The Christmas Turkey

I cooked a 40 pound turkey on Saturday. That's not a typo folks, it was 40 pounds. As you can see from the photo, it looks mighty big compared to the 500 ml pyrex measuring cup next to it. It took about 12 hours to cook in the oven. Fortunately, I have a big oven and a very large foil pan in which to bake this bird.

My sisters and I make lunch for all of the volunteers who work at Winnipeg Harvest every Monday. As you can imagine, there are plenty of turkeys (both the human and frozen kind) at the food bank this time of year and I thought it might be a nice idea to have hot turkey sandwiches for lunch. Michele had the "perfect" turkey for me. "It must be at least 40 pounds!" And she was right. This was one ugly bird but it was also surprisingly moist and tasty. I'm glad we went through the trouble to cook it even though a couple of smaller birds would have been easier to handle. Thank goodness for Wes who was so willing to lug that thing from my car to the back porch (my winter freezer), into the kitchen, into the oven, out of the oven, back into the oven...you get the picture.

The hot turkey sandwiches were a big hit. We made them last year too and they were so big that I actually got one marriage proposal and one "inquiry." Nothing so exciting happened this year although lunch was much appreciated by everyone.

The turkey that we cook for Christmas dinner will be a wee bit smaller and will require significantly less work. That's a good thing. I don't want to be cooking a 40 pounder too often.