Looking back on Thanksgiving Days of the past - Thanksgiving 2012 (The FIRST Major Holiday I Ever Hosted)
Picture This: It's Thanksgiving week, and I'm hosting for the first time ever at my home in Evergreen. I am SO pumped, ready to impress with a perfectly brined turkey that I marinated in magic juice (aka a recipe I Googled and felt overly confident about). The turkey was HUGE - so huge that it did not fit in my fridge.
But I had no worries because I had a "brilliant" plan. I sealed it in a lock-tight container and set it outside on my second-story deck (which had no access from below) to stay cool. Genius, right? WRONG...SOOOOO WRONG!!!
Thanksgiving morning, I stepped outside to check on my masterpiece, only to find the lid off my brine bucket two stories below on the patio...and my turkey completely obliterated. It looked like a crime scene out of a wildlife documentary. The bird was picked apart like a free buffet at Golden Corral. My day was wrecked!
Cue the panic: I raced to the nearest grocery store, and the next one, and the next one, until I FINALLY found two very small, very expensive (and thankfully, thawed) turkeys. Desperate times, Y'all!! I hustled home, whipped them into shape, and prepared a completely un-brined backup meal, knowing it would never live up to the turkey in my dreams.
Spoiler Alert: Thanksgiving still turned out amazing! We laughed about the turkey heist, the food was delicious, and my guests didn't seem to mind that it wasn't the brined masterpiece I'd planned. Lesson learned: People, FOR CRANBERRIES SAKE, thaw your bird in the refrigerator!! Consider this your official reminder: it's time to pull that fowl out of the freezer and move it to the fridge.
Oh, and about that turkey thief...We set up a sting operation the next night (aka we put the bird back on the deck and I made my friend Jeanette stay up to for a stakeout). Guess who showed up to claim a second free meal?
