Smoked Turkey

As I mentioned in a recent post, I smoked a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner yesterday.  Cec bought a turkey breast with legs and wings removed, which weighed about 8 pounds.

I prepared it by injecting the breast with a small amount of Worchestershire sauce with a little Tony Cachere's Creole seasoning sprinkled in (too much will clog the injection needle) and sprinkled the same seasoning on the outside.  I smoked it in my horizontal smoker (firebox on end) in a foil pan using a combination of hickory and mesquite chips at 300-400F for two hours uncovered and then another two hours covered with aluminum foil.

The result was one of the best turkeys I've every had.  That with all the wonderful dishes prepared by Cec made this one of my best Thanksgivings ever.

I had my first fried turkey last weekend on a campout with the Luf To Go Sams camping club.  It was very good, but I think I like smoked turkey a little better.  It is certainy lower in calories.

Egret

Speaking of egrets, here is one that showed up in our lagoon this morning.  We see these almost every day.  Occasionally we have a visit from a blue heron.

Life in a Small East Texas Town, Chapter 1

This afternoon, after a wonderful Thanksgiving meal (smoked turkey, cornbread dressing, corn casserole, mashed potatoes, green bean salad, homemade rolls, homemade cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, cocoanut cream pie, and pecan pie), and just as the clean-up was begoinning, Cec yelled that the water was off.  The water system is run by two guys who live just across the road from us, and I gave them a call to find out what was wrong.  Howard said Doug had just left to check on it.

A while later Doug stopped by to tell us that a woman up the street had a drainage problem at her home and did not know how to turn off the water.  For some reason she knew the location of one of the main valves at the water plant and how to turn it off, which she did.  That turned off water to about 1/3 of the water system customers.  

In the big city the perpetrator would probably be conferring with her defense attorney about now. In Riverside, however, our guys just told her never to do it again and turned the water back on. 

Invasion of the Pelicans

We have lots of birds around the lake.  Egrets and blue herons feed in our little lagoon almost every day.  They stand very still on their long legs in the shallow water and every so often peck at the water, bringing up a small fish almost every time.

Today we had an invasion of American white pelicans, a species usually seen on the Gulf Coast.  I was sitting in the yard with my back to the water watching my step-son Paul and his two sons burning a stump when I heard a whooshing, splashing sound.  I though someone had driven up in a boat, but much to my surprise I found several hundred pelicans landing in Bethy Creek bay next to our property.  They swam back and forth across the bay for about a half hour apparently feeding on the fish.  Suddenly they started flapping and left as quickly as they had come.  It was quite an  unusual sight.

We saw a hawk in the persimmon tree in our back (lakeside) yard a couple of days ago, and I have heard there are bald eagles on the lake.  We'll keep a lookout for them.