s backyard would be appropriate, taking precautions to wear masks when we weren’t eating, and to designate one person to be the server. We used a counter top roaster to cook the turkey; when it came time to transport it, we simply put the whole roaster in the trunk of the car for the drive to San Jose.

Our daughter and her family joined us with a homemade apple pie. Our son and his family had been staying with us the previous week, so we considered them to be in our social bubble. When it came time to carve the turkey, Sue pulled out a set of carving knives with elk antler handles that go back three generations.

Our spread of food included turkey, stuffing, cranberry relish (a recipe from my mother), kale and feta cheese salad, pomegranate and persimmon salad (from Sue’s garden), squash, rolls, and homemade apple pie for desert. Yum!

And, of course, Aunt Sue had to indulge the dogs with a bit of turkey.

After we had sufficiently stuffed ourselves on the delicious food, it was time for a walk. On our walk we passed a frog that seemed to wishing us a Happy Thanksgiving.

I wish you well on this day. And amidst the many challenges you may face, I hope that you can take a moment to find something for which you, too, can give thanks.