What a fun holiday. It actually started for us last weekend, and continues through this weekend.
For the last several years we've gotten together with some college friends for a "Friends' Thanksgiving". Three years ago, Jock started making Turducken for this gathering. For those of you who haven't heard of it, it is a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken, with layers of stuffing in between. It's a lot of prep work (about 3 hours), and a long baking time (10-12 hours) with all that meat and stuffing, but the end product is so good!
Here's the turducken preparation process:
- Thaws out the birds, cuts them open down their backs and lays them out flat.
- De-bone the chicken and duck, except for the legs, and de-bone the turkey except for the legs and wings.
- Put it all together: turkey, stuffing, duck, stuffing, chicken, stuffing.
- Fold it all back together, hold it in place (this requires an assistant), and sew the turkey back together so it looks like a really big fat turkey.
- Place cut&sewn side down in a rather large roaster pan with a rack, bake for about 12 hours at 200-250.
Here's a website with the more detailed instructions we use if you want to try it yourself.
I will say one of our friends got to our house Friday night just as he was layering it, and she thought it was rather disgusting to see all that raw meat laying there. But it's so good! The duck provides a good flavor for the meat, stuffing, and drippings for gravy, and it also keeps the turkey from getting all dried out (no basting required!) as is usually the case with just a baked turkey.
...
This morning we slept in, had a late light breakfast, and watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Since we don't do Thanksgiving at our house, we decorated for Christmas. It's so fun putting up the tree, setting out the santa and snowman decorations, and getting out the nativity set. I love this time of year. Also, this year is the first that we've had a full-size Christmas tree. We've only had a 4-foot tree since we've been married, so now we actually have two. We have yet to do any outdoor decorating. We didn't do any last year other than hanging out a wreath, as we were so busy in November with Kaylen's adoption and then the holidays. We're hoping to still get some done this year, but we'll see. We got an early snowstorm this year (about 4 inches yesterday!) and it's mighty cold and windy today, so that put a kink in our plans. Who knows...
This early afternoon has been kind of lazy, except for getting some laundry done, and Kaylen is taking her nap while Jock's playing a computer game, and I'm blogging. Later this afternoon we're going over to Jock's dad's house for the traditional Thanskgiving meal.
This evening we'll come back home, get a good night's sleep, and then in the morning we'll take off to spend the weekend with my family. It's been so long since we've been up there - usually we see them about one weekend every month or two. It's been since early August - too long! We're going to drive the long way around, so that we can stop off to have Karen cut Jock's and my hair. Then we'll have a quick lunch and head up to Dad and Terry's. We started a couple years ago going to a movie one night with all the adults and kids. This year we're still deciding what we want to see Friday night. Then Saturday we're going to have our Thanksgiving meal. A couple weeks ago, my sister said that we've talked about turducken so much but we'd never made if for them, so Jock's going to make it for my family Friday night/Saturday morning. It should be a fun weekend.
I'll try to post some pictures early next week of all our fun. We'll be back home Sunday night to get back into the grind - work, daycare, and the normal insanity of our lives. At some point I'm also going to have to start my Christmas shopping too! YIKES! It always comes up on me so fast. But I refuse to go shopping the day after Thanksgiving. Nothing against those of you who love it, I just don't enjoy the crowds - the deals aren't worth that to me. If I didn't have plans for tomorrow morning that required me to be away from my laptop and internet, I might do some online shopping though. Maybe next year.
Wishing you all a wonderful Thanksgiving Day!
No comments:
Post a Comment