My first turkey

Twelve years ago before my husband's dad passed away; all of hubby's cousins from California (I have talked about one of them here).  One of the cousins lived here while he was in the Army.  They actually lived with us for a while (which I really miss).  Anyway...they visited for Thanksgiving.  Since my house was way bigger than my father-in-law's; we decided I should host.  I don't remember where we got the turkey, but I know we got it free from someone's work.  I spent weeks researching and looking at different recipes and talking to various people on how to cook this turkey to make it extremely moist and not make Thanksgiving a disaster (biggest run-on sentence ever).

After much deliberation and research, I decided on brining the turkey.  I remember having this giant turkey in a giant bucket in my refrigerator.  We had to do a lot of rearranging of shelves just to get the bucket to fit (not to mention all the other food that was crammed in there).  The morning of, I gathered my butter, my rosemary, my sage, my lemon, salt and pepper.  I remembered to remove the giblets (gross) and washing this turkey.  I was really proud of myself because I find raw poultry repulsive to touch.  I added all my aromatics and covered it with foil and baked it away.  I can say that turkey was very moist and delicious and everyone raved over it.  More over I have the memories of that Thanksgiving.  

My husband and his cousins (who he had only met a handful of times) laughed and talked.  His dad made a brief appearance (it was really hard for him to get around he had skin cancer on the inside of his leg).  I have pictures of all this and as soon as I get my old hard drive copied over to the new one (yay!!...all my pictures and everything has all been saved and with the original file names), I will dig around and post a few.  One memorable picture sticks out; it is of cousin PJ who fell asleep after the meal and we decided to mess with him.  I will definitely find that picture.  

As far as turkeys go; I am 1 for 1 in successes.  Yay!  When we go to my mom's; we have smoked turkey...yum.

I am joining my friend Paula in talking about Thanksgiving for the month of November.