jen-maicha's photostream

Happy Halloween?

Not pretty yet, but definitely a more orderly place to work.

This is not a useable workspace.

We wound up using Jeff's desk as a dining table. It's a weighty piece of office furniture from the 1920s. I picked it up in the summer of 2002, when McCarter Theater in Princeton was having a big sale to clean out old props and set dressings. It used to be painted blue, and the wood grain is still tinted in places.

Strangely, the living room actually felt bigger once we plopped this big-for-us piece of furniture in the middle of it.

Not pictured: the study is a disaster area due to the removal of his desk plus the stowing of some living room furniture and clutter we had to clear out. Not looking forward to cleaning that up!

Jeff made the turkey. OK, he made almost all of the food. Juiciest white meat ever!

We got a small (eight and a half pounds) Kentucky Red Bourbon turkey. It's a heritage breed we got once before that my mom really liked. The thing is, we didn't actually know how to cook a turkey. Much research ensued.

Jeff wound up combining three recipes, and the process went something like this:

The night before, he took out all the extra organs and the neck, drained the turkey, gave it a liberal rubbing with kosher salt, and let it sit in the refrigerator overnight. This helped the skin get extra crispy.

Thursday morning he stuffed the turkey with rosemary, parsley, and large chucks of onion and granny smith apple. He also put sprigs of rosemary and some butter between the skin and the turkey breast. There was some some apple cider involved at some point, too, and some basting-and-injecting-of-drippings.

The final piece of research involved how to carve the thing. Jeff grudgingly took this tip from Bobby Flay: cut the entire breast off the turkey, and then slice it into one-inch pieces. Eliminates the problem of having to carve around the ribcage and at crazy angles, and gives everyone nice, thick pieces. It actually looked like duck breast.

Fantastic job, Jeff!