Thanksgiving, Flagstaff Style

We just finished our first major holiday in our new home of Flagstaff, and it is filled with lots of happy new memories. The fabulous Aunt M made the trek from the Big D to join us for the holiday weekend. Having some family here definitely was the icing on the cake! The only black mark on the weekend was me being sick. After almost a week of constant coughing and persistent throat tickle, I called uncle and went to the doctor on Wednesday morning. As I suspected, he said it was most likely a sinus infection and prescribed me antibiotics, which I was trying to avoid. ANYWAYS, a minor inconvenience at most. It slowed me down a bit, energy wise, but did not stop me from enjoying my long weekend!

Our Thanksgiving plans were to join some of my fellow SUSer graduate students for a potluck feast. We had purchased a pasture raised turkey through our CSA. It was not inexpensive, but we concluded that it was worth the cost to know that Buddy (what we named him) had a humane life. So this meant we were cooking the turkey. Luckily, we agreed to do an early evening meal so that we did not have to get up crazy early to start roasting. Roasting our turkey turned into a b it of an adventure with some ups and downs. Upon reflection, I am pretty sure it was our first attempt at roasting at turkey, so we should have expected a learning curve.

Unfortunately, even though we had been letting it thaw in the refrigerator since we picked it up Saturday it was still pretty frozen on Thursday. So, we tried the dripping water technique and finally seemed to get it thawed for cooking. And, we were still on track for getting it in the oven by about 11 am. See, everything said that our size turkey should take about 3.5 to 4 hours to roast. So, this would get it done

around 3:30 and allow enough time for it to rest before we carved and took it our host for the evening. Thanks LE for being a fabulous host, by the way. Soooo, our lovely instant read thermometer (which I highly recommend, by the way) went off right about the time we expected it to do so. We were a little surprised by the lack of drippings in the bottom of the pan, and we were certainly not prepared for the gush of liquid that came out of Buddy when R pulled him out of the pan. Liquid that was a definite pinkish color… that was our first signal that all may not be as we hoped… but at least we knew where all our drippings were!

However, we decided to let him rest, and after a while, R started carving. As he got close to the center, we realized it was definitely not cooked all the way yet. Okay, so perhaps the core was not as well thawed as we had hoped. The turkey went back into the oven for some more sun tan time… And kept roasting as each temperature check did not tell us the inner core was where it should be. Finally, about an hour and half after we had anticipated it being done it finally seemed to be ready for carving. It did turn a lovely golden crispy brown, but of course, we completely forgot to take a picture before we carved it up!

Along with the turkey and gravy, we took mashed potatoes and a big salad of mixed greens with pistachios (all from the CSA), pear, dried cranberries, Rogue Creamery bleu cheese, and raspberry vinaigrette. The fabulous Aunt M made her famous buttermilk pie (recipe to follow) and pumpkin pie. Our potluck extravaganza included the following contributions: two types of dressing, two types of cranberry sauce, mashed sweet potatoes, roasted butternut squash, sweet potato rolls, cheesy potato casserole, veggie tray, roasted root vegetable fries, dairy free pumpkin pie and an amazing chocolate turtle tarte. It was a lovely evening filled with tasty food and great new friends.

Robert had to work on Friday, so I spent the morning doing some studying. After lunch Aunt M and I headed into downtown Flagstaff to check out some of the local shops. Neither of really planned to spend money, but we ended up finding a few goodies. Aunt M found fun Christmas presents for her daughters, and we each bought each other a fun little gift for less than $5! I had been meaning to spend some time checking out some of the shops, and this was my first opportunity to really just wander and do this. We concluded that we had done our duty as citizens and contributed to the local economy by spending some money on the day after Thanksgiving, and we headed to Macy’s Coffeehouse to indulge in Macy’s Specials. I had a gift certificate for Oregano’s, so we decided to take a break from turkey and got pizza for dinner. We got the Frisco Thin Crust Pizza with a tomato cream sauce and bacon. Yum! We rounded out our evening with several competitive rounds of Quiddler.

Saturday, the weather looked promising in Sedona, so we headed south for an afternoon of hiking. We couldn’t have asked for more beautiful weather. After several days of highs in the 30’s, we welcomed the clear sunny day and temperatures of almost 60 degrees. It was amazing what a change in elevation could do. As we drove into downtown, we encountered some lingering fall foliage that we could not resist photographing. We picked out a new trail to explore called the Jim Thompson trail that was on the edge of downtown Sedona. It was perfect for what we wanted. It was a pretty easy, fairly flat trail with spectacular views of the surrounding red peaks. We took our time and even though it was a holiday weekend, the trail was not super crowded. It was also nice because it was JUST off the beaten path in Sedona, but you still felt like you were in the middle of nowhere most of the time.

Here are my pictures: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2222387&id=18808643&l=c0dcb9d79e

After returning, we put together a white chili using some leftover turkey and roasted chilies and dried beans from the CSA that we slow cooked in our Crockpot. We have been getting a bag of roasted chilies almost every week. Although that is great, our freezer is quickly filling up with them. I recently went on a quest for recipes that called for chilies, and this one seemed like a good one to try. Obviously we substituted roasted turkey bits for the ground turkey, and chopped up our own chilies and used our own beans.

Today, I rounded out the rest of our holiday weekend with a Thanksgiving Leftovers Casserole. I already had a vision of what I intended to throw together, but then encountered this recipe from one of the blogs I like to read. I did a layer of stuffing, then tossed chopped turkey with gravy and thawed frozen peas. I then topped it off with a layer of mashed potatoes and some shredded cheese. Yum, yum! All in all, it has been a good holiday weekend.

The Fabulous Aunt M’s Buttermilk Pie Recipe

3 eggs

2 Tbs flour

½ c. butter, melted

1 c. buttermilk

1 tsp. vanilla

An unbaked pie shell

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Mix all the ingredients together and place in pie shell. Will bake for about 1 hour and 30 minutes. Enjoy!