Bye-bye Birdie

I'll never make a fucking turkey again. There, are you satisfied, Miss Recent Commentatrix, that I'm again using "fowl language?" on my blog?

It wasn't a disaster. Far from it. It was a grand success. In the sense that buying a bunch of transistors from the electronics store and building a radio is a grand success. "Hey! It works! It even works great! It works even better than I ever even expected! I know I could have walked to the store and bought a transistor radio for $10 when mine cost $55 plus seven hours work, but that's beside the point! They do the same exact thing, but I did it! Not you! Me!"

Never mind that eight said they would come, but only one showed up; never mind that in the end, turkey is a pretty taste-free bird that either has to be gussied up with mountains of side dishes or just be another bland filling in a school-lunch sandwich or a major player in Jenny Craig's repertoire; never mind that it's just a total all-around hassle to prepare, maintain, serve and clean up after; never mind all that.

But it's like assembling an entire Everest expedition, complete with sherpas, oxygen, tents, Base Camp, Camp IV, South Col, summit, plant the flag! just to trek down to the corner store to get some beer.

I mean, I've never understood how keen people are to put so much effort into things that yield so little reward. Design a nuclear reactor? Years upon years upon most of your lifetime at the expense of your family, friends and collection of G.I. Joes, for WHAT exactly? My motto is, "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff. Don't Sweat the Big Stuff, Either. Let Someone Else Do It."

Thus, we come to the bird.

Here, I added rosemary feathers (and garlic slivers!) under the skin to see if I could make it fly again:



but the only place it flew was into the oven.

Making turkey is high-maintenance. In the pantheon of cookery, it's up there with sausage making or apple pies from scratch. Ya gotta HAVE A DAMN GOOD REASON to make a turkey from scratch when you could just get a few turkey pieces and roast those.

My motto is: let someone else do it.

The turkey was a grand success, was extraordinarily delicious,



but I'll never (fowl language) do it again.

FreeBird

The bird flies free! It is liberated from the brine. It was so cold last night outside that I knew it would be useless to let it "thaw" in its brine on the balcony -- it would have still been an ice cube today. So I brought it into the living room.

And lo and behold, it was still near freezing but completely thawed when I dumped the brine and washed the bird at noon or so. Then I put it on a rack and put it back, naked, on the balcony, where it remains (at 11:30 p.m.) and will remain till tomorrow, air-drying in Paradise with its 20 virgin turkeyesses while I anticipate how to cook it.

Meanwhile, the gravy! Yes, all afternoon I painstakingly made the gravy (all recipes to follow upon approval of the attending masses).

Stage one was the raw stage, with onions, herbs and broth.


Stage II (the whole process takes about three hours; I kid you not) was the straining and then making the roux.


Stage III was adding back the strained broth and lovingly stirring constantly (and I mean every second of every minute while watching Season II of Columbo and drinking beer -- highly recommended for making turkey gravy) for about 30 minutes. Then add white wine and hey presto! Another thirty minutes of constant stirring and



smooth as a slug of 1956 Laphroiag single-malt scotch.

Need I remind you: tomorrow is Crunch Day. My turkey (let's call him "Dindy" for no particular reason) tells me to say hello and that really, really, he's all right on the balcony. But he could use a sweater right about now. And maybe a slug of double-malt scotch.

(He really DOES look cold, doesn't he?)

Crunch Time

We forewent (is that a word?) Thanksgiving this year because none of our friends could make it. But we had bought a frozen Butterball turkey and had grand plans. Notwithstanding that I've never made a whole turkey in my life, it has been rescheduled for Saturday.

With my usual gusto, I did all the research I could on making whole turkeys, and, as usual, there are three million differing opinions on how it should be done. So I picked #s 1.65M, #2.98M and #.94M and mixed 'em up.

So, here's my thinking, and bear with me here: the damn thing is frozen, it's Thursday and I don't want it to be an iceball come Saturday. Defrosting in the refrigerator at this point is going to take a week. So I prepared a brining solution of one part sea salt (about one cup), one part sugar, one nugget palm sugar (exotic, don't you know), two batons of cinnamon, a couple of cloves and about eight crushed cloves of garlic, boiled it in about a gallon of water for twenty minutes, put it on the balcony (it snowed this afternoon) until cool, then discovered we didn't have a pan big enough to put it in.



No matter. We had a pail that had been used to store feta cheese and that I had cleaned and adapted for strawberry daiquiris for our wedding earlier this summer, so I decided to repurpose it. I lined it with a plastic bag, put the (now carefully washed) still-frozen turkey in, poured over the brining solution and topped it up with water, put the lid on and put it on the balcony.

I know it looks slightly unappetizing, but just you wait, my faithful!

I figure it will brine until tomorrow sometime, then I will pull it out, wash it and put it on a drying rack on the balcony for 24 hours. According to Cook's Illustrated (and I've done this before, but with chicken) the drying action will produce an incredibly crisp skin.
Then I'll put slits in the skin and insert slivers of garlic and rosemary, rub the whole thing with slightly melted duck fat, and PUT IT IN DA OVEN. Baste every half hour or so with pan juices, then towards the last half hour baste with honey/dijon (according to my friend Barry, if I lay on the honey early, it will burn) and then see how it goes.

I'm very excited. My first-ever whole turkey!

But I'm even more excited about what I made tonight: Potatoes Hassleback. I got the inspiration from the site in the link, and mine certainly didn't come out as beautiful as those, but take a look:


The above is the spoon that I used to cut the potatoes so the cuts didn't go all the way through. But it was a bitch cutting those thin slices. Must be a better way.

But they turned out pretty well -- I inserted slivers of garlic between the slices and topped the potatoes with garlic butter, parmesan and breadcrumbs. An hour of closely-watched ovenwork, and they were delectable.

Round one for the turkeymeister.