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Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

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THANKSGIVING IN BEND, 2010 - UPDATED

This year was the first time that I’ve ever roasted a turkey! It turned out pretty well, too….
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FRED MEYER, where I do a lot of shopping, had a promotion where they gave me a turkey for FREE, if I bought $150.00 worth of other merchandise. Since we had just got back from Maui and needed to stock up on perishables, it was pretty easy….and I ended up with a 21-pound turkey….
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What did I know about cooking a turkey? Precious little, if you want the truth—so I checked out the TWO-HOUR TURKEYwebsite referenced in Safeway’s weekly sales e-mail. As it turned out, this made the entire process easy - and it resulted in a well-cooked turkey in just over two hours!

Starting with the naked bird -
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I followed the instructions - washing, salting and peppering - and slid it into the 485-degree oven…
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and after 2+ hours of roasting, and about an hour of resting, it was ready to carve
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The same Safeway site had a video explaining how to carve a turkey, but I wasn’t willing to put my “skills” on display to an audience, so I did it before anyone arrived….
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I know that Dad would have been giggling at my efforts, but I got the bird cut up in reasonable fashion…..and this is what it looked like near the end. You can see the carcass in the foreground, with the bones and skin from wings and legs to its right - turkey broth, baby…... Left rear is a pan full of breast slices, and the freezer containers have the excess leg and wing meat. There’s a pan of slices in the oven keeping warm

We don’t have a proper dining room in this house - the piano is taking up that space - but for small groups we can bring in the high table from the front porch (for which Gail made a cloth this year) along with its two chairs and our two bar-stool chairs and Sophia’s high stool…it looked nice
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The table was nicely set in Gail’s inimitable way, despite the fact that all our really nice stuff is still in boxes in the garage (isn’t it interesting how much of what we have we can easily get by without? Good to keep in mind.).
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There was lots of food and good cheer….along with mashed potatoes, two kinds of gravy, wonderful dressing and three different cranberry relishes…..Yummmmmmmmmmm.
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after which we all contributed to a piece of artwork commemorating 2010 Thanksgiving in Bend,
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and then we finished off the celebration in different ways
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It was so much fun that no one thought of taking a family photo to remember the day by…..ah well. Plenty of time for that. Here’s the one from our last day in Maui….
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Compare that to what is actually going on outside our little house on Songbird Lane….
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I miss Hawaii…...Chico, here we come in 2011!!
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UPDATED: Turkey bones, skin and all other scraps ended up on the camp stove out in the garage (to avoid having the house smelling like turkey soup for days)
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