Thanksgiving dinner

I haven't posted in about a month, I know. I've just been lazy. I'll link to some photos some time soon.

Anyway, yesterday was Thanksgiving, for which Alysha and I cooked a traditional turkey dinner. It was the first time that either of us had ever roasted a turkey before. We took advice from various relatives and websites on turkey cooking and went over to the Co-op on Sunday to do our shopping. The smallest turkey that we could buy was 12 pounds and frozen. Shopping proved a little tricky - no cranberry sauce or cranberries in the supermarket. The friendly assistant who we asked (who knows one of my UPEI lecturers, oddly enough) said that it's usually not stocked until Christmas and recommended trying the butchers (we eventually found some at the little shop in Kyleakin). I also couldn't find lard or shortening to make pie crust with, but found some frozen blocks of shortcrust pastry that worked well enough. I threw the turkey in a sinkful of water as soon as we got back and left it there for 10 hours and that did the trick for defrosting after it spent the night in the fridge.

Early Monday afternoon we got cooking for an evening meal. The turkey seemed to be cooking very well and we had prepared up all our vegetables ready to be cooked in the evening. It all seemed very easy, and given the stories we've heard about the difficulty of making a Thanksgiving dinner and the disasters that can result, Alysha and I felt a little bit nervous as dinner time approached. We felt as though we must have forgotten something or messed something up. Even the cleaning of the turkey, something that Alysha thought she would find really disgusting (she warned me that she would probably make a lot of "weird noises" while assisting in it), went well, with Alysha coming around to playing with the turkey while it was in the sink and eventually singing "Alouette" to it as she picked things off of it (the song's about plucking clean a lark, just in case you didn't know).

So as dinner approached, we decided on two plans of action. Plan A was that the turkey would turn out and everything would be fine. Plan B was to be put into action if the turkey failed, and consisting of getting our expected guests (Jamie and Rob) so drunk before the meal that they would not notice if the food was bad.

The only slight hitch was that one of our guests missed his bus, so dinner ended up being a little over an hour later than we intended so we had to work out keeping the food warm without drying it out or making it soggy. The turkey turned out really good, so we were quite happy. Our guests were Jamie, Rob from the Uig hostel, and Helen, our new relief manager, who had arrived in time to eat with us. Mid-meal, a girl came in looking for the hostel that she had booked - it turned out that it was one down the street, but since we found out that she was from Alberta we instructed her to come back for some food once she checked in. Another guy from the village, Jeff, wandered in as well in time for dessert (apple pie and ice cream - no canned pumpkin to be found in the Co-op either).