Christmas Cooking, Decorating and Sleeping

This year, I volunteered to cook Christmas Dinner.  When I offered this to my Mom and my Aunt they were both happy to pass it off, but with the warning that I was to only cook the turkey, stuffing and gravy and to get everyone to bring something.  It worked out great, minus the stress of cooking a turkey for the first time. Thanks to our cooking friend Joel, we decided to try brining our turkey (I did a trial run on a chicken a few weeks before).  The recipe was from one of Thomas Keller's Cook books, he is the guy that runs The French Laundry, Bouchon, Per Se and Ad Hoc.  It was quite a simple recipe but it add lots of flavor and moisture.  

The chicken was left in for 10ish hours and this we did for about 24.  It was tricky trying to find a container large enough to hold a 30 pound turkey and all the brining solution but we managed to get it to work.  It was amazingly heavy though and I am glad that the bottom didn't fall out while I was carrying it to the garage.  The brine consists of kosher salt, lemons, peppercorns, fresh herbs (I did the Poultry Blend), honey and water.

It smelled wonderful before we even started roasting it and it was even better than expected.  We were expecting the cooking to take about 5-6 hours but it was done in just over 3!  We were all a little confused by that as we were thinking even 5-6 hours was on the short side of being done.  With another little trick from Joel, keeping the turkey covered in beach towels to keep warm, we were able to make sure that everything was still hot and ready to go by dinner time.  Ironically enough, my slow-cooker stuffing took the longest!

I would say it is up there with the best turkey, EVER and not just because I cooked it.  My cousins all commented on how good it was, or maybe that was just so they would be invited back to my house for dinner again:)  Thanks again Rite for the potatoes, salad and fabulous bowl; Jaclyn for the tasty squash, Pam for the yummy cheesecake; Neil for the 'fruit-type dessert;' and Mom for helping me with the gravy,  stuffing and turkey.

A couple of days before Christmas, we headed over to the neighbor's house to do a little gingerbread house decorating.  The kids all had a great time and this was the result of Sophia's hard work.  She was very meticulous this year.  I had to put the icing on in a certain way so she could put her decorations on.  That was no easy task as the icing came out in globs. It's sad but Sophia did a way better job of decorating than I did:)

 One night, after Christmas, Sophia decided she absolutely had to sleep with all her Barbies and most of her stuffies.  Max took these just as she was getting ready for bed, hence the big smiles.

Pretending to be asleep.  Ah, if only they were this angelic awake too!