December 9-12, 2021: San Antonio Birthdays
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Well, another year in pictures is drawing to a close, and Christmas was the last event of this year. The pandemic has taken its toll, and there were no amazing trips this year. At Christmas, we and our friends were all vaccinated, hale and hearty, and so things were routine as Christmas Day approached.

No Pardon for This Turkey

Whenever we are in San Antonio for Thanksgiving, which we were this year, I cook my yearly turkey at Christmas. But to take advantage of the low prices for turkeys at Thanksgiving, I buy it then and put it in the freezer until Christmas.

Cooking a turkey is such a big deal, that I've always figured to try to cook the largest one I can find, so there are plenty of leftovers to freeze for turkey dinners throughout the year.

So I usually make the rounds of the grocery stores nearby to try to find the largest one I can. Sometimes, I also leave a message with the Meat Department to be on the lookout for a big one. This has gotten less and less frequent as growers have gotten better and better at raising them to a certain size and no larger, so that they can fit exactly four of them into a standard box.

The week before Thanksgiving, I spoke with the young lady next door at Tom Thumb, and left her my name and number should she come across a large one. A few days later I did indeed get a call from her, so I went next door to see what she had found. As it turned out, she'd found a real monster- over 27 pounds! To put that in perspective, the average turkey is around 20 pounds, and I consider myself lucky if I can find one over 22 pounds. I took a picture of the tag as proof of my good fortune; this turkey was, but at least a few pounds, the largest of the 50 or so turkeys I have cooked in my lifetime!

I spent the next hour in the store happily filling a cart with the $75 worth of groceries I needed to buy to take advantage of the special 39-cents-a-pound price for this turkey, which meant that this turkey cost me just a bit under $11.

The turkey went into the freezer until the week before Christmas, when I transferred it to the fridge to thaw. A few days before Christmas I start drying out bread slices, and two days before I do the really tedious work, which is cutting the celery into tiny cubes, dicing the onion, and chopping the parsley.

Christmas Day is the day it all comes together. Given that I wanted to serve dinner around 5, and given that the turkey usually takes 20 minutes per pound (stuffed), the turkey has to get into the oven between 8 and 9 in the morning.

That means getting up at six or so to mix up the stuffing and get it into the turkey. Into a huge stockpot go the bread cubes I cut the day before, and to that I add almost a can of poultry seasoning (a lot easier than doing all the spices separately). The bread cubes are thoroughly mixed before I add some melted butter, and then they are mixed again. Then I begin to add in the celery, onion, and parsley, mixing it as I go, and moistening it thoroughly with chicken broth. I always make more stuffing than I need, cooking the rest of it outside the turkey the next day.

Now comes a tricky part- actually stuffing the bird. I know you are supposed to only stuff it loosely, but I really pack it in, which is one reason it takes so long to cook. I like stuffing, and the stuffing that cooks in the bird always tastes better than the stuffing cooked separately. You have to stuff it by hand, and it can get messy unless I take it slow. But eventually it is done, and I use skewers to hold the bird closed.

The turkey is then transferred to the roasting pan- and picking up a turkey this big isn't easy- particularly when it starts the roasting process upside down. (This is done to ensure the dark meat gets done; if you cook it right side up, and cook it until the breast is done perfectly, the underside of the turkey tends to be a bit underdone. That's why the turkey in the picture Fred took about 10am seems to look a bit odd- it is upside down. It gets turned around noon, and that is probably the most difficult operation at all. I have a couple of thick towels I use for this purpose each year; I use them as pads because the bird is very hot. I'd never turned a 30+-pound stuffed bird before (and I am not looking forward to doing so again). But I got it done, and retired the towels to the laundry to be washed and used again next year. I was rewarded with a perfectly-done bird, though.

Christmas Dinner

There is actually not much to do while the turkey is actually cooking, except to baste it regularly, tent the breast after it is turned, and go about fixing the other dishes that I make.

This gives Fred and I a chance to open gifts and get the house ready for guests. The cats seem to love Christmas, for they get to deconstruct the tree fairly regularly, even though there are gifts all underneath it. That's Zack at left, just hanging out.

These past few years, our guest list has been pretty much the same. Mario and Steve join us, as well as Lynne (our cat sitter) and our good friend Lou. Greg sometimes joins us, but this year he is helping John Toohey and John Lambert with their own dinner.

We have two more guests, but they usually arrive about six-thirty. These are our friends Justin and Gary, who stop in when they return from Louisiana where they have a noontime meal with Gary's family near Shreveport. For some reason, neither Fred nor I took all that many pictures this year, so I don't have one of every guest. In the picture at right, are Mario and Steve to my right and Lynne and Lou near Fred, who is taking the picture.

I should particularly have been more aware that I needed to take a picture of the record-setting turkey when it came out of the oven, but it looked just like all the other ones in this photo album- only bigger.

Mario brought a vegetable casserole, so we had that, turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, salad, rolls, and dessert. As I have learned to do to cut down on how messy the kitchen gets, I have taken to freezing containers of gravy from the previous year so I don't have to make it today. I've also decided there's no real reason to make a huge batch of it tomorrow, either. I will just freeze small containers of turkey fat, giblets, and juices, so that any time I want fresh gravy, I can take out a set of those packages and have everything I need.

We had a really great time this year, and Justin and Gary got a chance to meet and talk with everyone else when they arrived.

Over the next four days, I cut up the turkey, made stock, and created all my freezer containers of turkey and dressing (making it easy to have a turkey dinner, with fresh gravy) any time we want. These all get labeled and frozen. By the time I was done, as large as this turkey was, my freezer was chock full. But it's all worth it; a turkey dinner is one of my favorites.

Christmas brought our year to a close, and the last thing we did was to get ready to head down to Florida for New Year's. Since that trip was almost all in 2022, it will be the first album page for next year.

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	December 9-12, 2021: San Antonio Birthdays
	Return to the Index for 2021