View from the Mountain

Turkey Tussles

I have eaten a lot of turkey in my life. Much of it has been cooked at home, some at friends' homes, and even more at feasts hosted by my relatives. I do not remember my mother cooking a turkey when I growing up in the fifties in our modest home in Lewisville, North Carolina. It was just the two of us living there so it made little sense to cook a turkey.  Holidays were always celebrated at my Aunt Molly's. Mother always cooked a ham (sometimes fried chicken) to take and the turkey or turkeys were there ready to eat when we arrived after the short drive to Yadkin County. I know Aunt Molly always cooked one and perhaps one of her daughters cooked another.

The first turkey that I remember being prepared in our house was cooked after we moved to the Mount Airy house with my dad. It was much more conducive to turkey feasts. That move happened in the fall of 1963 when I went away to military school. While we still attended the Yadkin County feasts, we now had feasts in our house at 347 West Pine Street.  While I was aware of the turkey cooking operation, I did not really participate. My indoor cooking duties were limited to cooking bacon and sometimes a few eggs.

Military/high school did not last forever and I went to college in Cambridge.  The first Thanksgiving at college, I did not come home but I got invited out by a college friend, Jack. We had a wonderful dinner and I got my one and only opportunity so far to sample stuffing with oysters.

The next memorable Thanksgiving happened after college. I had purchased an old farmhouse with a barn and 140 acres on the shores of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. Four of us had spent months remodeling the two-hundred year old house with hand-hewed beams. College friends came up to celebrate that first Thanksgiving on our own in the fall of 1971. We bought the biggest turkey we could find and the ladies in the group figured out how to cook it. I do not remember if they consulted Joy of Cooking or they had learned in their home kitchens. The turkey was near perfect even if it took longer than estimated.  It was a wonderful meal with only some minor discussion about celery in the stuffing and pie crusts.

The next Thanksgiving, I cooked a turkey for the couple of us that were still living at the house. It turned out fine in spite of my not knowing to take the little package out of the turkey's cavity.  At least I got it done on time which was better than the one that we had to cook the previous Christmas in a wood stove because the electric stove went on the fritz.

Fortunately for my turkey cooking future, I got married to a wonderful Southern girl in the summer of 1973 just in time for the next Thanksgiving.  Once again I bought the biggest turkey I could find. My wife, Glenda, who was new to turkey cooking managed to wrestle it into the oven. Even then there were hints that the days of the big turkey were numbered.

We eventually uprooted ourselves from Nova Scotia and moved to a farm in New Brunswick. We continued to have turkey on special occasions like Thanksgiving.  Turkey is not the cheapest meat in Canada so there was one Thanksgiving we thought about having a beef roast instead because cash was pretty short and in those days grocery stores did not take credit cards. We were raising cattle so we had plenty of beef.

Once we moved back to the states, we were in the land of cheap turkeys. By then Glenda was an expert if somewhat reluctant turkey cook. After we moved to Roanoke, Virginia, she set down a rule that there would be no turkeys in her oven larger than sixteen pounds.  The last time I remember winning the battle for a larger turkey was Thanksgiving 2005.  It was significant enough that I wrote this post, I Win a Turkey Battle.

It was a fleeting victory. Not many years afterwards, we did a Thanksgiving with our children but not at our house. This Thanksgiving away from home certainly hastened our turkey changes. Our turkey became a turkey breast and I think most of the ones that we have had since then have been turkey breasts. Only a few times did Glenda fall victim to the lure of whole turkeys priced at twenty-eight cents a pound.  I did manage to get a couple of turkey thighs cooked with the breast one year, but I have learned to like turkey breast while still hoping for some dark meat.

We will hang on to our turkey traditions while now include a turkey breast and all the fixings. For Thanksgiving 2021 we already have a turkey breast in the freezer. It is a nice large one. There was a sliver of hope when I took Glenda to the opening of the Clemmons Aldi.  They had whole Butterball turkeys at eighty-seven cents a pound. Most were over twenty pounds.  Glenda didn't even slow at the turkey counter. Time to start looking for a deal on turkey thighs once again.

 

 

The First Cold Day

Living on the North Carolina coast, we always considered the first cold day to be the one when we had to give up wearing shorts. When I lived on the farm in Tay Creek, the first cold day was when I had to start wearing mittens. That was actually a whole lot colder than you might think. I rarely used mittens until it got below zero.

Growing up in North Carolina, cold is not something you think about very much. To me it was cold when the red dirt banks sparkled with frost crystals. As I got older and went winter camping with our Boy Scout Troop 752 at Camp Raven Knob, I got to know real cold. There is nothing like rain and chilly weather to make you appreciate a nice warm home. Still it was not serious cold.

The first serious cold that I remember was on a trip freshman year from Cambridge to Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire. I cannot remember why we went but I do remember it being minus twenty-four degrees Fahrenheit the Saturday morning we left. Fortunately, serious cold does not last very long if you are in a functioning car. Still it left an impression.  While temperatures in Cambridge got down into single digits, they could not come close to Hanover.

Sometime in my college years I caught a snow-loving virus. That and a obsession with having some land of my own led me to head off to Maritime Canada. In the early seventies land was cheap in Nova Scotia and life seemed like a throwback to life in the fifties in the United States.

The old house that I bought on the shore of the Bay of Fundy was not exactly the warmest house around. In spite of lots of efforts and a newly built fireplace, it could still be cold especially since the wind often howled in St. Croix Cove where the house was.  That part of Nova Scotia was famous for storms that went from rain to snow to sleet to freezing rain back to snow accompanied by bitter cold.

Fortunately for the snow loving part of me, the lousy Nova Scotia weather was also bad for cattle so my wife and I decided to move to New Brunswick. Without much thought other than falling in love with a farm, we ended up in Tay Creek, New Brunswick in the middle of New Brunswick's snow belt. Our first winter we had over twenty feet of snow. We also got to endure minus twenty-eight Fahrenheit that first year. In January of 1982, when our youngest daughter was born, the thermometer dipped to minus forty.

Most years in New Brunswick the first real  cold came in the first week or so December just about the time busy mothers needed to finish up their Christmas shopping. You could tell the real cold weather had arrived when on successive days the previous day's low would become the next day's high temperature. Things would continue that way until it bottomed out at something seriously below zero Fahrenheit.

I endured some bitter cold on our New Brunswick farm but I doubt that I ever got colder than when I went fishing in a skiff on the rainy, wind morning of October 25, 2005 when the temperature was in the forties. When we finished fishing that morning and I was dropped off at the dock, it only took me about a block of walking before I realized that I could not feel my extremities. There is nothing like being completely soaked in the wind to make cold penetrate to your bones. I had to spend some serious time in a very hot tub bath before I recovered. It is no surprise that I did not feel cold while I was catching all the fish. That fishing trip remains one of my coldest memories next to sitting on a brick hard seat in my pickup at minus forty.

I guess that I am getting soft. I now consider today our first cold day of 2021. I don't think we broke fifty Fahrenheit. I was wearing shorts when I went out to retrieve the paper but as the day failed to improve, I changed to blue jeans. I even put on socks.

 

 

 

 

 

Sourdough Blessings

My history with sourdough goes back to my almost-hippy days in 1973. I say almost because real hippies in Nova Scotia did not drive big John Deere diesel tractors. I was living on the land and growing much of my own food but my ambition was to have a bunch of cattle which we eventually accomplished at Tay Ridge Angus.

Before I ended up with 200 head of cattle in New Brunswick, I was living on the Nova Scotia shore of the Bay of Fundy. I was friends with folks who lived in a Dome. I think they might have sparked my interest in sourdough bread. I bought a kit with a sourdough crock. I still have the crock which is probably forty-nine years old. About eight years ago I decided to reconnect with my sourdough side.

That sourdough starter which supposedly descends from the gold rush years is still doing well. It just got refreshed this week and is now back in its back corner of the fridge. It will stay there for five or six weeks or until the urge to bake strikes me again.  I would bake every week, but I try to watch my carbs and baking every week definitely is not good for managing your carbs.

My wife claims that I put away the starter because I did not want to take the chance of having sourdough pancakes Saturday morning. It is true that tonight's sourdough pancakes and sausage were delicious. However, the sourdough BLTs that we had for lunch on Friday were equally tasty. It is also impossible to forget the delicious sourdough toast that we had with our bacon and eggs for breakfast the same day. You probably get the picture, but I was also worried that we might decide to follow up the other meals with some sourdough waffles which are also amazing.

This is the link for the sourdough pancake recipe that we made. We halved the recipe except we kept the whole egg.  It was just right for two people who hadn't had pancakes for months. I think there were only a couple left.

Below is my Sourdough Bread Recipe which I like to think I have perfected over time. It works well for me here on North Carolina's Crystal Coast.

3 cups all purpose floor
1 1/2 teapoons of salthh
1 cup of warm water
2 cups of sourdough or whatever I have

Mix flour, water and salt in a large bowl
Add Sourdough and stir, I work it all together with a dough scraper. Depending on how much sourdough I have, I might add more water until the dough comes together in a nice lump.

Once the dough is together, I turn it over, cover and leave overnight or at least two to three hours

Then I turn out on a floured board and stretch the dough then fold and knead the dough and stretch again and then knead again. This should take five to ten minutes. I will often stretch the dough four times if I am not in a rush.

I then grease either one 9X5 or two 8X4 pans.

If you are doing two pans carefully divide the dough.

Place dough in pans, spread to all sides and tuck edges in properly

Bake at 400 30 to 45 minutes, checking the temperature for 190F at 30 minutes

When bread is done turn out on rack and let cool before cutting.

Breakfast My Way

I am not sure why, but breakfast seems more and more important during the current crisis. I cannot remember when I did not cook my own breakfast, but there could have been a period when we lived on our farm, Tay Ridge Angus. We had three children, 200 head of cattle, two Labrador retrievers, and more cats than you could count. On top of that, we grew most of our own food. My memory goes foggy when I try to remember breakfast on the farm. I do know that Glenda, my wife, made some wonderful things on the farm including homemade English muffins.

Certainly, since we left the farm in 1984, I have cooked a lot of breakfast meals for myself and others. To me, breakfast sets the tone for the day. Like all of what I do, I believe doing it right is important. In that spirit you need to take the time to do your first meal of the day right. I have endless breakfast menu items including one that I recently called my perfect breakfast.

But I got to thinking about it and decided that you cannot have a perfect breakfast without bacon and if you have bacon, you need perfectly cooked soft-boiled eggs. I put my thoughts into action. I got out our sous vide cooker which in my opinion makes absolutely the best soft-boiled eggs. We are rarely without some bacon in the meat drawer so I started cooking the first pan of bacon before I started the sous vide machine. Once I had turned the bacon the first time, I turned on the sous vide which warms to 191F for soft-boiled eggs. Doing all this at once looks complicated but it isn't. It just takes some practice. Once the sous vide reaches the right temperature it takes about eight minutes for the eggs to cook. I always cook a half dozen so we will have extras. They are great cold. I usually turn the sous vide off at eight minutes but leave my eggs in the hot water for another minute or so. My wife likes her a little more cooked so hers get an additional minute. I believe this last time, the only task I delegated was the browned-butter toast. We did end up with near-perfect bacon even if I bought what was on sale. A practiced eye for bacon selection and expert bacon-cooking skills can often make the most of bacon you wouldn't think would turn out as nice as what we had with our boiled eggs.

It was a great Sunday morning breakfast and one that kept us going late into the afternoon. We also had some leftover bacon for BLTs the next day.

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