Frugal Feast Fiasco

Many of you know that I work really hard at finding the best deals on every little thing.  It's not that I am unwilling to spend money, it's just that I want it to be a wise purchase and if I can find it for the lowest possible price, then all the better.

Now it's time to apply that same logic to Thanksgiving dinner.

I bought a turkey for 74 cents a pound.  It wasn't the lowest price out there, but I didn't need to buy $35 worth of other stuff at the store that had the lowest price per pound so I felt like I had made the wisest choice.

I bought an enormous bird, 22.5lbs, because we had 17 people to feed.  When I brought it home Saturday before the holiday I didn't even bother putting it into the freezer because our fridge works so well I knew it would take all these days to defrost it.

By Tuesday it was still solidly frozen.  We, L & I, wanted to brine the turkey starting on Tuesday night, Wednesday morning at the latest.  So I started the water defrost on Tuesday morning. All was going well until this cutie showed up...

Ok, that's not really fair to c, but it makes for a fair excuse on my part.  AND he IS really cute; in my highly biased opinion.

Have you heard that too many cooks spoil the broth?  Well it could apply to a turkey too.  There was a definite miscommunication between the two cooks working on this bird, but I did get it into the fridge Tuesday night, and it was finally thawed.

Anyway, Wednesday morning when I opened up the fridge at O-dark-thirty to get J and L some breakfast there was a horrible smell.  I tried desperately to ignore it.  It smelled like bad poultry.  Accck!  Again, be thankful there's no smell-o-vision here.

You know how when something smells bad, you just have to get someone else's opinion?  When L came into the kitchen I had him smell the fridge too.  Yep, it smelled bad.  I would have to buy another turkey.  And this one would have to be fresh.  The first thing out of my mouth?  Do you know how much a fresh turkey is?  I bet they are $1.50/lb!!!!  I didn't even KNOW how much a fresh turkey was.  Well, L did have a point, we couldn't poison everyone.

That was a fair point so DDIL J and I headed to town to pick up a fresh turkey, they were $2/lb.  She also scouted out that if we needed to buy turkey #3 we could buy one already smoked, and we would only have to heat it up.  Should a fourth be necessary she pointed out that we could get that at the BBQ place that had them already cooked, and warm.  Thankfully we didn't need to use either of those plans.

Here's where the story takes a funnier turn.  Later that afternoon after turkey #2 was in the brine getting all ready for the smoking it was to get starting that night, I started to clean out the fridge to make room for the leftovers that would accumulate after the big feast.

What did I find that was interesting?  A bag full of rotting bean sprouts.  In fairness, they 'looked ok' from the top, but when I picked them up they smelled like rotten poultry!  Seriously!

I quickly took them outside to the compost pile (only stopping to snap a picture after the bag was empty) and when I came back the smell, ALL of the smell, was gone!  Really! There was nothing wrong with turkey #1, except that it was keeping company with fowl smelling bean sprouts (pun intended).  All we could do was laugh, and we did!

Some of us more than others!

After baking turkey #1 yesterday, and eating it for dinner, I have a baked and de-boned turkey in my freezer ready to use for whatever I can come up with.... oh and 3 quarts of turkey stock.

I guess it all worked out with the two turkeys, and these two turkeys were pretty good together too over the weekend.  I'm sure thankful for both of them.