Christmas 2009 pt.1

On Christmas eve I was expecting to get off work at around 3-4pm, but ended up leaving at 11:30am. It was just as well cause I had tons of stuff to do at home before me and Mat left to go to Rawdon. We brought Maxime and Toby along with us too. Toby is Mat's mom's dog, and she had asked Mat to take him for a few days because she was gone. She's also been meaning to give him away to someone for a while now. I had asked my parents a while ago if they wanted him but they said no because he's about 5 years old and they didn't want to watch him die. But after he stayed over for the night at their place they fell in love with him and decided to keep him. Here he is at my place on Christmas eve:



We left at 6pm with Toby, Mat's brother Maxim, and a trunk full of bags and gifts. We got to my parents place and 2 minutes after we had arrived there came a knock at the door, it was my mom's friend with her two sons and her sons girlfriend that had come carolling. It was so nice, it made my mom cry lol. It's the first time I've seen carollers come to our door:





After they left Mat & Maxim left as well, to go to his dad's place in Lavaltrie till the 27th.

I brought some food from Ikea for my mom, she was so happy :D Here's some Swedish crispbread with Kalles and Branvinn's Ost grated on top, it was delicious:



We opened the presents (we open them on Christmas Eve cause my mom's from Sweden and that's what they do over there) and afterwards I started helping my dad with the turkey stuffed turkey he had decided to make, which I had been wanting to try for a while now myself. He had started on it in the afternoon, and when I arrived in the evening he asked me to finish it because he had to do other stuff. So far he had cut off the legs and removed the leg meat from the bones. So me and my sister set to work to do the rest. It was slow going, seeing as we had never done this before and didn't know how to do some things, despite descriptions and diagrams.

At around 10 or 11 she went to bed, and me and my dad started grinding the leg meat around 11:30. We didn't know which attachment to use with the grinder, so we picked the one with more teeth on it and tried. Add to that a very low, badly placed workstation with no room to work (my dad's computer desk in his tiny cramped office was the only place the grinder could be clamped). Half an hour and a lot of swearing on my dad's part we had gotten half the meat ground and decided to pack it in and finish the rest Christmas morning.

So on Christmas morning we switched attachments on the grinder, I cut the meat into smaller cubes, and it worked just fine.

Later on I decided that I wanted to brine the butterflied (ie: horribly mangled) turkey breasts so that they would be nice and tender! Great idea, no? So my sister mixed up the brine per Alton Brown's instructions, and seeing as we didn't have 5lbs of ice to add to it to cool it, I went outside and put a few shovelfuls of snow in. I had no idea how much to put, I think I might have doubled the quantity of liquid. So it was nice and cold, in go the breasts. I figured I'd let them brine an hour or so, if a whole turkey should be brined overnight, an hour should be fine for some mangled breasts. By then we had to start getting ready to go to the Christmas dinner at Mat's dad's place. We forgot to take the breasts out of the brine till we were walking out the door, so we said "well ok we'll leave it a few hours more till we get home and it'll be ok".

Well first of all I ended up not going back to my parents place after dinner, I stayed to sleep over with Mat at his dad's place. But before they left I told my dad to make sure to take the breasts out of the brine, rinse and dry them when he got home. He said sure. The next day when we went to visit I discovered that the breasts had not been removed and had brined overnight. Apparently my sister had reminded my dad but to no avail. The now-renamed franken-bird was taken out of the oven, and looked lovely. I tasted some of the broth and almost gagged. We had about eight pounds of inedibly salty roasted turkey on our hands. So I took some home and I'll use it up in very small portions in other things like soups, stews, etc. Here's what it looks like cold out of the fridge. I forgot to take a pic after it was taken out of the oven because I was too overwhelmed by salt:



Here are some delicious turkey gizzards that I roasted, boiled, and ate:



And here's some really good turkey soup I made from the carcass and leg bones. I salted and peppered them and roasted them till golden brown, then boiled them with all the scrapings for a few hours. After that I removed the bones, let them cool, and picked off all the meat. Then I had to reduce the stock for a while more, by about 2/3. Then in went the meat pickings, added some salt, and voila! Delicious turkey soup:



Pt 2 to come later, I'm dead tired and getting over a cold, have to get up at 7am tomorrow.