Cooking Big Bird

In a moment of questionable sanity our younger son ordered a free-range turkey for Thanksgiving. I say this because of the purchase price and also the size of the turkey. It was just under 30 pounds. Well, we went to my parents’ for Thanksgiving and Christmas and so this past weekend we had Valenturkey. Our three “kids” came here and we invited two friends to join us for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. The weather was beautiful and we were able to eat on the porch.

This was by far the biggest thing I have ever tried to cook and I will admit that I was rather intimidated by its size. Just thawing it took a week in our refrigerator. It was so solidly frozen that I joked that we could just turn off the refrigerator and everything would be kept cold for days.

There was also the matter of the pan for roasting it in. Nothing in our kitchen was large enough, so we ended up finding these giant aluminum ones in SAM’s that did the trick. I doubled them when I put it in the oven.

No cooking chart that I found went as high in weight as this big bird, so I just really had to guess how long it would take to get it done.

  Well, I was off an hour, but we had a good salad (made by the same son) and good company and some Fat Tire and other beer to pass the time as we waited.

Eventually,…

It was good.

After turkey sandwiches on Sunday, we split it up three ways and began to reclaim our refrigerator.

I think this might be destined to be one of those memorable family stories.