NoJoMo Turkey Day Minus 1

 Company should be here any time now!

Grace is bringing the GrandGabey, but Jacob will probably be asleep. He was up all night two nights ago with Gabriel and didn’t get to sleep until noon yesterday. So he was up all night last night catching up on important work (computer games) and may sleep to noon today.

I slow cooked a turkey with Kathy’s Grandma Jensen’s recipe. It cooked about 10 degrees too long getting up to 180 degrees on the meat thermometer when I only wanted to go to 170, but is still pretty moist. Slow cooking is very forgiving. The basic idea is to brown the turkey in the oven at 400 degrees or so for the first 30-60 minutes then turn the temp way down to 200 or so until it is done 8 hours or so later. Today, thanks to the Internet, I found out the original recipe for this way of cooking came from an Adele Davis cookbook from the 1960s. That fits. Grandma Jensen was such a fan that she paid Kathy $1 to read Davis’ book when in high school. I have read over and over that such slow cooking is not recommended by the USDA and several such sources, but found a 1988 study from The University of Minnesota, department of food science that carefully documents that there is no way a slow-cooked turkey that is cooked all the way up to 165 degrees can host salmonella. 1 hour at 140 degrees kills salmonella. I have cooked dozens of turkeys this way. One year a guest told me that it was even better than his mother’s, and she’s a professional cook. No one has ever gotten sick as the rumors warn.

I was going out to coffee this morning. Got in the car and started it. Wondered if I should get out in the rain and scrape the windshield. Shut the car off and came back inside to surf, cook, and wash a couple of windows. So, I’ve been home all day. Kathy hasn’t killed me yet. There probably wouldn’t have been anyone at coffee anyway.

I made some plain steamed green beans (no fancy mushroom soup or canned fried onion rings), and a bunch of fat-free, lactose-free custards. Custard is so simple and yet satisfying. Even Kathy can eat it. Wonder who thought of it?

Then we’ll have some baked sweet potatoes.

I wrote the above this morning before the visit. It’s almost 7:00 PM now. The visit went so well. Everyone arrived about 12:30. Even Jacob came. So, there were 7 for lunch. No one ate very much so there will be lots of turkey to take for tomorrow too. Everyone liked the food though. David, Janet, and Jerry looked very good. All are as light and healthy looking and sounding as I’ve seen them in years. Really, I haven’t seen Janet since Grace and Jacob’s wedding. I’ve seen David two or three times since then. If computers ever make it real easy to do video calling we will likely spend more time face to face that way than real life meetings. We are just too far apart and too busy. Kathy no longer travels well at all.

They liked our new doors. The whole outside of the house looks pretty good these days. All painted and buttoned up. I’m sure this is the first any of them has seen our house when it wasn’t all white inside. I owe that all to Deborah and Benjamin. They just decided to have colored walls inside. Deborah picked out the colors and we did it. I am getting better at painting every time I undertake a job. The video instructions on YouTube and the home fix-up sites like Lowes are very helpful to someone like me who never learned a thing about house maintenance as a kid. I could have done so much better with the doors if I’d found the guy who installed them before we bought the doors. Clearly the doors we bought were not as good as we thought, but he got them in and added the trim they needed to fit just right. They look fine, now, but it could have gone smoother if I’d gotten deeper doors. I didn’t even know they were not a completely standard item, but our house is much older than the average one. While installing the back doorknob set I noticed that cleaning did not remove all the spots near the handles. Looks like the 20+ year old back door is rusting from under the paint. I may just go buy a new door. It is completely standard and all I would have to do is take off the hinge pins and switch out doors and handles. On the other hand, it is just a rear door and doesn’t actually leak air or anything, just looks a little unsightly. Maybe I will just sand and repaint it. I would guess the rust will come right back, but it may buy me a couple of years.

Have I mentioned lately what a bright, good-looking, nice family I married up in to? Each of our three in-law guests is an accomplished and fascinating person . They work hard. Have tons of fun. We tried not to, but the conversation did get into politics. I know all three of them are far to the left of me, but we agree on some things and no fist fights resulted! I have some really radical ideas about how politics and economics ought to work. We did manage to avoid religion altogether. Mostly, we caught up on how everyone has been doing. Janet and Jerry are both recovered from serious intestinal difficulties. It was good to hear that both had good outcomes from fairly natural home-treatments. How about that! Like her sister and brother-in-law, my wife, Kathy has done extraordinarily well with self-care. She has just learned what she needs to eat and not eat, do and not do, go and not go… to stay functioning. It is not easy, but she does it.

Tomorrow is the big deal! I will take lots of pics. I have video of Gabriel and will try to get that posted this week too. More tomorrow.

Oh No! I just remembered the sweet potatoes! They’re still in the oven!