Sounds of civilization

New chicken coop. It will be painted and pretty-ed up once we get more sun.

After what seems like a marathon move, I'm pleased to report that everything we own is finally in one place, our chickens are safe and dry in a REAL chicken house once again, and we have both TV and internet service.  These seem to be the foundations of civilization as we know it (in our household, anyway) and so it feels like once again all is well in the kingdom....the kingdom of unpacked boxes, ladders and paint cans, of course.

There are still more projects than I can count. But I did finish the yellow library walls before the furniture that's too heavy to easily lift got moved in!

I'm trying to pace myself on everything else, and enjoy the spring and the garden. There are three raised beds built over the septic drain field, which will now be used for flowers and ornamentals -- not food, ever. Big Ag will be building some other large beds not on the drain field and that is where we'll grow our food. Putting those three original beds over the leach field is a puzzler, as are a few other things, which I'm sure I'll be sharing in the coming days. I guess you never know what the previous owners were or were not thinking when they did stuff (I know they grew food there because there were still tomato cages in place).

Just say no to food grown over the septic system.

The best thing about living where we do now is that while we have two acres, we have all the sights and sounds of a neighborhood once again. I always felt very isolated in the vineyard. Sure, I loved the natural beauty that was present everywhere and yes, even the silence, but there was not a familiar face to be encountered anywhere except for Prince Albert, the resident and lone turkey on the property. Living on 200 acres is one of those things you think sounds great until you actually experience it. I discovered I really missed seeing other people -- just folks walking by, working on their yards, or driving past.

I miss Prince Albert, the vineyard's resident turkey.

I think that's because ultimately we are social creatures, even if we don't want our neighbors too close. I suppose there are a few Henry David Thoreau types who really could live in the middle of nowhere with absolutely no sight or sound of other people. But even he had his mom stop by to help with laundry and make dinner for him sometimes.

In this neighborhood, we have a lot of walkers, kids coming up the street on their way home from the school bus drop-off, and the occasional car, although since we live on a dead-end road the traffic is minimal. There's people out mowing their grass anytime it's not raining. You can hear the highway in the background, the trains running through the nearby town of Turner each morning, and also assorted domestic livestock noises from horses, roosters and sheep. But we're also less than 10 minutes from true civilization in Salem, where there is shopping, healthcare, and entertainment. The nicest part is, when we're done with the city, we can leave it and come home here to where there's plenty of space... but not too much. I have to be honest, I think we're in the Goldilocks Zone of property zoning and size. Lucky us. 

Best. Turkey. Ever.

So I think I mentioned in a posts several months ago that my blogging friend Stephen Andrew Jones ( http://stephenandrewblog.blogspot.com ) wrote a post that sold me on buying a sous vide system for cooking, due to his gorgeous, magazine-worthy pictures of his perfect Thanksgiving turkey. The other option was to show up at his house for the big day and just enjoy all his hard work, but since that's technically stalking (but is it still stalking if you bring really good wine?), instead I bought a sous vide system for myself. Stephen Andrew has several good posts on making a perfect Thanksgiving turkey on his blog, so if you've suffered through the curse of dry meat this year please check out his holidays posts from years past, as well as a couple of links I'll post below. It will change your life.

The sous vide uses vacuum sealed bags with the food inside, cooked at very precise temperatures, to cook meats and poultry to perfection. They cook at a lower temperature, for a longer time, making them safe to eat. I will never, for the record, knowingly eat a dry, briny, 165 degree bird again. 

Here at the homestead we've seen more than our fair share of dried up breast meat and under-done prime rib around the holidays and the stress of not knowing if we'd have another disaster every year was making restaurant reservations in town look extremely attractive.

Ollalieberry mimosas using my favorite sparkling Marsanne!

And so it's especially nice to be able to report that our home-cooked Thanksgiving turkey was, by far, the best any of us had ever had, whether at home or dining out. And for me, it was, by far, the easiest Thanksgiving prep I'd ever had. Thank you Stephen Andrew!

There were several factors working towards making this -- bar none -- the most delicious but also the easiest Thanksgiving ever.  The vacuum seal system I bought alongside the sous vide allowed me to vacuum seal anything, and so I used that opportunity to pre-make ALL the side dishes in advance and hold them in the fridge without fear of spoilage or flavor changes (including stuffing, which stayed moist and delicious despite not being cooked in the bird).  So all the side dishes were done by Wednesday.

Behold the stuffing cooker.

Thursday was Pie Day (we celebrated dinner on Friday, so Thursday was a prep day), using pumpkins I'd harvested a couple of months ago and Olallieberries harvested and fast-frozen in spring.  All I had to do was make two pie crusts and cook it all up, which wasn't hard.

Then our Friday Turkey Day arrived, and it was time to cut the raw bird up into pieces. I decided to only cook the breasts in the sous vide system and sear and then braise the legs in the oven, in a red wine reduction sauce (I got 99 problems, but lack of wine ain't one of them). I also pulled all the breast skin off (sous vide cooking means no crispy skin sadly, but there are alternatives for making this happen!). I slathered the peeled-off skin in bacon fat and a little salt  and popped it into the oven on a sheet of parchment to roast by itself. I roasted up nicely, but shrunk a lot, so next year I will be covering it with another baking sheet to hold it flat and help keep it's shape and size.

I then seasoned the two breasts and trussed them together to make a kind of "turchetta," popped it into a vacuum bag and dumped it into a stock pot with the sous vide cooker. Both the breasts and the legs were scheduled for exactly 2 1/2 hours of cooking. With about an hour left in the cook time, I took out all the side dishes out of the fridge and stuck them in the oven too. The stuffing I cooked outside in the solar oven to help keep it moist.

EXACTLY two and a half hours later, I had a perfect Thanksgiving dinner -- no stress whatsoever. What a cooking revolution. So nice to be able to tell people you're going to eat at 2 pm and MEAN IT. Commitment kept! There was literally no guesswork at all, which was so helpful to me as I started heating up side dishes and getting the table ready.

Generation Two, minus our son Groceries who is stationed in South Carolina.

We had two of our three kids home and I'm happy to say they absolutely loved the meal! So did Big Ag, even though he's not in this pic because he's off in the kitchen somewhere getting himself a drink.

Here is a link to the two recipes I used for this year's feast:

http://www.seriouseats.com/2014/11/food-lab-sous-vide-turkey-crisp-skin-sous-vide-101-thanksgiving.html

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/11/red-wine-braised-turkey-legs.html