catsittingstill | You're probably getting tired of this...

You're probably getting tired of this...

But Thanksgiving is much on my mind these days.

Dad called to ask if I wanted to cook a Turkey for Christmas. (Note--we're going to visit my Dad this year for a couple of weeks around Christmas. Dad usually asks me to do the cooking. I don't mind, actually; he supplies me with generous household money and I buy some of my favorite things, like lamb and such that I can't get here, and it gives a touch of structure to my days--and let's face it, Dad and Jake are not bad cooks, but day in and day out, I think I'm better--Plus I make them cook at least once each and make Dad take us out to dinner at least once, so it's not *that* onerous :-) ) But back to the turkey. My response was "well, I've never cooked a turkey, and don't plan to unless you're heart is really set on it." Dad didn't care all that much about turkey but idly wanted to know why. I gave him, in abbreviated form suitable for a phone conversation that is not a rant, most of these:

1) Turkeys are heavy. Because of their mass there are technical problems with getting the whole thing cooked through without overcooking the outside. These technical problems are frequently gotten around in part by basting. However, I have a bad back. It's in good shape right now, but having to lift something heavy, greasy and hot out of the oven six or eight times in an afternoon in order to baste it strikes me as the sort of thing where I should make the Dec 26th appointment with the back doctor today, while I'm sure I can get one. Seems to me Mom threw her back out really badly this way (in bed for days) when I was a little kid, which may account for my bone-deep wariness of the concept.

2) We will only have four people. Turkey is the wrong size for four people; it is the right size for twenty people. A chicken is the right size for four people. Chickens are also easy and safe to lift, and don't have to be basted, so they only have to be lifted once. Win all around.

3) I don't even like turkey that much. If Dad's heart was set on turkey I would get a *piece* of turkey and cook that. Easier, safer, and since the one who eats most of the leftovers is me, I'm not stuck eating something I don't really like for the next week. I do like chicken, and chickens are small enough that the carcass can easily be turned into soup. I make a killer coconut curry chicken soup.

4) I also *know how* to cook chicken. I am eager to experiment with desserts and such when I'm going to be cooking for people. Huge chunks of dead flesh, not so much, for some reason. There's also a commitment issue: cooking a chicken takes slightly over an hour. Cooking a turkey takes all day and once you start you can't quit.

5) I will be doing one traditional thing; pumpkin custard (probably for Christmas and buy a pumpkin pie, or at least the pie crust, which I don't know how to make, for Thanksgiving). I may make rolls if I have time, given that I would have to make them by hand since my bread maker died last year. I hate cranberries with a powerful passion (they taste very bitter to me) so I probably won't have any. My idea of gravy is what other people call pan juices--I love that, and will not be soiling it with flour. There will be rice to go with the gravy. Or perhaps I will cut potatoes carrots and mushrooms up into the huge covered roaster I cook chickens in. The roaster is good because it traps all the juices and keeps the walls of the oven cleaner. The veggies poach in the chicken juices and, man I would make more of those if I could fit more in the roaster.

So it will be chicken for Christmas, or perhaps rock cornish hen which is even smaller and tastier than chicken. Though I do remember one Christmas (or maybe New Years?) where Mom just put out bowls and bowls of treats--potato chips, candies and such. It is a shining moment in my youthful memories and must have been a lot less work than a full-fledged dinner.

I have already bought the Thanksgiving rock cornish hens and put them in the fridge to thaw. I am not sure if I will take the roaster method for cooking them or not.

Does anyone else out there make not-Turkey Thanksgiving / Christmas dinners?

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Thanksgiving seems to be turkey for me. Christmas dinner may be turkey, but is more likely dead cow(roast beast). New years often is ham. Peter can wax poetic (and has) about his holiday meals.

So if a miniature mammoth is a mimmoth, does that mean a miniature turkey is a cornish game hen? Do Ozymandias et al. have opinions about all of this?

So far they have expressed no opinion. On the other hand, two of them are missing and the remaining one keeps edging farther away when I'm not looking.

I think they may just have figured out that they are living with carnivores for whom they would be a light snack.

First, I'd recommend ditching the basting brush. Brining the turkey is far easier. You'll still have to hoist the bird a few times, but not the bird and roasting pan. The brining vessel, fluid and bird might be similarly problematic, though.

So I'd suggest adapting Alton Brown's turkey brining technique to chickens. Veggie stock, salt, brown sugar, whatever spices you like. Stuff a big hornking handful of sage into the body cavity before roasting, for that special Thanksgiving-y flavor.

Well, first I'd have to want turkey. Then I'd have to figure out how to boil a turkey in salt water. That *is* what you mean by brining, right?

Not quite. You boil the brine, then cool it to room temperature, then cool it further with ice water, the soak the bird in the result for 12 hours. Osmosis being the wonderful thing it is, salt (and other flavors you have in the brine) will move into the bird, flavoring the meat.

We usually do a ribeye roast for Christmas (or a standing rib roast if we can't find the boneless version -- although it's less useful at the moment, since we have no dogs to chew the stripped bones!).

For Thanksgiving, though, we do do turkey. It's actually possible to find smaller birds that cook in less time, or you can find a turkey breast and cook that. The Butterball varieties and their clones all come effectively pre-brined, so you just put them in the oven and let them go until they're done.

Of course, you have to want turkey. :)

Yes, first you have to want turkey.

But if I did, I'd go the turkey breast route, I think.

My stepmother's family had so many people with different tastes, religious traditions, cultural traditions, and allergies at their Christmas dinners that they didn't even try to have a single center item. They made a huge potluck buffet setup, with chicken and roast beef and ham and vegetarian stuff and amazing curries brought by the Indian contingent of the family, and something I couldn't even pronounce brought by the Romanian...

I wish we still had those gatherings. My grandmother, who ran them, is far too weak now to host such an event, nor does she have space to do so since she gave up her house and moved into the nursing home. The few remaining people who both live within traveling distance of each other and have house space don't want to host, not even to the extent of letting their house be used if someone else cooked and got stuff done.

Sounds to me like a good excuse to start a tradition.

Problem is location. If I host it here, nobody from my family will be able to come -- Mary can't travel anymore at 95, my parents (quite reasonably) won't leave her, and the cousins etc. have made their own traditions by now with splintered subsets of the original group. Mary was what held the extended family together, and it's fragmenting as she grows too old and ill to keep her hand on the reins.

Such things happen to families, I know, or else we'd be trying to cram the entire world's population into one dining room. (Which, metaphorically at least, would be no bad thing, but contains certain logistical problems to accomplish literally.) But it's sad to see it happen. Someday, perhaps, I shall be the family matriarch and host my kids and their partners and kids and extra in-laws and chosen siblings and random friends who need a place to go for the holiday, and I shall make it as warm and wonderful a space as Mary did for us.

I do like this idea.

We started as soon as we moved in together, since Colleen's Mom had neither the interest nor the space required for hosting, and the East Coast was too expensive to get to very often. There were always a few friends who didn't have family to go to.

It's sad when a tradition ends.

This strikes me as a very practical solution to the issue of pleasing large numbers of people with differing tastes :-)

I've had goose a couple of times for T-day, and duck once... our hostess was a gourmet cook; she brined them up and had her grillmeister then-hubby cook them on the gas grill. I remember it being *quite* good.

Mother usually did ham for Dec. 25... after I wandered off the beaten theological path I didn't go home as much for that holiday; Solstice was usually potluck or party food and spiced cider and such like... I know

tabbifli celebrated Christmas but even though I know I was over there twice for it I cannot honestly tell you what we ate as a main course. The only thing I really remember was cream cheese stuffed olives as an appetizer.

riverheart used to do the double whammy for $WINTERHOLIDAY: a goose and a whole salmon. Goose, though, has much the same issues as turkey, and whole salmon of any quality is probably hard to get out there.

I actually have no idea what I'm doing in late December yet. *chuckle* I do know that in *early* December I've been invited over to a (culturally) Jewish friend's house for latkes. I'm looking forward to that. I'm about as Jewish as bacon-wrapped shrimp, but I like me some latkes.

Heyyyyyyy, there's a traditional Christmas food. Shrimp. On the barbie. It's an Aussie thing. :) (You could do it inside with a Lodge Logic grill pan. Can be had at the store at the Pigeon Forge exit, if you don't have a better source for them. Just be sure to crank up the hood on your stove to exhaust the smoke, or the smoke detector will ring your ears for sure...)

Yum. Salmon. Now there's a thought.

We always used to make turkey for Thanksgiving and something else, usually ham, for Christmas. These days we have T-day dinner on the road driving down to Loscon, at a place called Pea Soup Anderson's.

We'd really prefer goose for Christmas, but they're ferociously expensive; we usually go for turkey these days. If you cook the stuffing on the side, the bird cooks pretty quickly and doesn't get overdone; I don't think we've basted a turkey in years. We almost always have guests, who bring the side dishes.

The ham that my brother (who lives in Virginia) sends us every year gets served at our annual "sometime-around-New-Year" anniversary party. We send him a large platter of dried fruit.

Hmm. I don't actually like ham either, though Kip does, so we have it sometimes. A little ham goes a long way, for me.

I wonder if goose is like duck. Duck is yummy, though I've never cooked one myself.

Almost identical to duck, only bigger. Very yummy, but way too expensive.

We have lox and bagels on Christmas, and smoked oysters and high quality lunch meats and cheeses. No one really cooks.

:-) I like this idea too.

I've done chicken, when it was just me and my mother, and she couldn't cook. Turkeys for four aren't hopeless but, they are a lot of work.

Christmas meals, of course, I've never done. The big feast holiday in Judaism is Passover, but I've only done a Passover meal once. The foods served at Passover are a traditional mix of Middle Eastern and (mostly) Eastern European cookery, which I simply don't like very much.

& I am being dragged off to an Orphan's Thanksgiving in Portland. Happy Turkey Day!

Happy Thanksgiving--have a good time in Portland!

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