Thanksgiving

These are a bit out of order, but I thought of a funny story I need to remember. We had our Thanksgiving meal with our new neighbors this year. I asked if we could do the turkey, since Jonas does such a great job cooking it in the smoker, and it also frees up valuable space in the oven. I bought a big twenty pounder because our neighbor Megan was also having her parents come up, along with her sister and her family. Jonas and I were expecting the turkey to cook for a long time since it was so large, so we put it on about midnight the night before. (All the things we had read estimated a ten pound bird would take approximately 10 hours). We slept in since I was called off of work that morning, and went down to check the bird about 9am. Jonas came in and said, um..... the turkey's done. It was already at 190F! We have a nice thermometer that goes in the meat and tells us without having to open the smoker the current temp of the meat, so we went out and opened up the smoker to see the disaster that awaited us.

It looked even worse than the picture. It was dry and hard, I couldn't even chew up the piece of breast meat I tried. We were scheduled to eat dinner at five, and it was only about 9:30am, so Jonas headed to the store, in a hurry. The only fresh turkeys left on Thanksgiving morning were more twenty pound birds. We wanted to smoke it first for a bit, and then finish it in the oven since we had a good bit of time until dinner. Once we got the new turkey going, Jonas kept checking the probe temp to see how it was coming along. We set the temperature pretty low (225F) and expected it to take a long time. The temperature kept climbing though, and the new turkey was done at 3pm! We were scared to look at it, but the new bird was beautiful (and done, we checked the temp in so many places!). No way we should have been able to cook a twenty pound turkey at 225F in less than five hours. It was a Thanksgiving miracle!