Thanksgiving cooking day
Ever since Laurie and I got together, Thanksgiving is our holiday. Our parents can lay claim to Easter and Christmas, but Thanksgiving is for us. The tradition is to either go backpacking or car camping out to the coast, which makes it hard to get very fancy with the cooking, so we cook everything ahead of time and heat it up in a skillet when we get there.
This year I got a 13 pound organic turkey. I was hoping to find a farm around here that would sell me a heritage breed, but they were all taken by the time I started looking. The turkey has been out in the smoker for about the last 8 hours, and I just brought it in to the kitchen to finish the last 10 degrees in the oven. I made a rosemary, thyme, sage, chipotle rub, then injected the bird with spiced turkey stock.
We made a cornbread stuffing casserole using some apple chicken sausage along with the normal mushrooms, onions, celery and carrots. We still have a bit of the turkey stock from our last bird that gave it a bit of that good turkey flavor without having to cook it in the cavity of the bird.
Of course, it just wouldn't be Thanksgiving without our spelt dinner rolls to sop up all the tasty bits. This year I got some white spelt flour to use in place of the one cup of white wheat flour, and it worked out well.
Laurie whipped up a cranberry and orange relish, and we still have mashed potatoes to make over the next couple of days. We're wimping out and bringing purchased apple sauce and some Marinelli's sparkling apple cider instead of something homemade, but we are camping so we have to "rough it" somehow.