Our hosts left ordering a turkey to the last minute, and finding one was made slightly more troublesome by the need to find a local, humanely raised bird. When Michelle started calling around earlier this week, lots of farms didn’t have any birds left.
She finally reached a lady who did.
“I don’t think you’re going to want it,” she said. It was 36 pounds. (That’s three pounds more than my two-year-old.) And even with 23 people on hand to eat Thanksgiving dinner — an estimated pound of pre-cooked flesh per person — that seemed like overkill.
The turkey had to be brined in a green Coleman chest cooler. At 15 minutes per pound, it would need nine hours to cook. Josh installed an additional oven just to roast the turkey.
Still, after we picked up the bird and were headed home, Josh started to have second thoughts. Maybe we should have taken the 39-pound turkey the farmer had offered.
Update
I’m saddened learn that our turkey was nowhere near the size that one family found. That would be 72 pounds, which bested their previous record of 47.