And to make our first Thanksgiving memorable, we decided to make Jacque Pepin's steam powered turkey. With the promise of a moister and crispier bird than roasting alone can deliver, we steamed our 17 pound bird for about 40 minutes and then roasted her for about 2 1/2 hours.

Our ghostly bird steaming away

While I suspect Jacque's method is pretty sound, our results were mixed. We produced a golden bird with very moist breast meat, but the thighs weren't cooked through and the sauce was a little strange.

Steaming complete and into the oven

The final product minus the bloody thighs
we discovered minutes later

While I would like to say I'm going to get it right the next time, I think we'll be serving Thomason's barbequed ham at our next Thanksgiving.

A Kitchen Island for Thanksgiving

Will and I quickly accumulated six dressers when we moved to Lexington this fall that looked a bit awkward lining the walls of our two bedrooms. To remedy this, we decided to re-purpose my grandmother's dresser into a kitchen island. Had I thought to blog about this before starting the project, I would have taken a picture of it before the stripping and painting got underway, but just imagine a dark wood dresser with fancy pulls and a big mirror floating above it between two carved spindles. We removed the mirror and top, stripped the finish, gave it about five coats of white paint and finished it off with a butcher block top and pulls that match our cabinet.

We finished it just in time to host our first Thanksgiving and I don't know what we would have done without the extra space.

New home to my baking equipment

And the perfect spot to display our shaved brussel sprout
and manchego cheese salad, apple pie and sugar cream pie

The next dresser is destined to become a handsome filing cabinet.

Soup Luck 11.14.2012