Hope everyone had a great Christmas yesterday! I’m a little late in posting, but I thought I would share our Christmas card from this year.
Cole got a new tricycle and we have barely been able to get him to stop riding it since he saw it yesterday morning! Santa is also bringing him a big boy bed, but the elves were a little late getting it together so hopefully he’ll have it sometime this week. We enjoyed a nice dinner last night with Matt, Charla, and Gabbi along with Matt’s parents and his brother, James who were visiting for Christmas. I made my first turkey! It wasn’t as difficult as I had imagined it to be and it turned out really good. I read online that brining it was the best way to keep it from drying out, so I did that for about 24 hours after thawing it, and it was wonderful! Very moist and tasty! I would post the recipe, but I am sometimes not very good about measuring everything out, so I just kind of threw it all together. Basically with brining you soak the meat in a marinade heavy with kosher salt and sugar, along with other liquids (I used apple cider) and spices. You’re supposed to inject the turkey in several spots but I didn’t have anything to do that with, so I ended up using the sharp end of my meat thermometer and just poking a few random holes in so the marinade could soak through better. Everyone here in Cusco takes their turkeys to cook in traditional ovens, which are all over the city in different neighborhoods. I hadn’t seen one in our neighborhood (they are not really labeled so it’s hard to know where they are) so I called around and found one within walking distance. Like I said, they aren’t labeled, but I saw a few other people walking into this house with big bags that looked like turkeys, so I figured that must be the place. I followed them to the back of the house and there was a big room with lots of little cubbies on the wall, and turkeys were lined up in metal pans within the cubbies. Then in the back of the room was a giant stone/adobe wood-burning oven and an older man had one of those giant spatulas (is that the right term!?) that they use in pizzerias for the brick ovens. It was full of turkeys and so I just told them what time I wanted to pick it up and they gave me a number for pick up! It was very easy and so much better than cooking it in my own oven. Our ovens here run on gas so baking sometimes can get expensive. Anyway, I thought I would share with you my first turkey adventure!
I thought I’d also share a recipe I used last night for Cranberry Wassail. My parents always host a big Christmas eve party at their home with all of our relatives, and my mom usually makes Wassail. This is a slightly different version of the traditional recipe, because it uses cranberry juice, but I thought it turned out good. It’s a nice drink for Christmas because all of the fruit juices and spices make your house smell very nice and festive! You can find the recipe here. I didn’t add the lemon juice and I added a little more sugar because my juices weren’t already sweetened.
