I’m the official turkey cooker and carver this year and therefore interested in Alton Brown’s video on YouTube on how to carve a turkey. His suggestion is to place the turkey on a cutting board, using a towel as traction, and to cut out each of the main parts of the turkey.
I enjoy cooking. I’m no master chef, but I’m think I’m pretty good at the small list of things I can make. One of my favorite things to make is Thanksgiving dinner.
Assuming people aren’t just being nice, I’ve received good reviews on my turkeys. There’s no secret to how I make it, I follow Alton Brown’s recipe pretty much verbatim.
Thanksgiving isn’t thanksgiving without mashed potatoes. Mashed potatoes are my favorite food. I’ve spent years trying to perfect the recipes and a few years ago I found something that allows me to cheat. The Steam’N Mash by Westinghouse
Finally, I have started making home made turkey gray in the last few years. My favorite so far is generically called Turkey Neck Gravy. There’s many variations of it, this website seems to have the basic recipe that I use. I only use the neck, the heart and gizzard go in the trash. Animal organs shouldn’t be eaten as far as I’m concerned. I also like to add mushroom, then again I like to add mushrooms to everything.
I won’t be making the main thanksgiving dinner this year. I will be making 15lbs turkey on Saturday.
“The FCC says that we have more media choices than ever before. But only a few corporations decide what we can choose. That is not choice. That’s like a dictator deciding what candidates are allowed to stand for parliamentary elections, and then claiming that the people choose their leaders. Different voices do not mean different viewpoints, and these huge corporations all have the same viewpoint–they want to shape government policy in a way that helps them maximize profits, drive out competition, and keep getting bigger.” Big Brother might not turn out to be the government, it might turn out to be the giant company when they all merge together as one.
That’s the problem with big companies. As Alton Brown recently said, “They?re businesses doing what businesses do. They don?t love you”. The first thing I learned in a high school business class (and probably the only thing I remember) was a businesses purpose is to make money first and foremost. They need to grow and expand that business, like a virus, to continue to be profitable. We expect the government to jump in and be the antivirus. But if government is infected by big business then we have lost. Or have we?
Even when I watch my local news I wonder if they are reporting the right things. So I stop watching local news, and National News, and stopped watching Fox News years ago when I though they were slanted (can’t stand that Bill O’Reilly guy). We still have control of our elected officials. So what’s stopping us from making change?
My favorite cooking show host Alton Brown has seen the light
“research has led me to believe that the obesity crises in this country stems not only from lack of exercise but from the uber-ubiquitous use of two ingredients in packaged/manufactured foods: high fructose corn syrup (devised in Japanese labs in the early ?70s) and hydrogenated (or partially hydrogenated) fats. I believe?or at least hypothesize, that were these ingredients completely removed from our diets, we?d be okay. No we wouldn?t be able to eat anything we want and still sit on our butts Tivo-ing Dr. Phil but we?d be a heck of a lot better off”
(May 7th 2004)Well DUH! I respect this guy but I cannot believe it he has just now figured it out. Hopefully he uses his new found knowledge and incorporates it into his show. I came to this realization about 2 years ago and about a year ago I started to reduce my intake of high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated fats. The results: over 25lbs of weight loss without doing anything else. I haven’t been able to completely eliminate them but the increased amounts of fiber and heathy foods should be enough to flush out the crap, so to speak.
I’m still not the weight I was when I was 18, that would take another 25lbs. What I really need to do is, as Alton did, work out. I was doing that quite a bit about 5 years ago with good results but I didn’t change my diet. Today I’m just not motivated. It’s getting more and more a priority, maybe I need to make this a goal for this year.
For you dear reader I implore you. Next time you buy something at the grocery store that’s in a convenient factory made package. Look closely at the ingredients. If you don’t know what they are should you be putting them in your body or your families body? It’s doing more bad than good.
The main dish, the bird, was made using the Alton Brown “Good Eats” method. It involves brining the turkey the night before. To prepare, I made a test turkey a few weeks before the big day. It was a small 10 pound turkey and the experiment proved that it was the way to go. The boys ate it like it was going out of style.
The next new thing was gravy. I had always wanted to make homemade gravy. Most recipes call for using the internal organs, but I find that to be gross. Considering that things like the liver are waste creation factories. I did however find a good one using the neck bone. Normally I would use the Alton Brown recipe but it seemed a bit complicated for the first try as it requires two recipes. I thought I had the “Gravy Confidential” episode on my Tivo, but looks like it mislabeled it. None the less, the results were delicious. Another hit.
I had wanted to make some mashed cauliflower but went with traditional mashed potatoes instead. Mashed cauliflower tastes almost like mashed potatoes but without the carbs and more fiber.
Nothing else real fancy besides that. We had stuffing, pumpkin pie, the normal stuff.
I couldn’t agree more with Alton Brown when he says (June 10th, BTW).
“I?m just saying that people with authority should have to play by a set of rules…published rules. If as a nation we?re going to have to tolerate being probed, scanned, profiled and frisked before we can get on an airplane, so be it. But it seems to me that we deserve a little consistency. Otherwise we open ourselves up to a whole new brand of bully…bullies with badges…not to mention really nice omelet pans.”
(TSA = Transportation Security Administration)
In the year before September 11th, 2001 I was working away from home in California. I flew back and forth for 9 months and got quite familiar with the airport system. I was luck that my assignment was over just before those planes crashed into the towers. At the time I thought it a good idea to turn over security to the feds. I mean, they should be doing for the safety of the citizens instead of for the money (not that “for the money” is a bad thing). Having been through security since then I can think that it is nothing more than a joke. They have random searches of peoples shoes? Give me a break.
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