I forgot to compliment the turkey fruit dish too, that is so cute and creative! Oly, I bet that was good. The smallest I could find was the 14 pounder, much smaller than I used to get, but I have found that the smaller the bird the more tender it tends to be. The organic one I got was a fresh never frozen as well and I agree, it definitely has more flavor than the larger retail turkey's I used to buy.

Marilyln, you're right, keeping chickens is not profitable, at least in our area. There isn't enough hours of sunlight without provided supplemental light, which would cost more than the eggs are worth, I think, plus I worry about burning the coop down. So I'm feeding 21 chickens and getting 1 egg per day from my one little faithful Barnevelder, the rest have all given up entirely. I won't get a lot of eggs until spring now. LOL, Seagrass. I keep getting those "senior citizen" mailings too, and I keep thinking I'm not old enough. Of course, senior citizen tickets at the local ballpark are available if you're over 50, so..... You are just what my mother needs. I told her she needed a hearing aid. She told me that everyone just needs to talk louder! Oh, and to keep this on topic, she loves turkey, no matter the brand. She particularly loves the crusty edges of stuffing left in the pan too, those really unhealthy and greasy bits. Annie

I roast turkeys for Passover Seder, usually, rather than Thanksgiving. 20-22 lbs. So, as the part of the service that says "the festive meal is served" is coming up, I pull the turkey out. We start serving the soup, getting the meat out and slicing if necessary (depending on what it is), clearing the soup, serving the fish, plating the sides, clearing the fish, plating the meat, then carving the turkey. In other words, I let it rest until I'm good and ready to bother with it. :) Same as everyone else, 30-45 minutes. :)

So the gravy involved experimentation, yelling, throwing food out, and frenzied remaking. I had a little pork stock and a good amount of duck stock. I expected someone to bring some turkey drippings, and we had boxed chicken stock for an emergency. I thought it would be fun to make a few kinds of gravy. So I did something that made perfect sense to me. I put about 2 c of AP flour in a saucepan and browned it. It was fun, I got to do that rolling thing where you move the pan to get the contents to roll into a wave and thus mix. Okay, the kitchen got a little smoky but oh well. My idea, you see, was that I'd have a jar of this pre-browned flour on hand for future "instant" gravies and general thickening. Because sometimes you need a sauce thickened right away and don't have time to mix raw flour with a little of the liquid, whisk it smooth, add and cook until the floury taste is gone, and you don't want the texture of a cornstarch thickened sauce. Then I made the gravy for my low cooked deep fried pork cubes. I simply put the pork stock in a small saucepan, added butter and pork fat, then stirred in the pre-browned flour. It worked great: dissolved right away, no clumping, no further cooking of the flour needed, and easy to adjust the degree of thickness by adding a bit more pre-browned flour (let's call this PBF for short) because the thickness responded immediately. That was easy, I thought. Then SWMBO started, not yelling exactly, but loudly expressing her disappointment and astonishment that I had cooked the raw flour, which is Never Ever Done and Unheard Of. DD took a few minutes to comprehend what I had done, then joined in the vocalization of Great Dismay. Protesting, DD proceeded to make the duck stock with my PBF. And immediately claimed it was a disaster. I was busy frying confit duck breasts so I didn't see what she did. I think she may have used the PBF as if it was raw flour, starting the roux by cooking butter and flour. Maybe the PBF quickly became burned - since I didn't do any additional cooking of PBF during the actual gravy making, I am not sure how it would tolerate further cooking. I just don't know. Anyway she said the texture was gritty and the taste was burned, and that all the duck gravy had to be thrown out. Throwing out a pint of duck stock is not something that makes DD happy. She said so. In the end, she started all over with the Normal Sane Roux Method You Dummy and made gravy with the turkey drippings and chicken stock, and it was fine. The pork bites drizzled with gravy turned out to be very popular. So there. And I have a jar of PBF that I need to hide or label as something else, lest SWMBO or DD find it and throw it out.