illdothedisheslater

Editor’s note: Picture quality deteriorates rapidly as exhaustion and despair set in. Also I have some beers.

I’m getting tired. I’ve been shopping, chopping, and mixing all the live long day. Time to get this show on the road. The oven is preheated to 500, and while I haven’t been able to figure out the smoke alarm, I have the hood fan on and a door cracked. The giblet gravy is simmering away, the liver stares accusingly from the countertop. Let’s revisit the directions and see what’s next.

Lightly fill turkey body and neck cavities will stuffing. Lightly? What the hell does that mean? I’m guessing you don’t cram it in there tightly. Maybe fill loosely would have been clearer. I’m left with 15 of the eighteen pounds of stuffing. Does this recipe call for a larger bird? I check. No, it does not. The rest goes in a Pyrex baking dish and into the fridge. I’ll bake it tomorrow.

Skewer closed. What the hell does that mean? Is this something other little girls learn at their mothers’ hips while I was out shooting baskets in the driveway? (Mother also never taught me to sew; her one foray into needlework ended up with my Christmas pageant sheep costume sewn to her jeans. We ended up using glue, and Mary’s little lamb shed cotton balls all over the church. Hi Mom!) I tentatively shove bamboo skewers around various parts of the cavity. I am torturing poor Frankie. I give up.

Place turkey, breast down, on rack in large roasting pan. Got it.

Cook about 15 minutes. Remove; turn breast-side up. Cook 15 minutes. Okay! I’m cooking a turkey! Look at me!

Meanwhile for paste, combine:

8 egg yolks

3 cloves of garlic, crushed

1 tablespoon of dry mustard powder

1 teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon ground red pepper

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 tablespoon onion juice ??? Where did this ingredient come from? I read this damn recipe four times, I made a list, I checked it twice. Can you buy onion juice? Do you make it? There are plenty of onions in this stuffing already. Moving on.

4 cups of hard cider Hooray! An excuse to buy and drink cider!

The egg yolks are pretty.

Whisk together and add 1/3 to ½ cup flour to make a paste. I call bullshit on this. Bull. Shit. In what universe do four cups of liquid and half a cup of flour make a paste? I end up adding about a cup and a half of flour, until it’s at least not too runny.

Now the real fun begins. If by fun, you mean chaining yourself to the stove, wasting an entire day, and heaving thirty pounds of meat and stuffing in and out of a hot stove at ten minute intervals.

Turn the oven down to 325 degrees. Paint turkey all over with the paste. Return turkey to oven until the paste sets (5 to 10 minutes). Remove turkey and paint again. Put back in oven. Continue this until you run out of paste. This takes hours. I paint with paste. I watch 10 minutes of Parenthood (my new Netflixation). I paint with paste. I feed the cat and clean up a little present he left just outside his litter box. I paint with paste. I crack open a beer. I paint with paste. 10 more minutes of Netflix. And so on. I’m starting to think this is stupid. Until! I’m poking randomly at turkey parts with my Thermapen (Best. Thing. Ever.), when lo and behold, a little spurt of juice sprays out from beneath the crust! Not a hit-the-ceiling, firehose kind of spray, but let’s just say if it was a public water fountain, you wouldn’t have to worry about contracting herpes from drinking there. I’m encouraged and energized. I paint with paste. I run out of paste. Finally.

Meanwhile, add the reserved turkey liver and 1 cup of hard cider to the simmering basting liquid. I totally skipped this step, I admit. I add cider, but I’m tired now. Cook until liver is no longer pink. It was never pink. Remove liver. Consider it done.

 

 

 

Not pink!

Roast turkey, basting every 15 minutes and adding more cider to basting liquid as needed, until a meat thermometer reads 180 degrees in the thigh, 170 degrees in the breast, or about 4 hours. Well goddam. It takes about 45 minutes. This turkey is not black. It’s not even brown. It’s kind of a creamy buckskin color. But I go ahead and take it out. It’s now 9:00 p.m. I let it rest for 15 minutes, then go ahead and peel back a bit of crust and slice off a little bite. Dry as an effing bone. Damn it. I can’t even get a decent picture of it. Oh well. You win some, you lose some. I crack open another beer, and Netflix myself into oblivion. I’m not going to make gravy for this pile of bones and dust. When it cools somewhat, I shove the whole mess into the fridge to deal with in the morning.

 

So. While I may have made a few missteps, left out a few ingredients, and thought mean thoughts about this Thompson guy all day, I certainly cannot recommend this recipe. Maybe Frankie was a bad bird. Maybe the onion juice would have made all the difference. In the morning I salvage what meat I can and make turkey hash with a box of Trader Joe’s gravy (excellent product – very difficult not to drink like a juice box). I eat turkey hash for three days.  I take the stuffing to work where they will eat anything.  Only two people try it.  One likes it, one pronounces it “weird”.  Fifteen others opt out of the process entirely.

I may never recover from this, but there you have it. I made a Thompson Turkey.