Turkey time

It's Thanksgiving next week, and Mrs Walles and I are well prepared.  In past years one of the local supermarkets has given away free turkeys if you have enough loyalty points.  This year turkey prices are unusually high so they aren't offering that, but by biding our time and keeping our eyes open (most of the credit here going to Mrs Walles) we found one for 45¢ per pound. We got an almost twenty pound bird for less than eight dollars plus extra money off next time we fill up the car, which just about makes it even in my mind.

The idea that an entire turkey can be bought for less than ten dollars - a real flesh and blood bird, not a photograph - seems remarkable to me. Apparently some of the locals have become conditioned by Thanksgiving deals into thinking a turkey at Thanksgiving is an inalienable right, like freedom of speech and guns.  There was a man behind us at the checkout when we bought ours who was almost apoplectic with anxiety that he might miss out on his free poultry, and then even more so when the cashier told him, in effect, that if he was waiting for a free one he'd better go and catch it himself (which, as this demonstrates, is quite possible).

We also picked up ten cans of cranberry sauce on special, which should tide us over.  It might not be so much a matter of having sauce with our turkey next week, as having turkey with our sauce.

Now we just have to decide how to cook it.  I've cooked turkeys a few times here but I want to do something a bit special for the holiday meal, and my mind is turning to stuffing.  That poses a problem, because I like the dense, moist kind of stuffing that goes inside the bird and is traditional where I come from.   But I also like the comparatively dry herbed bread cubes that are traditional here and cook separately.  I don't know if I'll be able to choose between them, so that turkey had better look out: it's going to be well and truly stuffed this Thanksgiving.