thanksgiving

The weather was good with temperatures in the low 50’s °F – its often much colder at this time of year.

There were going to be 13 of us for Thanksgiving Dinner and as we wanted enough left overs to go round we’d decided to cook two turkeys. But how do you do that with only 1 oven? The answer is that you don’t

Instead you use two gas burners, two large “kettles” and more than 6 gallons of Peanut Oil.

Take your two “kettles” and having worked out how much oil to put in (by using water and your turkey) you fire up the gas and heat the oil to 350°F.

Once the oil is hot you carefully, and slowly, lower the turkey into the kettle:

You keep an eye on the oil temperature and adjust the gas flow as appropriate making sure it doesn’t go over 350°F

And cook for 3.5 minutes per pound.

So after 60 minutes we lifted the turkeys out and let them drain for a new minutes.

Then you take them inside, let them rest for 30 minutes and then carve and eat!

American Customs

On Monday after returning from our weekend away in Kennebunkport I went to my first basketball game. It was a game between the Maine Redclaws and the Springfield Armor at the Augusta Civic Center.

I had no real idea of what to expect. I’d seen some games on TV, including a couple over at Sue and Jeff’s but watching top flight pro teams on TV is very different to seing a pretty new team in the D league. Probably like watching Arsenal v Chelsea on TV and then going to watch Cheltenham v Burton Albion.

I think what struck me most was how disjointed the whole thing felt. There were mad bursts of action with players running back and forth along the full length of the court and then there were whole periods of nothing going on with timeouts and penalty shots, and sometimes those penalty shots seemed to take forever to be taken. Of course with all the timeouts and everything else it’s surprising how long 48 minutes of play can be stretched out to, and having a ref who seeemed to love the sound of his own whistle and his own voice probably didn’t help, and the crowd of just over 3000 people didn’t think he was doing a very good job.

Today was of course, Thanksgiving, so that meant a lot of good food and family time with Kathy’s family, and everyone ate too much, and that was before we started on the various pies for dessert.

Now everyone is just sitting round relaxing and trying not to fall asleep, and talking about plans for Black Friday, and working on wedding programs for this weekend.

Thanksgiving

Well its the day of too much food and too much turkey, and too much beer.

The Antacid manufacturers must love Thanksgiving and Christmas!

We are at Kathy’s parents for Lunch and then we will head back to Sue and Jeff’s where we will basically turn up at the end of their meal so it will be a second round of deserts for us

Let it snow!

Apparently whilst we were getting rained on in Maine it was snowing in England. Typical!

Anyway it started snowing here yesterday – it did about half an inch and its still lying on the ground this morning and we have had a few smatterings this morning. They say that its going to be like this for a couple of days so it looks like a white Thanksgiving for us this year.

Sue and Jeff got back from their cruise last night – they were about an hour late due to delays at the airports. Still at least they made it home – it looks like the delays on this day before Thanksgiving might be much longer than that