Gobble, Gobble, Grumble, Grumble...

Thanksgiving we off very well. The prime rib roast was a five rib'er, which is about twice the size of the ones that we usually cook and have the recipe for. The recipe is specific to the roast size because you leave it in the oven for 1 hour at 375 deg and then turn off the oven and leave it for 3 hours. During that time the internal temperature keeps rising. Usually, by the end of the 3 hours the roast has reached about 125 deg and had backed off to about 120 deg. But, with this larger one the internal temp only got to about 100 before it started to drop. So, I had to improvise and turned the oven on twice during the process to keep the oven temp up and it finally got to about 125 internal. Then, about 45 minutes before time to eat, I put it up to 400 deg. It turned out great. It is the only way I have found to cook a roast where once you get past the outer edge, the whole roast is the same color and done'ness all the way through - just like in the restaurants.

The down side to this way of cooking is that the oven is consumed for about 5 total hours. And the problem with that is that there are usually a number of other things that need the oven to cook/heat them during that time.

So, we used the gas BBQ as our secondary oven. We cooked the turkey in the BBQ, but as you would in a oven. Pam first had it in a regular roasting pan and after only about 30 min, we could tell that the turkey parts that were on the bottom of the pan were getting way to done, so we switched it to a secondary roast roasting pan with a raised rack to keep the turkey off of the direct heat with the BBQ grill and put water in the bottom of the pan. This worked great and the turkey ended up wonderful. In fact, we will probably do it again next year as it give you a lot of great options and works well.

We ate about 5:30pm after Tim, the butcher got here from his job up in Sun Valley. The roast was just wonderful and so was the turkey. Everything turned out great and a great time was had by all.

While all this cooking 'fun' was going on, I was taking another set of instructional pics for the needles new instruction booklet that we will be including inside each of the needles new outer tubes. I decided to go with an 8 page, that fits onto two physical pages of paper in black and white, instead of with a 4 page, on one physical page of paper in color. We really need the extra space to adequately describe all that is necessary and the cost of doing it in color would have been way too much.

So, I took all the B&W pictures and assembled the new 8 page booklet and all was well, until I looked at a printed version and the highly reduced B&W pictures are just not going to work. The 'white' background is way too gray which makes the line and needles in the pictures extremely hard to see.

I have come to the conclusion that we need a professional photographer, or artist, to figure this all out. I give up as I have spent a good week on this and have put together three different booklets and none of them are going to work for various reasons. I have got to get these photos, or diagrams, to be usable in the size I have for them...

I checked out all the famous Black Friday ads and really was underwhelmed. First, the ads were not that good and second, we didn't really need much of what was on sale. I didn't get up until about 6:30am and went to the few stores that had stuff that we were interested in and I got a few things, but it just wasn't the same as the past two years.

So, all in all, after Thanksgiving, its been a disturbing weekend so far. I have got to find someone to help resolve this needle booklet problem - one way or the other. So, I must be off to find the Wizard, here in DaHoland...