Giving Thanks....

....for thanksgiving dinners that could have been ruined, but weren't.

What a fiasco this last week has been. All because of one dead turkey. Little did he know that his demise would be so traumatic, after the fact. I'm sure his life was never so exciting.

I heard from my chiropractor that organic turkeys were being made available by a local health food store for a very reasonable price. When I called to order it, the person who answered the phone was in a hurry so I wasn't able to ask how much it would cost. It came in on Monday, and I soon found out.

Forty. whole. dollars.

For a turkey.

My mother-in-law has cancer and her doctor told her she could have some thanksgiving turkey if it was brined in a salt water solution first. I was so excited when I heard that because I had already planned on brining my turkey this year thanks to Pioneer Woman.

Guess how much this stuff cost? A lot. Especially considering that it's mostly salt.



I was planning on having a "Pioneer Woman Thanksgiving" all around. I had all the ingredients for her mashed potatoes, her sweet potato casserole, her rolls, and her gravy. I was going to do the green bean and tomato side dish too, among other things, but it's a small miracle that what got done got done as it was.

She makes it all look so easy what with her big pictures demonstrating each and every step, and the ongoing dialogue and all, but I'm here to tell you it's not nearly as easy as it looks. If I would have known what brining a turkey entailed for me I never would have done it. And that's just brining the turkey. Cooking it was a whole 'nother story.

It was a 20 lb. turkey, so it was like wrestling with it to move it from one place to the next to begin with. It was fresh, and the juices were just.....everywhere. I managed to get it from the van into a very large rubber watering tub, that was none too clean, but was the best I could do right this second. It was so slippery that it almost landed on the floor.

I am so stupid.

That rubber tub weighed almost as much as the turkey.

Earlier in the evening Josh's parent's had called to inform us that they were driving straight through and would be here that night instead of sometime the next afternoon. We should have known better, but I decided to get the turkey brining while we waited for them to get here around midnight.

I was so tired. It was 10:30 p.m. Not a good time to try to figure out something new. But I managed to get it down the stairs from the garage into the laundry room and then back up the stairs to my kitchen....with mud dripping off the bottom of the tub. Have I mentioned before that we have white carpet? Or that Josh had just finished shampooing my carpets? I didn't think so.

I cut all the wrapping off of the turkey, rinsed it thoroughly, placed it in some turkey cooking bags that were doubled up, (and much cheaper than the $16 Williams Sonoma was selling them for), and poured the chilled brine into the bag followed by a gallon of ice water. The bags do not hold themselves up so there was brine and ice water all over the place. I finally had Josh come and help me, but between the large pot and the large turkey it really was easier to do it myself.

Finally that was done. I couldn't help but tell myself that the worst was over. Now all I had to do was let it sit for at least 12 hours. I was standing there holding the top of the bag closed while Josh tried to figure out how to use the tie thingys that came with the bags.

They don't work.

So I had Jordan hunt down a rubber band. It took him at least ten minutes to find one. I was convinced that this was only happening because I need to work on patience.

I could do this.

I finally got the rubber band on the bag. I lifted it up to put it back in the dirty rubber tub so that Josh could take it back out to the garage....and it slipped out of my hands, thankfully into the tub, before I let go.

Thus causing the cheap Wal-Mart bag to pop....

And spewing brine all over the dirty rubber tub and my kitchen.

It took me all afternoon to prepare that brine, not to mention its' cost.

We hastily found two large heavy duty garbage bags, doubled them up, and poured the turkey and the salvageable brine into them.

Very carefully, Josh took it into the garage and put it well out of the dog's reach. Our minds were in "catastrophe avoidance overdrive" at this point. I could vividly picture the remnants of my forty dollar turkey after Pepper got ahold of it,

and how I would therefore methodically kill her.

At that point, I was ready to forget the whole "Pioneer Woman" ordeal. It would be so much easier just to stick to what I already knew, even if it wasn't "fabulous". By the time I was done cleaning up the mess, I had a not-so-nice email all written out in my head, ready to be sent to "Pioneer Woman".

I didn't wait for his parent's to get here. I went straight to bed.

I was in a much better frame of mind Thanksgiving morning. Other than the brine not washing off the turkey, and a few hitches here and there, I managed to pull it off. I'm not kidding, one bite of that turkey was worth every second of trouble. It was unbelievable.

Everything else looked nothing like the pictures, but turned out well anyway,too.

And really I think my sister's mashed potatoes are better, and much easier.

Now that I have most of the kinks worked out of this brining thing, I'm looking forward to trying it again. I wish you all could have tasted it. It was so juicy and tender that we didn't even have to slice it. The meat just fell off the bone. I noticed that it was strangely silent the first five minutes or so into the meal. Everyone was enjoying it that much. I've never tasted or seen anything like it.