This holiday season, we’ve both experimented with using Sahnaz to help us make purchasing decisions. This has saved us a lot of time and hassle.

The Turducken: An Awesome Culinary Experience

We had always wanted to try a Turducken. When we decided to host Thanksgiving dinner for about 12 of our friends and we figured this was a great time to try one. Making our own Turducken was going to be a bit too much of an experiment - we didn’t have a full day to dedicate to deboning, nor did we really know what to do. We had heard that you could just order a turducken online, which is what we decided to do. We had Sahnaz, our current offshore assistant, do some research on Turducken vendors. In the meantime, our friend Kirby mentioned that the Golden Gate Meat Company in San Francisco would make turduckens. So we had Sahnaz find out the details about that option as well. This was a case where having local knowledge was really important - a Google search (which is how Sahnaz works) didn’t turn up this company.

End result: It made much more sense to purchase from the Golden Gate Meat Company due to shipping costs - and we had the benefit of getting an organic turducken (we do, after all, live in San Francisco).

The Turducken was a totally awesome experience. This was a 25-pound hunk of meat - no bones. Turns out it was mostly turkey, and we could have used some extra stuffing. Based on Sahnaz’s research, if we had ordered a small Turducken, the ratio of turkey to duck to chicken would have been more event - but we had a large enough group where going large made sense. Cooking the Turducken was incredibly easy - we just stuck it in the oven and it cooked. The only mishap was that the really nice turkey pan we had bought to appease Brooke’s mom’s exacting ways was too big for our oven. So we ended up with a supermarket foil one. As far as we can tell, it made no difference (too bad we can’t return the $100 Sur la Table pan….).

The Christmas Tree

Toby: Brooke mentioned in November that it would be nice to get a real Christmas tree for our apartment at some point in the future. We’ll be away for a couple of weeks, so she wasn’t really sure this was the year to do it, but I decided to surprise her while she was in Seattle for work.

Since I don’t exactly have a car right now (this is another life experiment that we can explore later), I couldn’t just go to a farm and get one. I talked to a couple of friends about whether they thought Christmas trees could be delivered — they both said that they had never heard of such a thing, and also thought it was a bad idea since it’s really necessary to go and pick out a good one yourself. I was unconvinced, I figured that it would be possible to pay someone to bring me a tree even if the farm itself didn’t offer delivery service.

So I had Sahnaz investigate for me. I was actually walking around Boston at the time when I thought of it, so I sent her a one-line email from my Blackberry, essentially “See if you can find a way to get a Christmas tree delivered to my house in San Francisco”. Two days later I got an email with an attached Word document (she likes the MS Office documents), listing a series of ways that I could theoretically get a tree delivered. She had obviously done some Googling and filtered and formatted the results for me. Many of them were shipping options from far away farms, but one was in Marin county and said that they did delivery.

I had Sahnaz call the Marin based farm and she sent me an email explaining that she had called them and been told to call a different place, which she had diligently done and gotten quotes on a few trees, along with delivery charges, and found out that they could indeed deliver while Brooke was away. I called them, choosing to go with the classic Douglas Fir rather than the “fuller and heavier” Grand Fir. The fullest, nicest tree I’ve ever had was delivered a couple of days later at a delivery charge of $10 (I tipped the driver another $10).

Result: Brooke was so stunned when she saw the tree that she almost cried. Now that we’re on vacation in New Zealand we have friends staying in the apartment and they’re also very excited to have a Christmas tree.

B&T: Lessons learned from outsourcing the holidays:

• Once again, we found that a great use for an offshore assistant is making a series of standardized phone calls
• Don’t buy a giant turkey pan if you live in an apartment and haven’t checked the size of your oven
• Don’t be afraid of Turduckens, they’re really easy to cook if you order them pre-made
• If you get a Turducken, make extra stuffing. There may not be enough and people LOVE stuffing
• Getting a tree delivered is not only possible, at $10 delivery + $10 tip, it’s a great deal compared to the hassle of getting one yourself
• Surprising one’s girlfriend with a Christmas tree is a great idea

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