We spent the week of Thanksgiving up in Ashburn with our families. We packed a lot of stuff into that week but one of our absolute favorite things we did was the Thanksgiving prep with both families. It's funny how it takes days to prepare for a meal that will be over in about 30 minutes. Maybe the true joy of Thanksgiving isn't really the eating, but the family time you spend together while baking, mixing, shopping, chopping, brine-ing, rolling, and [insert any other cooking term here]. And for some reason, it always takes place late, late at night. Why is that?
George had the glorious job to brine two turkeys for his family. If you've never brined a turkey before, it's fairly low maintenance after the first few steps. Basically, you make a brine solution and then submerge the turkey in said solution for at least two days, maybe three. If your George, that involved putting each turkey in it's own black trash bag with their unique brine and the attempting to stuff both turkeys (I think they were a total of about 35 lbs) and about 5 gallons of brine into a cooler. It fit with me sitting on the lid. I think the cooler ended up in the freezing garage with flats of soda piled on top to keep the lid down with George trying to keep it cold by wedging a few pieces of ice in the cracks every few hours.
After the turkeys had finished the brine, Grandmom tried to get the kids involved with stuffing the birds, but as you can tell from their faces, no one was too keen on putting their hands on the turkey, much less inside. They watched the process for about 3 minutes and then ran off to play...
...so Jen stepped in.
And PopPop. You would not believe how much stuffing Mom can get into those small cavities! Her years of experience were very obvious as I watched her muscle and shove the stuffing inside until the bird was literally bursting at the seams.
My family got into the cooking spirit as well. Late Wednesday night after we had stuffed the birds at George's parent's house, I went over to my mom's house and helped make rolls. Chad had just come into town, Stephen had come the day before, and Amy was there, too! We had a great time!
Mom wanted to double our favorite roll recipe, but we discovered about half-way through that it might be almost impossible to do because of the sheer volume of dough.
Our Bosch lost the fight and Mom and Amy had to kneed the rest of the flour in by hand. The lump of dough was so big, they needed four hands to do it!
Everyone helped roll. It was a neat experience to stand around talking and working together. We had so much dough left over, I made two batches of cinnamon rolls, too!
Yum!
I think I went to bed Wednesday night around 1:30 a.m. Not really a good idea when we had a race to run at 8:30 the next morning!
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