Happy Thankgiving
My view of Thanksgiving was skewed by my Father’s attitude. Having grown up on a poultry farm, he saw the holiday as the culmination of weeks of work “processing” dozens of turkeys to be frozen and readying a few dozen more for fresh delivery. We generally ate ham when he was alive.
Having been on my Grandfather’s farm at this time of year I can understand my Dad’s attitude: our meal was subject to interruption by people picking up a fresh turkey at the last minute. A sale is a sale when you are business for yourself.
Watching the WKRP turkey giveaway was long a tradition at our house. It’s availability is not guaranteed. [update: Mustang Bobby has it this year.]
Enjoy your meal and try to forget about the world’s problems for a day – they’ll still be there on Friday along with a few people who think it’s essential that they buy stuff. There won’t be as many this year, but those with money will try anything to make it stretch.
[I should have kept my mouth shut about freezes, because we are having one this morning for the first time in years.]
19 comments
Happy Turkey Day, Bryan! Thanks to Sarah Palin, most Americans have witnessed that “processing” on their very own TV; I hope that doesn’t spoil anyone’s dinner.
Here in H-town, it’s still T-day for us… tandoori vegetarian at India’s, arguably Houston’s best Indian restaurant, though I don’t know if they really use a tandoor or not. Catherine, our friend of some four decades now, is meeting us there, so we’ll even have family of a sort.
Have a great day, whatever you dine on!
Happy Thanksgiving to you, Bryan and to you mom. And your cats.
I thank you all and hope you are warm and well.
My Mother likes turkey, so I’ll do some thighs with stuffing and all the other things in her main oven because it will be warm, which I can really appreciate today as we broke the low record for the day with a dip below 32° early this morning. The cats are unlikely to move from atop the wool blanket.
If it was warmer and I didn’t want to cook, I would have headed to the Asian restaurant that is across the street from me for take out. I know the owner, and it is good, and probably vegetarian [he orders it from the ‘friends’ menu], while extremely filling.
The best thing about eating Asian food on Thanksgiving is that there are no drunks and no television to interrupt the conversation, which is tempered by being in a public place. The meal is always better without the side orders of ‘drama’.
Have a peaceful time.
happy ham and salmon day to you and yours!
That sounds like a winning combination to me, and you seemed to have survived the freeze.
I had the traditional Thanksgiving turkey *and* ham and dressing and sweet potatoes and etc. with a couple hundred friends, strangers, and passers-by at a desert outpost. I asked one of the people running things how many turkeys they cooked and he reported that they didn’t actually buy turkeys anymore because they’re such a PITA to cook and carve, instead their food service supplier (Sysco) has turkey breast loafs that they buy and cook. They cooked 400 pounds of turkey breast and 200 pounds of ham this year. Seeing the scale of what they’re doing I understand why they did this — that’d be 40 turkeys to cook if they tried to cook whole turkeys, figuring you can get maybe 10 pounds of breast meat from the typical turkey. And they were still up at wee hours of the morning baking pies…
Black Friday I was busy slamming my Jeep into snow banks while trying to get to a remote mountain cabin. I got pulled out once, I pulled out a friend twice, he pulled out another friend once, and the other friend pulled out another friend once. It was a regular stuck-a-thon :). But that’s why we travel in groups, it’s always easier to yank someone out with a yank strap than to dig someone out of a snow bank with a snow shovel :). Oh yeah, we did get to that specific cabin, but we never got past the snow drifts to get to the other place we wanted to go, we got through a three foot snow drift and then there was another four foot snow drift and we looked at each other and said, “Yep, time to call it a day” :).
Somehow that seemed like a much better plan for Black Friday than the typical mayhem…
There are a lot of restaurants that are using the ‘loaves’, instead of messing around with a turkey. It’s not like they will be making soup from the carcasses, or any of the other things that happen to uneaten whole cooked turkeys.
I would have gone for the ham and sweet potatoes, as long as they didn’t spoil them with corn syrup, raisins, and marshmallows. White meat turkey is for sandwiches, where you can add some flavor with mayonnaise and good bread.
Oh, yes, the joy of driving in snow. Yeah, it helps to have a group with towing straps and winches, but that’s part of the experience.
Well, if you saw the kitchen of this place… it’s an old 1920’s roadhouse, and the kitchen isn’t big enough to hold forty turkeys, much less cook them! The loaves are far more practical for this kind of mass feeding, they stack better than whole turkeys and are a lot easier to prepare and serve.
Not only driving in the snow, but driving off pavement in the snow. I wanted to show them some remote backwoods miner’s cabins that I knew about. We managed to break trail to one of them, but that was it.
Actually carving a turkey requires a certain level of veterinary knowledge of the skeletal and muscle systems to maximize the amount of turkey served and minimize the time it takes. Knowing where and how to cut is not intuitive, which is why most people can’t do it. Anyone who can slice bread, can deal with a loaf.
It is easier to deal with a ham, but a lot of people still pay extra for the boneless and spiral cut hams. I want the bone for bean soup, so I get a deal, just like the deal I get on turkey thighs.
For a crowd like that you need the kitchen of a military chow hall with the room and equipment to feed hundreds of people three meals a day.
Given a choice between off-road and the high-crowned rural roads in upstate New York that were normally coated with a layer of glare ice, I would opt for off-road. My Kharmann Ghia was the most fun I had driving in the snow. The body shape turned it into a bobsled in deep snow, and you could do most of the steering with the throttle. Starting and stopping were a bit of a problem, but it never left me stranded during the winter in Nebraska. If it had just had a decent heater, I would have kept it.
Well, off pavement can be off-camber and have glare ice too. My biggest pucker was an off-camber shelf with a snowbank over it. It was a case of back up as far as you can on the switchback, hit the gas hard, and hope you shoot over to the other side before you slide off the shelf (eep!). If it had been any further to the next turn in the switchback, I wouldn’t have tried it.
A Karman Ghia, eh? They did have decent heaters, *if* you added an electric fan to the proceedings to pull a sufficient amount of air through the heat exchangers. The little hoses from the upright engine cooling fan weren’t enough to do the job, given how leaky the heat exchanger housings were. My Uncle Marvin, my “crazy uncle” that as kids we were told to never go near, had one of the things for a while. He also had a mail order wife from the Philippines for a few days. That was all she lasted, because he lived even rougher than the average Filipino, including hauling all his water from a spring that was a quarter mile away. That was back in the days before electricity came to the hills. It was a rude awakening for a Filipino who thought all Americans were rich!
If I win the lottery I might buy an old Ghia and have it restored by professionals. It was a good car, but I wanted more heat and more power so I bought a new ’70 Plymouth ‘Cuda that was really scary when you stepped on the gas.
Yeah, rock slabs have even less traction than concrete, but that’s what makes it ‘fun’, right?
People get funny ideas about the US from the media. Even the Federal government doesn’t have a firm grip on the varied conditions in the US. Hell, the government of Florida has a hard time remembering that the Panhandle is part of the state and in a different time zone.
The problem with the Ghia is that it was all custom bodywork that was designed to be swoopy, not long-lived, so it had a lot of places to trap moisture and salt. And the bodywork was made of mild steel, not galvanized, and some of the body parts couldn’t be easily painted or sealed to keep out the moisture and salt because of the design. Thus most of the Ghias out there have fallen prey to the dreaded Ghia Rot and have rusted out to the point of not being viable.
I’ve thought about restoring an older Jeep at some point in time, but the new stuff has such better power, handling, ride, and capability that I realize it’d just be a money pit that I’d never drive and would end up selling after sinking (and losing) thousands of dollars in the process. If I’m going to buy a car I might as well buy a new one that’s reliable, powerful, and safe. Those old cars were death traps and it was a wonder we ever survived childhood riding in them, with no car seats and no seat belts even.
It should have been done in fiberglass or plastic because other than the hood, trunk and doors the body was one piece attached to the floor pan.
If reality kicks in I should have a Jeep with a trailer hitch and a trailer just big enough for four by eight foot sheets, that could support a major appliance. You can’t buy a real compact pickup like by 87 Toyota anymore, that did almost everything I asked of it.
What you need is a Dodge minivan. They’re cheap and they carry 4×8 sheets of plywood just fine because both the middle row and 3rd row fold into the floor when it’s time to carry cargo. They’ll also tow a trailer for tall things like a refrigerator. They do not, however, get all that good of gas mileage, claimed mpg is 17 city, 25 highway, while your old Toyota probably gets around 25 city and 35 highway. The problem being that they have a 285hp engine and weigh 4,200 pounds. WTF? I remember when a minivan really *was* mini, powered by a 4 cylinder engine and weighing 3000 pounds!
My Jeep Wrangler is utterly impractical unless you are well off pavement in places where sane people have no place being. It gets even worse gas mileage than the minivan due to its sad aerodynamics and the extra drag of the giant tires and extra drive axle. It isn’t even a very good tow vehicle because of its short wheelbase. It is, however, very, very good at what it was designed to do…
I was wheeling with someone who was driving a 1985 Toyota HiLux 4wd that he bought in 1985. It was completely stock. He went everywhere we went. Granted, we put him 2nd or 3rd in line so someone else was breaking trail and knocking down the snowbanks, but he was getting 25mpg while we were getting 10mpg. He went the whole weekend without filling up with gas while the rest of us had to pay outrageous Death Valley prices for gas ($90 for a tank of gas! YEESH!). I wish I could buy a small simple truck like that again. But dealers refused to sell them when they were available in America, because they weren’t big enough profit compared to big trucks. Sigh.
Gas mileage is the real issue. Every thing I’ve looked at sucks or is too big 95% of the time. I really beginning to think that I need to find an old Toyota and have the engine and transmission rebuilt. It would be cheaper than spending $25K on something that annoys me and makes the oil companies happy.
The other option would be to look at importing one from Canada, which would be a major hassle, I have no doubt.
I’m in no hurry, so I’ll look around.
Oh, my truck was part of a fleet purchase made by a client of mine, which is why I got both a good price and the the most basic truck that you could buy, with no power assists, and nothing automatic. It hit 200K+ before the guy I sold it to didn’t notice the coolant temperature or oil light during a commute and blew up the engine.
The 1985 Toyota Hilux with an 8′ bed for carrying plywood had a wheelbase of 112″ and a total length of 186″. It weighed roughly 3,000 pounds. The 2014 Dodge Caravan has a wheelbase of 121.2″ and a total length of 202.8″. And has an 8 foot bed for carrying plywood if you fold the seats down. It weighs roughly 4500 pounds.
So now you know why one got 25mpg, while the other gets 17mpg despite having a much more efficient fuel system etc…
Oh, yes, the fuel efficiency increased, but not as much as the weight of the vehicles being sold. A four-cylinder Toyota Tacoma is a special order down here.
A four cylinder Toyota Tacoma isn’t very common over here either. It doesn’t help that the engine in the four-cylinder Taco is now woefully behind the times technology-wise, for example Hyundai has a 2.4L direct-injected four cylinder that produces 15% more power and torque than the 2.7L that Toyota has in the four-cylinder Taco…
The Nissan Frontier is probably the smallest truck you can buy in America right now. But again, the 4 cylinder engine in the base model is ridiculously outdated compared to current state of the art…
I remember back in the day when four cylinders was all you needed in a small truck. I had a 4-cylinder Ford Ranger and it wasn’t super quick but it did well enough for what it was and got decent gas mileage. I also remember when Chrysler minivans weighed 3,000 pounds and had a 4-cylinder engine. Man, that was a lotta years ago….
This is going to be a long process, and I may still end up buying used and rehabbing it to get what I need without what I don’t need or want. I still remember that the Toyota didn’t even register on the California smog test and I was getting 30mpg mixed driving in California.