On Christmas Eve, Chris and I found it would just be us! We were planning on celebrating with Chris's family on Christmas Day, and my parents were bouncing around CA, visiting relatives and friends for the holidays. So, for our first Christmas just the two of us, we decided to try our hand for the FIRST time EVER - making the full turkey dinner!
We managed to plan ahead well enough to get the turkey thawed in time. Below I'm unwrapping the turkey to help it thaw a little quicker.
Surprisingly, though, we didn't get any turkey giblets! Most people would say, "who cares?", but Mom swears they add excellent flavor to the stuffing. I wasn't planning on cutting them up and including them in the stuffing like Mom does, but I was planning on using the cooking water from them to flavor the stuffing! So I was a little disappointed. We followed some hand-written instructions I had received from Mom a few years ago - soaked the turkey in brine overnight, stuffed it with homemade stufing, made mashed potatoes and peas. All went well, (though I ended up calling Mom a few times with questions about her notes).
Below, Plato the Greedy is interested in the smell of raw turkey Christmas Eve morning.
Our finished turkey! Isn't it beautiful? We were a little concerned b/c it didn't brown as much as we thought it would, but all thermometers read that it was DONE.
The dinner was DELICIOUS! It was either the best turkey ever, truly, or it just tasted that way b/c pride in a job-well-done (turkey-well-cooked?) made it taste better. Chris even liked the white meat, which he normally doesn't!
Below, we let the babies lick a plate after we were all stuffed to the gills. They enjoyed a turkey dinner, too!
The next day leftovers - Kaya the Mooch sure is interested in Chris's plate!
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