I have not cooked this dinner for many years, don't go anywhere anymore for a turkey "fix" so last night my grandgirl brought me a what the sticker says "a lb" dinner, 2 so so slices of white turkey, dolop of mashed potatoe and dolop of white mac and cheese, no stuffing, no sweet potato, no cranberry, just those 3 white things.....and the sticker price she paid said $23.23. I ate a little last night and I will save the rest for tomorrow and later heat a Marie Callendar's turkey roast dinner in my oven, it cost me $4.49. I cooked a yam yesterday and will enjoy that. Anyone else have price complaints or just me.
We bought a small turkey this year since there's just the two of us. I don't know what we paid for it, but I thought the prices looked pretty good while we were looking at regular-sized turkeys. That wasn't the case when it came to ham, though. Those prices were up there a bit.
Believe it or not, we will be spending $50.00 each for Thanksgiving dinner at a local Steakhouse at a very large Truck Stop. The environment of the steakhouse really reminds us of the High-Class Dining Area on the movie Titanic. White table clothes and all waiters/waitresses dressed in black. We will be in FULL western attire, including our black felt hats. Both of us wearing our Wrangler jeans and I will be wearing my sport coat, dress shirt/tie. Of course, we don't live in a so-called "western/rodeo/cowboy area", but that's the way we will dress. We no longer cook Thanksgiving dinner at home. Too much work and clean up for just the two of us. Last time we had Thanksgiving dinner with part of my wife's family was in North Carolina in 2007, when we lived there. And, while waiting today to get ready for our 4:30PM Reservation, my wife decorated our fake tree and I'm finishing up setting up our Lighted Christmas Village on dining room table. Wife's older sister will love seeing it next month.
Grocery stores around me charge 49¢ per pound if you buy $35 of other stuff. The farm across the street from me has fresh turkeys for $7 per pound. So a 15# bird will run you $105...but he had a happy--albeit short--life. Makes you wonder who the real turkey is.
Well I know Everything is Wildy Expensive in good ole LIB CA, but this one really hit me...granted it's from a store that is pricey to begin with along the same lines as Whole Foods only pricier....If I'm still around next year I'll remember this year's prices...
We got our turkey from Kroger when it was on sale for 49 cents a lb. I actually got two, so we have a smaller one for Christmas , too, and it is in the freezer. The turkey was just over 17 lbs, so cost about $9. I made stuffing and gravy to go with the turkey, and we went over to my son’s place. His wife made the accessory foods, yams, salad, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. I would guess that dinner for the four of us (plus leftovers) didn’t cost much more than your tiny dinner did, @Joy Martin . And both families will have plenty of food leftover for several more turkey based meals. Over all, Alabama is maybe one of the cheapest states to live in, and for sure cheaper than California would be. When we were shopping , the meat guy was telling Bobby that he had to order his Thanksgiving turkeys last April, and they then order that many turkey eggs and raise the amount of turkeys that they have orders for. Apparently, this started during the covid disaster, because they had all those turkeys raised, and people were told to isolate for both thanksgiving and Christmas, so there were way too many leftover turkeys that year. The $7 a lb seems expensive to me, @John Brunner , but maybe it is not. I remember seeing huge turkey farms in western Washington, and the turkeys were just free range in large pastures all summer long, and eating bugs and grasshoppers, so they probably only had to special feed them for a short time in the fall. Even in north Idaho, the wild turkeys that they brought there back in the 1990’s seem to do fine all year round and thrive.
I've been over there a few times and have seen the turkeys in their pen, and never really inquired about them. First, they look an awful lot like the ones that just wander around my property, so I wonder if they're a special breed or just captive locals. Local wild birds would not have all that much meat, especially the legs. Second, there are never really a lot of them in the pen...I've seen free-roaming flocks that are larger. I don't know if they raise them year-round and increase the volume for Thanksgiving, or if there's only demand for a few of these Maltese Turkeys. These folks are on the high end of the pricing scale. They give herbal medicine classes at $1,000 a pop and sell eggs for $6 a dozen. I get my eggs for $2-$3 a dozen from the locals who have chickens. I also recall that their beef is real high, too...but that has to be processed in USDA facilities. edit to add: Poultry can be processed for sale to the public by the grower. Beef can not.
Good thing the Marie Callender dinners are low cost, even thou a friend recommended them, mine was pretty soupy, and I read a bunch of reviews and all said the same thing, then I read Stouffer's Turkey frozen dinners and MUCH better reviews, so I'll buy a Stoufferss in the future... Live and learn.
That's interesting. I like Marie's pot pies, and they're more expensive (and larger) than Stouffers and Banquet. I'll have to remember that their turkey dinners are not high quality...and I do like Stouffers lasagna.
We had a more or less traditional Thanksgiving Dinner that included a small turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, cranberry sauce, and biscuits. Despite it being a small turkey, we have some left over for sandwiches tomorrow. @Michelle Anderson did a commendable job on all of it.
I used to go to my brother's for Thanksgiving, but they are having problems there so not anymore. I just found out last year that a Presbyterian church down the road was handing out cooked Thanksgiving dinners to take home, so I've gone there this year and last. You could order up to four so I ordered two to freeze the second for Christmas. The portions were huge, so I ate half yesterday and will finish the rest next week. Watching local news last night, there were quite a few organizations who did the same and fed a lot of people.
The 3 church charge I was attending delivers Thanksgiving meals to folks who need them. The meals get delivered the Saturday before Thanksgiving. For some reason, I got on their list. I told them they did not need to do this, since I get around fine and they know I can cook with the best of them
Trust you all got your guts satisfied and happy. I just ate some sweets I cooked and some white turkey that my grandgirl brought me yesterday.... Years ago I had read that a person could consume 18,000 calories at a huge sit down, from drinks before to all the deserts etc.....