Thanksgiving Shake-Up – Bacon Wrapped Turkey and Chow Mein

My kids have long envied a friend of mine who married into a Chinese Canadian family and enjoys a roast-turkey-and-chow-mein dinner each Christmas. My oldest son is graduating this year and I fear it won’t be long until I get the sad news that he is planning to spend Thanksgiving (or Christmas, or another traditional family holiday) as the guest of some other family with a fetching daughter. So, it now behooves me to up the ante a little.

Bacon is apparently the ‘it’ food these days – at least with young men. I read an anecdote in Maclean’s magazine just prior to Thanksgiving concerning a turkey-farming MP who puts pulpy orange juice and soy sauce into the roasting pan as a gravy starter and covers his turkey breast with slices of bacon for extra flavour and moistness. Without more information that this, I decided to have a go. I would say the bacon was definitely an addition; however, the orange juice/soy sauce burned in the pan and took several soak/scrubs to conquer. I’d stocked up on some gravy mixes anyway (Sorry, I can’t hear your boos and hisses) so no harm done to the dinner.

Strips of bacon keep the turkey moist and add flavour.

We cooked our turkey at the cottage on Saturday, so we could indulge ourselves in cold turkey sandwiches for lunch on Sunday and hot turkey sandwiches for dinner. When the turkey was resting and I was mashing the potatoes – which didn’t get into the picture somehow – I sent Cottager out on a secret mission to the Bayview Szechuan restaurant in the village for a container of chicken chow mein. He was back just as I finished carving the bird.

I don’t fuss with setting a beautiful table when we don’t have guests since my crew is fairly food-centric. It was just nice to have a quiet family meal at the end of a day working out-of-doors at our fall clean-up tasks. The chow mein was a surprisingly nice addition. I believe we have a new tradition. Hopefully one that will keep my boys coming home for Thanksgiving dinner.

Turkey and chow mein with all the trimmings

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Super Urchins!

This past weekend we finally got to the bottom of The List. Yep.

The bottom. Of The List.

The List that we set for ourselves of things to finish before the rental season started. As of now, nothing (well, nothing major) shall be added to any New List until the fall. When we are fortunate enough to find ourselves at the cottage this summer, it will be for bonfires and gelato runs and no-holds barred Farkle matches.

Getting to the bottom of The List was more problematic than we expected. There were setbacks.

But this weekend we prevailed, thanks to our Super Urchins.

Little Urchin (Lu) took on the job of adding pickets to an unsafe railing around our back deck / tent platform.

He worked hard in the hot sun. The result is a deck that is miles safer for little guests, and actually looks better too.

 

 

 

 

 

 Meanwhile, Big Urchin (Bu) got up on the roof. We passed him a blower to see if that would remove some of the gunk on the shingles. But like so many jobs in life, there was no easy way to do it. In the end, it took a broom and a lot of effort to get the roof looking good. 

I still can’t get over it!  It was a long, hard job on a very hot day. He did not quit. He did not cut corners. He even put on a shirt when advised to do so. Could this really be true? 

These are the tears of a woman who may have just had a glimpse of the light at the end of at least one tunnel. 

And it was good.

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The Best Thing About a Cottage Is…

Getting your kids disconnected from their electronics. It can be a bit painful at first. It takes them a while to come to their senses and realize that life was worth living even before graphics cards were invented. Even with our ‘Modern Amish’ sensibilities, my kids are no strangers to Facebook and computer games. Being deprived of all that artificial visual stimulation, for two or three days together, can stun them as surely as a baseball to the head. But then, ever so slowly, they come around. 

My Little Urchin gets pretty creative and shows signs of becoming a fine cottager himself one day. He split wood and whittled pegs to make these trivets for us recently.

trivet construction

Two models to choose from!

Trivet in Action!

Meanwhile, Big Urchin likes to play with fire! The beach is a good place to let him work this out of his system with relatively little risk of serious injury. Creative photography by Little Urchin.

Bu commands the flames

 

 

 

That can of Stella appears to have gone to Cottager’s head.

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