First Thanksgiving

[pdxkevin]

I hope that you had a great Thanksgiving. Tina & I spent the day to ourselves to keep it a stress free Thanksgiving in our first home.

Took forever to get the bird ready. We went out to the store the on Wednesday night to pick up all the things we still needed for Thanksgiving day cooking (or so we thought). I got the bird in a nice brine to soak overnight. It was my first brine and turned out pretty easy to do. It was a salt water base with black pepper, chopped garlic, thinly sliced onion and lemon, with a few bay leaves added.

First thing in the am, we started looking for our injector. I know we had one at one time... It turns out that the tip had fallen into the garbage disposal a while back and got mangled. So it was off to the store to try to find one on Thanksgiving morning. Three stores later we got a tip that this one store out in the boonies might have them. There was a large display of everything you would need for Thanksgiving cooking.... most of the stuff was almost al gone.. the spot for the injectors was bare. bummer... looking around the shelves right around the area we found the last injector just sitting between some boxes. Got it... now was there anything else we need? Nope so its back home.

The turkey is injected and time to give it a rub coasting and ... wait the legs are tied together with plastic. That will melt out on the grill. No problem just remove it and replace with string. The only string I had was a nylon based string - it would melt too out on the grill. So it was back to the store for string.

Got the turkey all trussed up and ready for the grill. The hickory chips were smoking nicely and the bird eased just perfectly onto the grill. I needed to get the instant thermometer... Found it right in the drawer where it should be. The thing had been left on all last year and had a very dead battery. OK back to the store to find an odd sized watch-type battery. They had one battery which was roughly the same size, though a little shorter than the original. It worked as long as I squeezed the contacts. With a little help from some strong tweezers I was able to bend the contacts to hold it in tightly. It worked.

The 12 lbs turkey took just 3 hours to cook out on the grill and was the juiciest, most flavorful turkey I had ever made. The bonus was it didn't take up the whole oven so we could still make some pies and stuffing.

Now it is time to get ready for the Christmas season. Next weekend, we go tree hunting...