Tuesday, November 23, 2021

Thanksgiving week: part two begins now

 Time for an admission: I've done fifty years of Thanksgiving turkeys (with only a couple of missed ones in there) and I have never brined that bird. Oh, one year I did a half-assed job of salting it ahead of the baking, but I'd neglected some key components to that process so it hardly counts. It's not that I don't believe in brining, it's just that my turkey is never there, sitting in the fridge days in advance, ready to be bathed in something wonderful and aromatic. It's either defrosting still, or it's waiting to be picked up fresh from the fields where it once roamed. I don't have room for a big bird to sprawl out on a whole shelf of the fridge. So, I skip that step and try to compensate by doing everything else I can to make the bird come out with the right degree of doneness, crispness and juciness. As one writer said -- the whole turkey roasting project is one big headache and the result is rarely perfect. Were it faultless, you'd do it again the very same way next year. But no, here we are, wasting our time trying something new, hoping to improve at the margins what you supposedly perfected the year before. (Read the article in WashPo. I laughed hard. It's funny because it's true.)

So on this beautiful November morning...






... I take out the turkey I purchased at the farmers market (I think I got the Blue Valley Farms one, but I'm not sure) and I set it in a brine bath of buttermilk, bay leaves, sugar, salt, roasted peppercorns, and cayenne. Of course, I don't have a brine bag, so I'm willing my garbage bag to do the job nicely. The turkey is 14.5 lbs and the recipe for this year's bird is from the NYT. (It's the slow roasted one with apple gravy, as developed by Padma Lakshmi.) I have to use NYT recipes in abundance, because I splurged and bought the paper's cooking pages (and extra couple of dollars per month) and I am determined to not have wasted my money on their food preparation wisdoms.

It takes a while to brine the turkey. Why? Because the darn bird us big and it leaves a trail of juices on the counter and in the sink and if you're obsessive like I am about poultry bacteria, you'll scrub everything ten times afterwards so as to decontaminate everything. But, on the upside, the bird is now bathing and I found a bowl large enough to contain the bird in the garbage bag, buttermilk and spices included. (I think Ed was properly horrified to see me pour buttermilk mixture into a garbage bag, but I assured him it would not go to waste, though honestly, I don't know that this is true. If the bird is just 95% perfect, that will be no better no worse than last year's bird, which was good enough without 2.5 quarts of buttermilk going into the effort.)


In the afternoon I pick up Snowdrop, who had pajama day at school today.










In the evening, the kids are all home, doing what they usually do.







(Snowdrop likes company for homework)




And even later, I am back home, vaguely keeping tabs on all that I have to do before the big day.  I've done it enough times that I know it always does come together in the end in some shape or form. Always. And if it's not all perfect, well, you can improve on it the next year or the year after.