Phew, I'm still stuffed and it's almost 11:00 p.m.! We both agreed that this was the best Thanksgiving meal, possibly best meal of any kind, that we've ever prepared. Everything was great! We started cooking around 9:30 a.m. and just kept at it until it was all done.

Tried some new stuff with the bird this year, maybe we did some of this last year too, but I can't remember. According to Alton Brown's method (see the brining link in the previous post) the turkey was started in a five hundred degree oven for thirty minutes, then the temp was dropped to three fifty and the breast was covered with foil to prevent overbrowning. We also added a broth/water mixture to the bottom of the roasting pan - Tom turkey was up on a rack. The idea behind this is to allow the bird to soak in some of the steamy moisture that rises during roasting. The ultimate benefit was that there were tons more pan drippings and therefore tons more gravy. Because, as you may know, there is rarely enough gravy for the other copious leftovers. This gravy was the best that I've ever made.

My pumpkin pie also turned out great. I use the recipe found in the latest "Joy of Cooking." I'll post this over on my recipe page someday, now I'm too tired. I ran into a glitch because I didn't have any ground ginger for the pie. I did, however, have some crystallized ginger, so I figured I could just zizz it up with the mini-processor attachment for my stick blender. Well, at the beginning this worked OK, but if you process, it becomes warm and the sugar starts to melt and you end up with ginger taffy. To combat that I added a little of the pumpkin into which I had already mixed the cream and eggs to the mini-processor. It had the desired effect of giving the ginger mass something to dissolve into. This was such a great success that I added all of the spices to the mini-processor. It was much easier to get the spices fully incorporated into the pumpkin mixture this way and I didn't end up with lumps of spices in the pie filling. Another innovation was using the stick blender to puree the cooked pumpkin, as I recently sold my food processor at a yard sale. I figured I never used it, forgetting that I use it every year for pumpkin pie (I also could have used it for the turkey liver pate, oh well I made due) and I think the stick blender product is superior. The cooked pie filling is so much smoother, really silky and not at all grainy as pumpkin pies sometimes are.

OK, now am truly am too tired to go on. All of that home cooking has finally caught up with me.

Happy Thanksgiving to all and to all a good night.