The time for eating has begun! We did our small group Thanksgiving together today. It was good food and fun all-day hangout. I actually ate only a little bit of turkey, and instead filled up on all the other stuff. The green bean casserole, the dressing, the two types of sweet potatoes, the two cranberry sauces, the mashed potatoes, and the cakes for dessert.
Fried turkey - Inject with a full bottle Tony Chachere's creole butter spiked with 3 tablespoons of Tony Chachere's seasoning (I think this amount can be increased). Keep injecting until it starts squirting out the holes you made with the injector. Yes, it sounds weird and a bit cruel. Yes, it's "cheating." But I can't argue with the results. I screwed up the frying process, and it *still* ended up being fairly moist.
How did I screw up the frying? I made the most amateurish mistake I've made in a while when it comes to food. And I could have said nothing about it, and this error would have been lost forever. But the humor level for me just seems too much for me not to share. I accidentally left the giblet bag in the neck cavity. Yes, I made that mistake. It messed with the frying time because the giblets prevented good oil contact with the upper part of the breast. I was able to pull it out, but it had already fallen behind in the cooking, so I had to flip the turkey over and finish it upside down, holding the turkey so that it was only partially submerged for the last 7 minutes or so. In a certain sense, this is precision cooking, as cooking just the top of the turkey is an unusual order. But if I hadn't done something silly in the first place, I would never have needed to do that.
But that's not the only error I made. I took another attempt at making Nutella cream puffs. I left the salt out of the cream puff batter, and they came out tasting flat. And I didn't have enough Nutella to make the cream taste like Nutella. It's a nice not-so-sweet cream puff, but it's not what I wanted. (Yes, I'm still going to eat it. But it's something I need to try one more time before I get it right. I hope.)
There's going to be another Thanksgiving on actual Thanksgiving, and I'm looking forward to some fun and exciting cooking then.
What other things are going on? Who cares? It's the month of eating where we supposedly are programmed store up fat and calories for the coming winter. I don't buy it. (Not the the fact that we eat more calories this time of year, but that it has something to do with evolutionary programming. I'm pretty sure it's culturally programmed.)
I got a different student worker to help me with the textbook. The first student I was working with is having a rough semester and couldn't commit the time. She may step back into the position after the semester is over, but that will depend on where things are and how much more help I need.
But the good news is that I'm now finished with the chapters that required a lot of diagrams, and can go through algebraic manipulation chapters faster. So maybe I can get caught up to where I want to be over the break.
