View from the Mountain

Family Holiday Traditions- Peanut Brittle & Rook

Every family has a few holiday traditions.  As families change the traditions come and go. Still it is nice to hang onto some of things that have made us happy over the years.

When I was growing in Lewisville, North Carolina, it was a tradition that we would spend Christmas eve at my mother sister's house between Yadkinville and East Bend, North Carolina.

The location was a good one since it was only a few miles from the spot where my mother and her two sisters were born on the Styers Mill Pond.  The pond has long since disappeared, but the memories are still there.

My mother and I were always considered part of her sister's family.  Her sister, my Aunt Molly, had six children, and all but one, Sue, were older than me.  It didn't take long before the Christmas eve celebration was crawling with grandchildren. 

I can still remember the floor being ankle deep in wrapping paper as all the children unwrapped their presents.  Even at an early age, I was a semi-official photographer for the event.  Sometimes before the event, my mother and I would join Aunt Molly and Uncle Austin and attend the Christmas eve service at the Union Cross Friends Church.  I enjoyed going because one of their traditions was to give "unusual" presents to each other at the end of the service.  I think I remember Uncle Austin getting a pig's tail one Christmas.

When I was fourteen, I got shipped off to military school in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  Many of my vivid memories revolve around coming home for Christmas. My first airline flights on Piedmont would have taken place in the winter of 1963 when I came home for Thanksgiving and later for Christmas.

Coming home to Christmas is different from being at home as Christmas is gradually unfolded.  I cannot ever remember coming home to a tree being already up and decorated. That was always my job, and I started selecting trees well before I could drive.   I still remember having to wire some of those early trees to the wall to keep them from falling.

In the summer of 1971, I bought an old farm and moved away to Canada. By the time my wife and I moved back to the states in 1987, the Christmas eve celebration at my Aunt's house was long gone.

I guess that makes the most enduring family tradition for me putting up the Christmas tree.  Over time the tree has more often than not been a real tree just like this year's.

Another tradition with strong roots in our family is making homemade treats for friends and relatives.  My mother made so many delicious things for the holidays that it is hard to remember them all.  The applesauce cakes, rum cakes, mints, and fruit cakes that she used to make are beyond what our family is willing to tackle these days.

It is hard keeping up even a few of the cooking traditions, but we almost always have country ham and biscuits for at least one breakfast during the holidays.  My oldest daughter made my mother's super easy fudge this Christmas.  Sometimes we make her cheese straws, but this year we got ambitious and decided to make peanut brittle. It was a renewal of tradition that we stopped after my mother's death in 2004.

Making peanut brittle takes a little planning.  In early fall we start watching for small bags of raw shelled peanuts.  We never could find them in Virginia, but we always seemed to be able to find them in Mount Airy where my mother lived for years.  This year we got them just before Christmas at the Ace Hardware in Swansboro.

Next is the hardest part, splitting the peanuts and getting the skins off of them.  Obviously not everyone takes the skins off the peanuts for their peanut brittle, but it was a rule with my mother. It is a tribute to her authority as the matriarch of the Styers family that seven years after she died, no one in our family would dare make peanut brittle with peanuts which still have their skins.

We still have two of her peanut brittle slabs, one made of Mount Airy granite and another made of marble.   The granite one is thicker and more suitable for a number of batches, one after the other, but the thinner marble one works for the couple of batches that we usually do. We put our slab out the night before we plan to make candy.  We only make the peanut brittle on cool, clear days.  Supposedly the process doesn't work well on damp days.  It was another of mother's rules.

I was taught how to make peanut brittle at a very young age so I have never timed anything.  I just do it like my mother showed me how to do it.

Once we have nearly a couple of cups of skinless raw peanut halves, I put one half cup of Karo Syrup or light corn syrup in my wife's four quart Dutch oven that was given to her by my mother.  To that I add one quarter cup of water and one cup of sugar.  I bring that to boil stirring continuously with a wooden spatula.  When I can drop some of the syrup off the spatula and it "strings," I dump in almost a cup of peanuts and continue stirring them. It is approximately medium heat, but we cook on a gas stove top so I adjust as needed.

Today I sent my son out to get the slab while I was stirring the peanut brittle mixture.  My wife put a towel on our granite counter top to prevent the slab from damaging it.  When we could smell the peanuts, and they got to a light brown color, I added one teaspoon of baking soda to the mixture and stirred vigorously for a few seconds before pouring the molten hot candy onto the slab where my wife spread it as thinly as possible. 

It is a two person job, and everything including pot holders need to be ready for action. You only have a few seconds to get the candy from the pot to the slab.  Watching this YouTube video that my oldest daughter filmed today might be of some help.  It starts just before we added the baking soda.

We immediately put the pot in the sink and fill with water which usually dissolves the remains of the mixture stuck in the pot.  After the candy has cooled a few minutes on the slab, my wife takes a metal spatula and tries to work from the edge inward and lift big pieces of the peanut brittle off the slab.  If the slab is cold, dry, and clean, it usually works very well.  The idea in our family has always been to get the peanut brittle as thin as possible.

Once we get the peanut brittle off a slab, we spread it out on a cookie sheet and put it outside to finish cooling.  The slab goes back out for a few minutes while we reload for another batch.

Hopefully we can get enough made tomorrow so we can have some for gifts.

These are links to pictures of the ingredients, peanut brittle on the slab, peanut brittle on the cookie sheet, and a close-up of a nice piece of peanut brittle. Peanut brittle is a lot harder on the diet than the other tradition which we renewed this year.

Playing a game of Rook was a big part of growing up in the South.  It was what our family did on cold winter nights.  I can remember playing it with teenage friends when we wanted something to pass the time late at night.  The times have changed a lot since then.

For Christmas 2011 my wife dragged out a new deck of Rook cards that she was given a few years ago.  Our two older children were visiting so after a little persuading, we got together a foursome and had some great fun learning how to play Rook all over again.  It came back to us pretty quickly, and we had a ball.

The last time we played Rook was over twenty years ago when my wife's parents, my mother, and her friend R.J. visited us in Roanoke. It was a magical visit, and playing Rook this year brought back a lot of those memories.

With a fresh tree, some homemade candy, and a few hands of Rook, we kept some traditions going that are as much or more fun as all the gift giving and cooking that wears us all out so much during the holidays.

Next year we are hauling out the Crokinole board. My mother would be proud.

My blog has gotten a few changes recently.  At the top of the left sidebar is a convenient search box. There are over 1500 posts at View from the Mountain, so a random search might turn up something of interest.

 

 

Everything is Better Fried - NC Fish Camps

Seafood has long been a part of life in North Carolina at least according to my telling of the story. I am pretty sure I started eating seafood at the beach as soon as I could chew solid food. By the time I moved to Mount Airy in 1963, wherever I was home we would go to the small seafood restaurant run by a German fellow whose name escapes me. It was on the outskirts of town and was only open Thursdays through Saturday. While it was not a real fish camp, it operated similarly. Aside from a hamburger, the only thing on the menu was fish, shrimp, oysters, or the strange little stuffed crab shells.
I loved the fried flounder and the fried oysters but they would also sell you a Captain’s plate with three choices of food so it
was easy to get some Calabash shrimp if you really want to have a feast. You could get baked or fried potatoes with slaw and hush puppies. The tables in the restaurant were all long, designed to accommodate families with some friends. We were often joined by friends or other relatives.
Restaurants like this one would arrange to have fresh seafood brought up from the coast on Wednesdays. Some of the owners went to get the seafood themselves. They knew the fish houses that could be counted on to provide the freshest fish. All the restaurants had similar menus. They were not many places in Piedmont North Carolina without one of these restaurants an hour or so away.
The original fish camps were close to water and run by fisherman looking for a better way to sell their catch. The fried seafood was so popular that seafood restaurants with the same menu became very popular. My first real memory of a fried seafood emporium was in the summer of 1969. My uncle and I had gone down to Morehead City to do some surf fishing. The only bridge to Bogue Banks was there. Once we crossed, the roads ran out quickly and we drove my Bronco eighteen miles down the beach to the Point at Emerald Isle. It was midsummer so it was not real surprise that we caught almost nothing.
After reversing our trip on the beach and crossing the bridge from Atlantic Beach to Morehead City, we stopped at Captain Bill’s on the Morehead waterfront. We had a feast that I still remember well even the traditional lemon pie that follower. Later that summer I was camping on Ocracoke Island. Instead of going home by catching the short ferry and driving north to Nag Head, I took the long Cedar Island Ferry and eventually ended up in Morehead City where I filled my coolers with flounder and shrimp.
That was the summer that I learned how to cook flounder. My mother also shared the family hush puppy recipe. I learned that the biggest challenge of making small batch hush puppies is cooking them fast enough to stay ahead of the ones being eaten.
In our years down on the coast we tended to favor flounder that I caught and cooked or flounder that I bought from our local fish house, Clyde Phillips Seafood.
When friends visited we would sometimes visit one of the local fried fish houses. The most iconic would be T&Ws Oyster House which opened in 1971. The flounder is unlikely to be local and it might be a little heavier on the breading that what I would cook, but you can be sure that you will gotten a taste of the what fish houses are all about in North Carolina.
Just to get you in the mood for some fried flounder, here is our family's hush puppy recipe.
Most of the Hush Puppies that we get in restaurants are heavy and not anywhere close to the light fluffy ones that mom taught me to make.
The recipe is pretty simple.
One cup of self rising cornmeal,
One half cup of self rising flour,
One teaspoon of sugar,
One finely chopped small onion,
One cup of milk
Mix all the ingredients together.
Heat in a small heavy sauce pan three inches of Wesson oil until it is hot

Fill a coffee mug with cold water

Take a soup spoon, wet it in your coffee mug of cold water, dip it in your mixture so you have about enough mixture to cover about one third of the spoon lengthwise.
Carefully let it slide into hot oil.  If your oil is the correct temperature, there will be lots of bubbles around the hush puppy. If you take a long handled metal slotted spoon and touch the just dropped hush puppy which will sink to  bottom of the pan, it should rise to the surface easily.

If the oil isn't hot enough, just keep trying.  When the oil is the proper temperature, the dropped mixture will bob to the top of oil with very little encouragement.  Turn the hush puppies until they are golden brown and place them on a platter with paper towels.
It takes a little practice, but it isn't that difficult.  They are best done in small batches.  You're working with very hot oil so be very careful and keep kids away from the cooking.  Don't be surprised if for the first few minutes, the hush puppies keep disappearing.  The recipe makes enough for a huge crowd, probably four dozen or more hush puppies.  It does make something of a mess, but the good hush puppies are worth it.

 

The New Art of Eating Well At Home

It has been years since I spent significant time in the big cities so I cannot vouch for the state of restaurants outside my rural world of North Carolina’s Piedmont.  We have some good restaurants here, but with few exceptions (and we just ate in one for our fiftieth annivesary) most can be faulted on something, service, price, or even the quality of the food.

Like many since the pandemic we have cut back our in-restaurant eating drastically. We have been disappointed so many times that we often choose to not go back.

Our home-cooked meals have for the last few decades been exceptional. We have been fortunate enough to eat wonderful fish like red drum and flounder fresh from the waters of the White Oak River where we lived from 2006-2021.  The fish I caught was often supplemented with vegetables from our own garden.

We know what good food is. We understand what it looks like and how it tastes. For a decade we had a cattle farm and raised most of our own food. Our kids grew up on unpasteurized Guernsey milk that I got from our cow every morning.  Our freezer was full of beef. We had our own chickens which provided us with eggs even when they had only snow for their water. 

We had wild red raspberries that grew along the rock piles by our fields. There were still a few wild strawberries around in those days. We harvested Chantelle mushrooms from our woods and fiddlehead greens from our marshes.

Times have changed. We are a lot older but we still love good food.  We still garden but it is only supplemental to what we buy from farmers, farmers’ markets and grocery stores. We also have relatives that garden.  This year I have grown enough tomatoes to sell a few pounds and still have plenty to enjoy and share with friends.

We have all the tools we need to cook well from a sous vide stick to a gas grill and a wood pellet smoker. The challenge is that the older you get, the less time you want to spend cooking and cleaning up.

We use our cooking energy sparingly, often working to cook something  that will last a few days. If I smoke a trip-tip roast, we might eat off it for four or five days or until it ends up in the soup pot. A pot of beans or crowder peas will last at least as long.  When I bake bread, it is usually three or four pounds of bread.  We always freeze most of what I bake.

Even so there comes a time when the spirit to cook needs a rest.  We have learned very little take out food travels well. Pizza needs to come from a place as close as possible, certainly not more than ten minutes away and it is still just pizza.

Burgers, Chinese and Mexican food just don’t travel well. Even rotisserie chicken is a gamble and often too salty. The one food we have found that travels well is barbecue or smoked meat. We are lucky to live in the South where it is plentiful.

The meal pictured above has crowder peas that were given to us by relatives and cooked by my wife. The brisket and smoked-pulled chicken, and collards came from Honky Tonk Smokehouse in Winston-Salem, NC. Honky Tonk is one of the hidden gems in the Triad area. The baguette was from Camino Bakery in Winston-Salem. It was a delicious takeout meal supplemented by some of our cooking and bread from a good local bakery. It is the way we have learned to give ourselves a cooking break post pandemic - find something that travels well and build a meal around it.

The Elusive Great Saturday Morning Breakfast

The older the you get the more that you find excuses to go out to eat. The pandemic has complicated that by putting all sorts of pressures on restaurants, not the least of which is staffing. My mother and almost every lady that I have met including my wife has held that breakfast is their favorite meal to enjoy outside the home.

Turns out that getting a good breakfast delivered to your table in a timely fashion is much harder than one might expect. I am of the opinion that I can cook a better breakfast for up to half a dozen people than you can find just about anywhere. That's the case as long as you don't want pancakes or waffles, then I give in and agree to a meal at iHOP.  We roll the dice with service and hope for the best.

We lived on the side of a mountain in the county outside of Roanoke, Virginia, for over twenty wonderful years. It was a wonderful place to raise a family. We moved to the Carolina coast for the next sixteen years so I could bring a few dreams to life. We had a favorite breakfast place at the coast which we could enjoy during the nine months that the tourists were gone, but it closed as favorite restaurants sometimes do.  We moved to a small town just west of Winston-Salem in the winter of 2021.  It is near where I grew up in the fifties and sixties. For the last two years we have looked for a breakfast spot to call our own. We have come close, but there are no winners yet.

We thought we found one in Winston-Salem.  It had been open since 1963 which just happened to the year that I got shipped off to military school in Tennessee.  The first couple of times we went it was great.  The third time, the service was the worst I endured in a while.  We were some of the last few customers in the restaurant as we watched as a couple of waitresses stand around chatting while our food cooled on the window by them. When our food did come, no surprise, it wasn't hot. My grandson had to wait another fifteen minutes for his waffle. We were finished eating by the time he had his food. He had eaten food off our plates while waiting for his waffle.  The place was closing as he finished eating.  We haven't been back.

There's a new restaurant opening near us. We have hopes it will be better.  Actually, if I could tell them what to do, it would be to emulate the waitresses that used to serve us at the Famous Anthony's Restaurant in SW Plaza in Roanoke, Virginia.

Walking into what we consider our home-away-from-home Famous Anthony's this morning, we found it packed with customers who were all being taken care of by the very energetic crew of waitresses. What always amazes me is how each waitress connects with her customers in a personal way and makes certain that they get what they want from the kitchen. The other impressive thing is how they work as a team. Sometimes there is a hostess, but sometimes there isn't. It doesn't matter, you always get seated quickly. Then someone will get your drinks, and it might be your waitress or another waitress who has figured out that you need something to drink. Your coffee cup might get filled by your waitress or another one who happens by and sees that you need coffee.

If you can sit back and watch it for a moment, the waitresses have time for personal interactions with each other while still delivering exceptional service to their customers. They might be occasionally irreverent towards management and even joke at some of us regulars, but it creates a wonderful atmosphere. As much as we like the quick, reasonably priced food, we really go there because we feel at home. We know many of the waitresses by first name, Wendy, Ginger, Janelle, Tasha, Jean, and Robin, last but certainly not the meekest. There are other whose faces we know, but we just haven't caught their names yet. We even know some of them well enough to tell when they have run into some challenges at work or home. Yet in spite of the many times we have gone there, it is the rare time we don't get absolutely great service.

There are restaurants that might have fancier menus or even some food that I might like better, but there is just no place where I think you will find a better team of waitresses. You might find some individual people who excel in other places, but this is a whole group of individuals who through their cooperation and dedication to doing more than a good job create an exceptional experience just as the Fishmongers do.  (Full article on Teams That Work)

That particular Famous Anthony's also had very good food.  I still have not found an omelet that I like better than their Chicken Philly omelet (that excludes the ones that I cook myself like the one pictured).  I have not been back to that Famous A's in Roanoke in over a decade and I am sure those waitresses have moved on to something better. Still I have the memories of being a valued customer there.

Teamwork really is important in all sorts of businesses. That is a lesson I learned in my early days after college when I moved to Nova Scotia. Unfortunately, business owners rarely have the skills to create an atmosphere that fosters teamwork.  I was part of some great sales teams at Apple.  Then the company's philosophy changed to have teams compete against each other for the same business.  Imagine the customers who sit down and have two different waitresses vying for their order. Confusing?  It is absolutely confusing, and the worst way to run a business. There was sales magic at Apple during the early years, but like all magic, it was easily destroyed.

The omelet at the top of post is a recent breakfast.  I do omelets much differently than most people.  I call my omelets cold-pan omelets to distinguish them from the hot pans that the French often use for their omelets.

1. Put a pat of butter, and a tablespoon of grape seed oil in your non-stick pan on your stove burner, turn the burner on medium for about ninety seconds and then turn off.
2. Spread an ounce or so coarsely grated cheese over the bottom of the pan after you have evenly distributed the oil-butter mixture.
3. If I am using precooked sausage like what is in the one pictured, I just cut it in pieces. If I am adding mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, or onions, I precook in another pan.  Mushrooms work well in the microwave as long as you drain them.
4. Next I beat two or three eggs (local eggs so it depends on the size) and a splash of water in a bowl until I can't beat them anymore. I love egg whites but they make omelets fall apart unless you are very careful.
5. Now I pour my eggs carefully into the pan where the cheese has melted on the bottom. Here I usually grind some black pepper into the pan and often add some red pepper flakes.
6. Next I distribute my sausage, ham, bacon or whatever across the pan with the eggs- the omelet pictured had turkey and chicken sausage
7. I usually  find a piece of cheese (whatever needs using- blue cheese, cheddar and feta are favorites) that I crumble into the pan
8. I am also fond of spreading a thin last layer of spinach across the bottom of the pan- sometimes I added chopped green onions. When the lid goes on, they steam nicely.
9. Finally on top of the spinach and/or green onions, I sprinkle a little more shredded cheese.
10. Then I put a cover on the skillet and turn the heat on and set it at medium.
11. I put bread in the toaster oven, and I put my plate on top of the toaster oven.
12. I pour myself another cup of coffee and set the table.
13. Around three or four minutes later (depends on your stove, burner and how fast you are cooking) I check the omelet. If it is almost done. I turn the burner off, remove the pan from the burner and put it on a hot pad- leaving the lid off.
14. My toast is now ready, I take it out, spray with olive oil and put it back in for another minute in the toaster.
15. I take a non-stick spatula and work it under the omelet from the edges until it is ready to slide out of the pan.
16. I bring over my plate, slide half the omelet out of the pan onto the plate and fold the rest over.

If your omelet gets brown, try using less heat.  I like salsa with my omelets.  Omelets are for experimenting so go for it.

 

Tomatoes and Me

I would not venture to guess when it was that I ate my first tomato.  Tomatoes likely appear on every page of my life story.  Shortly after we moved to the small town of Lewisville just west of Winston-Salem in 1952, my mother had tomato plants growing in front of our house.  When she moved from her Mount Airy house to our Roanoke house, there were still tomatoes growing near her back steps.   When she got to our house, there were tomatoes growing by the side of the house.

I remember loving tomato sandwiches, even to the point of ordering BLTs for breakfast when traveling.  Some time during my teenage years when on an overnight fishing trip with a friend, I learned about bologna, cheese, and tomato sandwiches. It was love at first bite.  This was well before all cured and processed meat was pronounced as bad for us.   However, we can cling to the knowledge than nothing is better than a plain tomato sandwich on the great bread of your choice with the perfect mayonnaise which in my case is Duke’s.

To eat really good tomatoes, you must face the challenge of growing tomatoes unless you live in an area with lots of farmers’ markets.  I planted my first tomatoes in Nova Scotia in 1972, on the shores of the Bay of Fundy.  We started the plants from seed and hardened them off in cold frame made from salvaged windows.  We barely managed to get tomatoes before the first frost. Since they were all we had and North Carolina was a long way off, they seemed delicious. However, there just wasn’t enough heat out on the shore for tomatoes to be a reliable crop.

For lots of reasons including better hay making weather for our cattle, we moved inland to the hardwood hills north of Fredericton, New Brunswick. It was much easier to grow tomatoes (and make hay) there.  By the time we got to the mountainside in Roanoke, in 1989, I had a lot of experience growing tomatoes in harsh conditions.  Even so, getting a ripe tomato by July 1 on our Virginia mountain was a challenge.

Then in 2006, we decided to make a move to North Carolina’s coast.  We ended up on a marsh on an inlet of the White Oak River near the beaches of Emerald Isle.  It was definitely a tomato friendly climate. The spring of 2007, we planted our first coastal tomatoes. Even though we got them in the ground late, we had ripe tomatoes before the end of June.  The next year we had ripe tomatoes before the end of May.

Eventually, in 2016, we managed to grow tomatoes for twelve months using wagons to move them in and out of the garage.  The ripe ones we got in January and February weren’t the best but by the time the heat came in March they were pretty tasty. 

Now we are back in North Carolina’s Piedmont where my mother grew her first and best tomatoes.  On March  8, I planted my tomato seeds for this year’s crop. I will get them into the ground in late April.  Hopefully, we can still manage to beat that July 1 date that I used to chase on 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.