That 5 lb. turkey

Our Chistmas bird was sold as une petite dinde — a little turkey. I assume that means it was a young bird. It certainly wasn't a "birdzilla, I mean." Here's what it looked like after poaching in simmering water for two hours.

And here's what it looked like as served. I took it out of the poaching liquid and put it in a hot oven for as long as it needed to lightly brown and crisp up the skin.The meat was not dry, and it wasn't mushy either.

My plate looked like this. Steamed broccoli, baked bread stuffing, puréed sweet potato, a turkey leg and thigh, and some of Walt's late Aunt Kathy's cranberry relish, made with cranberries and a whole orange, skin and all. It's a kind of chutney, I guess, and it's really good with the turkey. I also made a creamy gravy using more of the turkey broth.

Yesterday I made a big pot of soup using the turkey broth that the poaching water had become, some chopped-up turkey meat, and some of the vegetables that had poached in the broth along with the bird — onions, garlic, carrots, leeks, and bay leaves, etc., all chopped up. It makes a very warming, nourishing soup.

Christmas morning, 2025, at Saint-Aignan

This was the view from our kitchen window yesterday morning.
By early afternoon, almost all the snow had melted, as I thought it would.

Grassy surfaces, tree limbs, hedges, bushes, and piles of fallen leaves had an inch or so of snow on them early in the morning. Hard surfaces like the paved road that runs through the hamlet and our gravel-surfaced driveway showed no accumulation at all. The ground isn't yet cold enough for the snow to stick. Today it's cold outside, but all the snow is gone. It was pretty while it lasted.

Christmas 2025

It's not often that I manage to take and post a picture of our Christmas dinner on the day we are going to cook and eat it. That's one remarkable thing about this Christmas day. The other is that we have about an inch of snow on the ground this morning. The snow will probably melt away by noon.Neither one of us is going anywhere.

Our dinner today will be a turkey and all the fixings for just the two of us. The turkey weighs about five pounds. We'll have a lot of leftovers. As you can see, I'm poaching the bird in simmering water with carrots, leek tops, onions, garlic, bay leaves, cayenne peppers, and spices including allspice berries, black peppercorns, and whole cloves. After it poaches for about two hours, I'll take the out of the poaching liquid and put it in a hot oven to brown it nicely (I hope) and finish the cooking.

 Merry Christmas and Bon Appétit to all.

Christmases past (2)

Inside the church (l'église Saint-Urbain) in Mennetou-sur-Cher at Christmastime in 2004.