Thanksgiving Anti-Tradition Becomes Tradition

On Sunday morning, Jill and I took a 4 mile walk on a wide-open Bethany Beach, Delaware, a day after returning from  La Romana, Dominican Republic, where we spent the week including Thanksgiving Day.

At over 60 degrees, it was unusually clear and sunny for this late in November in the Mid-Atlantic and I was still recovering from the mind-blowing experience of airplane rides, which not 24 hours earlier had ferried me at 38,000 feet from Santo Domingo to Philadelphia over the very same beach on which I then stood. So it was this kind of reflective, expansive mood I was in.

I'll come right out and say it, because this is the season for giving thanks: I'm fortunate. For lots of reasons and going over Thanksgivings past in my head I realized that since Thanksgiving 1997 I have not spent consecutive Thanksgivings in the same place.

Cooking this up for a blog entry, I resorted to the familiar formula of the list of locations I have spent the last 13 Thanksgivings dating back to 1997:

1997 - Boise, Idaho
1998 - Basking Ridge, New Jersey
1999 - Queechee, Vermont
2000 - Edinburgh, Scotland
2001 - Cabo San Lucas, Mexico
2002 - Aspen, Colorado
2003 - Lancaster, Pennsylvania
2004 - Cecilton, Maryland
2005 - Todos Santos, Mexico
2006 - Russian River Valley, California
2007 - Lake Tahoe, California
2008 - Vashon Island, Washington
2009 - La Romana, Dominican Republic

With the odd jaunt to Hood River, Oregon (~1993) I had spent nearly every Thanksgiving up to and including 1997 in my hometown of Boise, Idaho. Since then, I've shown a fearsome resistance to tradition by spending no-two Thanksgiving Holidays in the same place twice and without even meaning to built something of a new tradition.

Next year is virtually assured not to be a repeat of this year so the anti-tradition will live on another year at least.

Fried Turkey: Well Done!

It's been a rough start to December since I've been in a coma since Thanksgiving when I finally succumbed to my spirit as an adventurous eater (not to mention the peer-pressure of the Nascar bandwagon) and ate a turkey that I had first painstakingly deep-fried in 4 gallons of peanut oil. (That's the bird above, in all its deep golden, crispified glory mere moments before the carnage began.)

Ever since Madden convinced me to try my first turducken back in '03, I've been gathering my courage to take the ultimate step and deep-fry a turkey in gratitude of our nation's founders' willingness to mooch a meal off the Indians in that first Plymouth winter.

Internet research abounds, both extolling the benefits and warning of the substantial hazards of frying a turkey (see: 'Deep-fried Disaster'). So it wasn't lightly, nor without a significant risk/rewards analysis, that I accepted this challenge.

Two things are true with frying turkeys, you need the right equipment and a shitload of oil. In this case the right equipment is more or less a giant-sized bunsen burner which comes some assembly-required in a kit. We got ours at Home Depot and I wouldn't recommend any jury-rigged contrivances as stand-ins since this seems to be how most of the explosively bad endings happen. That, and there are lots of unforeseen tools like the turkey-dunking/retrieval hook apparatus, as well as the long thermometer for keeping your oil in the sweet spot between 325 - 350 degrees farenheit. (Too cold and your bird won't cook, too hot and it's fireball time!)

But the best part is that when you get it right, as we did, you spend minutes (45 of them), not hours, waiting for your bird and when it comes out the skin is crispy and tastes like bacon, while the interior is moist and delicious.