Thanksgiving
So, on Friday night we had a Thanksgiving dinner. A bunch of friends all got together at someone's flat and ate a whole lot of food. The flat was donated by the Dalkeith trio, 3 of the fourth years who live together on Dalkeith Road. The dinner was organised by another fourth year, and in a fit of what I now realize was COMPLETE and TOTAL madness, I volunteered myself and my flatmate to bring the turkey, the cranberry and the stuffing. In other words, all the important stuff.
In my defense my flatmate had been talking about, and wanting to, make turkey and stuffing for the holiday. A holiday that I haven't really celebrated in about 6 years, though there was the one time I went to my mother's in Italy. We had a dinner. Out of town friends were there. It was still light out. There was no turkey. I don't think there was stuffing, cranberry or any of that stuff either. There was corn. Possibly black beans as well.
But for one reason or another, I didn't get myself organised enough to buy a turkey until Thursday night. My flatmate had left me a list while she and a friend went out to the German Christmas market. I stewed at home, caught up in details about my latest project, a calendar I had put together as a fundraiser for the Horse Society. I had worked my a** off on it, and the orders were in and done when I realized I had made a mistake in one of the captions. A big mistake - but that's another story.
It was cold and wet out and I trudged up to Morrison's in a funk. My list had only 3 things on it; celery, 4 bags of Stouffer's stovetop stuffing, and a turkey. We had spotted turkeys in the frozen aisle last week, so we knew they were there. Clearly, the Brits were catering to all the Americans in their midst, because I can assure you, turkey is not normally available.
I circled the vegetable aisle twice before I spotted the celery. I wanted only coke for msyelf, but I didn't want to get that and the turkey before I had the other lighter items. I perused the entire store before calling my flatmate and whining over the phone there was no stuffing.
"It's across from the spices, in the pasta aisle," she assured me.
I trudged back and found it, in a teeny tiny section at the bottom of the shelves. There were only 2 brands and none of them was Stouffer. I stared helplessly at the different varieties; sage and onion, cranbery, orange..What should I getting? And what size? The largest of the boxes said it would feed 20-26 people. Wow. That should be enough. I called my roomate again. What type? Sage and onion. What size? Get 2 of the big ones. Are you sure? Yeah. Oh, and get walnuts.
I picked up the walnuts next, then the coke, then approached the frozen aisle. Turkeys, turkeys, turkeys - I was supposed to get 2 of them, the smallest 8 lbs. I think she meant kilograms. This I could do. Then I spotted it. It was big. It was the biggest one there. It was the only big one there. I eagerly rolled it over to check its servings. It was an 8.8 kg turkey, and it was supposed to feed 16-18 people. Trying not to annoy her, I texted my roommate instead of calling. Two other woman were coming down the aisle, talking about turkeys. They spotted mine. I moved in protectively. Then the text came in. "Perfect," my roommate wrote back.
Gleefully, I wrestled the turkey into my basket. Spotting a large foil roaster, I grabbed that as well, then had to rearrange my very small basket to hold everything. Impossible. I put it down, staggering, 2 aisles later, took out the coke and walked as fast as I could to the basket aisle. Once there, I could barely get a grip on my frozen bird, and had to empty out everything else, balancing the basket on the edge of the belt, before I could grasp his smooth plastic coating. He was quite heavy. Oh dear. Could I get him home? Well, I would have to. I ended up putting him in my backpack and carrying everything else out by hand. It was cold and wet out, and the rest of the groceries were heavy, but I told myself it was worth it. We had our turkey.
When I got home, I put the foil roaster, with the turkey inside it, on the counter, put everything else away and waited for my roommate to get home. She called to check on my progress, and I examined the turkey carefully, looking for cooking instructions. She had told me it would have to defrost overnight. There, about defrosting - 48 hours! My gawd! There was a short pause. Don't worry, she told me. We'll put up the heat in the kitchen, then put the oven on low in the morning and stick him in there.
What did I know about cooking? Nothing. But I was nervous. Didn't large turkeys take 6-9 hours to cook? I had watched an episode of ER where Susan had sat down to Thanksgiving with her drug addict sister and the turkey wasn't done and she said it was because it hadn't been cooked for that long...What about half frozen turkeys? Would it take twice as long? Oh dear.
That night I couldn't sleep, so I went back downstairs and put the turkey in a green crate we had and set him down in front of the radiator. I had palpated him anxiously and discovered though he was soft on the top, he was still hard and frozen beneath. Well, we would just have to make sure we got up early and started cooking him.
It was 11am before I descended, still bleary from my night of insomnia. Both my roommate and I had the day off from classes. No one was downstairs. I surveyed the kitchen mournfully. The turkey still sat in his crate by the radiator. I poked him, then sighed. I hadn't the faintest idea what to do with him.
Fortunately my roommate came in the kitchen quite shortly after that. "Hey," she chirped. We set about preparing. We put the turkey back in the foil roaster again, then unwrapped him. "He's huge!" my roommate gushed. And he still had hairs. She wrestled him into the sink, took out his giblets and began examining his innards. She couldn't get his neck out, which apparently was stuffed inside him. I turned on the the hot water and she began to fill up his body cavity. Now, the hot water is really seriously hot. I began to feel better about our defrosting abilities. But..
"It's taking off his self basting!" I exclaimed, horrified. He had been self basted, with his giblets, a fact I was proud of. Don't worry about it, my roommate said. We can baste him ourselves if we have to. I'm going to call him Larry.
Eventually, she got Larry's neck was out while the oven heated up. We put him in his roaster and stuck him in. Juice had had somehow leaked out from his cavernous body cavity and we had to clean up after him. My rooommate joked you could hear an echo, he was so big inside.
Then we went to the gym. I worried incessantly. Would he cook through? Would he be alright? Did we have enough time?
"He'll cook," my roommate assured me. What did I know about cooking? Nothing. I took her word for it. We came back and took Larry out to examine him. He was still quite pale. "I would feel better," I told my roommate, "if he was starting to brown."
That only happens at the very end, she told me. We didn't have a baster, so we used spoons to spread the juice over him. Then I snapped on a pair of latex gloves and gleefully rubbed pats of butter and pepper all over him. That was fun. There was a bunch of juice on the floor and counter, and I worried he had a leak. But we shrugged it off and put him back in the oven.
Eventually, one of the Dalkeith trio came by in her car to pick us up. We were late as we'd only gotten started on the stuffing and gravy about a half hour before. Don't ask me why we were that dumb. We worked out that while I put all the lighter things in the car - tupperware for leftovers, extra silverware, the big pot of stuffing - my roommate would get Larry out of the oven and ready to go. I came back to find my roommate nursing a burned hand and a bad temper.
Larry had a leak.
Apparently, when she went to take Larry out, turkey juice gushed out with him. She hated him and, she proclaimed, "he's not cooked!". My heart did a flip flop. Oh no. But there was no time to worry about it now. I grabbed some of our kitchen towels and spread them on the floor, then gave us both some cooking mitts to handle him. We simply had to get Larry to where we were going.
We put a pan under the roaster and attempted to carry him out together. I ended up with turkey juice all over my shoes, one of my cuffs and a pants leg. We had gotten outside, though, so we put him down on our step, and decided to try and get him into the green crate that was used for our fortnightly produce drop-off. It was one of those standard milk crates. We dumped Larry in, and he ended up half in and half out of his roaster. I straightened him up, then we attempted to put the crate, with the pan and the turkey half in and half out of his foil roaster, into a plastic trash bag.
Our driver, who had been patiently waiting, got out of the car to see what the problem was. We were on a timetable here, and we all needed to get going. In desperation, we put another trash bag on him and I carried him up the steps to the street while my roommate went back in to do some damage control. But Larry was still leaking - everywhere. I put him down and called to my roommate to get a bag. She came out with one of those huge blue IKEA bags, and we placed the entire affair inside and sealed it in the trunk. He was still leaking.
We got Larry to the flat and carried him upstairs; our giant turkey, in a leaking roaster, with a pan, in a crate, 2 trash bags, and an IKEA bag. I proclaimed how this would all be very funny when we looked back on it. We deposited Larry in the middle of the kitchen and got ourselves out of the way. It was chaos. People were cooking all over the kitchen. The counters were covered. While we waited, I thought furiously. My roommate drank; a very large glass of coke and vodka.
When counter space opened up, I went back in. There was no foil. I spread baking sheets over a section of counter, holding down the edges with the kettle on one side and oranges on the other. Then, gingerly, I began digging through the layers to get Larry. I lifted him out, carefully, in his roaster. Our mitts had been buried with him and were soaked through with turkey juice. He was all leaked out.
I put him on the counter. My heart was thumping. This was the big test. I asked for latex gloves again. I needed to examine Larry's body cavity to see if he was warm. Did he cook? I stuck my hand in him. YES! Larry was still hot inside. My roommate handed me a knife, and I stuck it through Larry's breast, parting the layers of meat to see their color.
He was cooked! It was a miracle! We had done it!
I relinquished Larry to my roommate, who shepherded him over to the neighbors for final browning. Merciful gawd, it was over.
Approximately 30 minutes later, Larry returned in full glory, browned and hot. Naturally, none of us knew a thing about carving. One of the guests actually came in to see Larry because she had never seen a cooked turkey before. But my roommate proclaimed she could do it. I helped. We carved Larry in the kitchen. I had to twist his legs while my roommate hacked at his joints, then I set about picking off the dark meat while she attacked the breast.
Larry was beautiful. He had tasted great and cooked well, only slightly dry from his ordeal with losing his juices. I proclaimed it was all worth it in the end. When dinner was over, my roommate and I picked his carcass clean and practiced pretending to talk dirty about our turkey.
Larry has a beautiful body.
Larry tasted great.
Larry was huge.
Larry spilled everywhere.
Etc.
In my defense my flatmate had been talking about, and wanting to, make turkey and stuffing for the holiday. A holiday that I haven't really celebrated in about 6 years, though there was the one time I went to my mother's in Italy. We had a dinner. Out of town friends were there. It was still light out. There was no turkey. I don't think there was stuffing, cranberry or any of that stuff either. There was corn. Possibly black beans as well.
But for one reason or another, I didn't get myself organised enough to buy a turkey until Thursday night. My flatmate had left me a list while she and a friend went out to the German Christmas market. I stewed at home, caught up in details about my latest project, a calendar I had put together as a fundraiser for the Horse Society. I had worked my a** off on it, and the orders were in and done when I realized I had made a mistake in one of the captions. A big mistake - but that's another story.
It was cold and wet out and I trudged up to Morrison's in a funk. My list had only 3 things on it; celery, 4 bags of Stouffer's stovetop stuffing, and a turkey. We had spotted turkeys in the frozen aisle last week, so we knew they were there. Clearly, the Brits were catering to all the Americans in their midst, because I can assure you, turkey is not normally available.
I circled the vegetable aisle twice before I spotted the celery. I wanted only coke for msyelf, but I didn't want to get that and the turkey before I had the other lighter items. I perused the entire store before calling my flatmate and whining over the phone there was no stuffing.
"It's across from the spices, in the pasta aisle," she assured me.
I trudged back and found it, in a teeny tiny section at the bottom of the shelves. There were only 2 brands and none of them was Stouffer. I stared helplessly at the different varieties; sage and onion, cranbery, orange..What should I getting? And what size? The largest of the boxes said it would feed 20-26 people. Wow. That should be enough. I called my roomate again. What type? Sage and onion. What size? Get 2 of the big ones. Are you sure? Yeah. Oh, and get walnuts.
I picked up the walnuts next, then the coke, then approached the frozen aisle. Turkeys, turkeys, turkeys - I was supposed to get 2 of them, the smallest 8 lbs. I think she meant kilograms. This I could do. Then I spotted it. It was big. It was the biggest one there. It was the only big one there. I eagerly rolled it over to check its servings. It was an 8.8 kg turkey, and it was supposed to feed 16-18 people. Trying not to annoy her, I texted my roommate instead of calling. Two other woman were coming down the aisle, talking about turkeys. They spotted mine. I moved in protectively. Then the text came in. "Perfect," my roommate wrote back.
Gleefully, I wrestled the turkey into my basket. Spotting a large foil roaster, I grabbed that as well, then had to rearrange my very small basket to hold everything. Impossible. I put it down, staggering, 2 aisles later, took out the coke and walked as fast as I could to the basket aisle. Once there, I could barely get a grip on my frozen bird, and had to empty out everything else, balancing the basket on the edge of the belt, before I could grasp his smooth plastic coating. He was quite heavy. Oh dear. Could I get him home? Well, I would have to. I ended up putting him in my backpack and carrying everything else out by hand. It was cold and wet out, and the rest of the groceries were heavy, but I told myself it was worth it. We had our turkey.
When I got home, I put the foil roaster, with the turkey inside it, on the counter, put everything else away and waited for my roommate to get home. She called to check on my progress, and I examined the turkey carefully, looking for cooking instructions. She had told me it would have to defrost overnight. There, about defrosting - 48 hours! My gawd! There was a short pause. Don't worry, she told me. We'll put up the heat in the kitchen, then put the oven on low in the morning and stick him in there.
What did I know about cooking? Nothing. But I was nervous. Didn't large turkeys take 6-9 hours to cook? I had watched an episode of ER where Susan had sat down to Thanksgiving with her drug addict sister and the turkey wasn't done and she said it was because it hadn't been cooked for that long...What about half frozen turkeys? Would it take twice as long? Oh dear.
That night I couldn't sleep, so I went back downstairs and put the turkey in a green crate we had and set him down in front of the radiator. I had palpated him anxiously and discovered though he was soft on the top, he was still hard and frozen beneath. Well, we would just have to make sure we got up early and started cooking him.
It was 11am before I descended, still bleary from my night of insomnia. Both my roommate and I had the day off from classes. No one was downstairs. I surveyed the kitchen mournfully. The turkey still sat in his crate by the radiator. I poked him, then sighed. I hadn't the faintest idea what to do with him.
Fortunately my roommate came in the kitchen quite shortly after that. "Hey," she chirped. We set about preparing. We put the turkey back in the foil roaster again, then unwrapped him. "He's huge!" my roommate gushed. And he still had hairs. She wrestled him into the sink, took out his giblets and began examining his innards. She couldn't get his neck out, which apparently was stuffed inside him. I turned on the the hot water and she began to fill up his body cavity. Now, the hot water is really seriously hot. I began to feel better about our defrosting abilities. But..
"It's taking off his self basting!" I exclaimed, horrified. He had been self basted, with his giblets, a fact I was proud of. Don't worry about it, my roommate said. We can baste him ourselves if we have to. I'm going to call him Larry.
Eventually, she got Larry's neck was out while the oven heated up. We put him in his roaster and stuck him in. Juice had had somehow leaked out from his cavernous body cavity and we had to clean up after him. My rooommate joked you could hear an echo, he was so big inside.
Then we went to the gym. I worried incessantly. Would he cook through? Would he be alright? Did we have enough time?
"He'll cook," my roommate assured me. What did I know about cooking? Nothing. I took her word for it. We came back and took Larry out to examine him. He was still quite pale. "I would feel better," I told my roommate, "if he was starting to brown."
That only happens at the very end, she told me. We didn't have a baster, so we used spoons to spread the juice over him. Then I snapped on a pair of latex gloves and gleefully rubbed pats of butter and pepper all over him. That was fun. There was a bunch of juice on the floor and counter, and I worried he had a leak. But we shrugged it off and put him back in the oven.
Eventually, one of the Dalkeith trio came by in her car to pick us up. We were late as we'd only gotten started on the stuffing and gravy about a half hour before. Don't ask me why we were that dumb. We worked out that while I put all the lighter things in the car - tupperware for leftovers, extra silverware, the big pot of stuffing - my roommate would get Larry out of the oven and ready to go. I came back to find my roommate nursing a burned hand and a bad temper.
Larry had a leak.
Apparently, when she went to take Larry out, turkey juice gushed out with him. She hated him and, she proclaimed, "he's not cooked!". My heart did a flip flop. Oh no. But there was no time to worry about it now. I grabbed some of our kitchen towels and spread them on the floor, then gave us both some cooking mitts to handle him. We simply had to get Larry to where we were going.
We put a pan under the roaster and attempted to carry him out together. I ended up with turkey juice all over my shoes, one of my cuffs and a pants leg. We had gotten outside, though, so we put him down on our step, and decided to try and get him into the green crate that was used for our fortnightly produce drop-off. It was one of those standard milk crates. We dumped Larry in, and he ended up half in and half out of his roaster. I straightened him up, then we attempted to put the crate, with the pan and the turkey half in and half out of his foil roaster, into a plastic trash bag.
Our driver, who had been patiently waiting, got out of the car to see what the problem was. We were on a timetable here, and we all needed to get going. In desperation, we put another trash bag on him and I carried him up the steps to the street while my roommate went back in to do some damage control. But Larry was still leaking - everywhere. I put him down and called to my roommate to get a bag. She came out with one of those huge blue IKEA bags, and we placed the entire affair inside and sealed it in the trunk. He was still leaking.
We got Larry to the flat and carried him upstairs; our giant turkey, in a leaking roaster, with a pan, in a crate, 2 trash bags, and an IKEA bag. I proclaimed how this would all be very funny when we looked back on it. We deposited Larry in the middle of the kitchen and got ourselves out of the way. It was chaos. People were cooking all over the kitchen. The counters were covered. While we waited, I thought furiously. My roommate drank; a very large glass of coke and vodka.
When counter space opened up, I went back in. There was no foil. I spread baking sheets over a section of counter, holding down the edges with the kettle on one side and oranges on the other. Then, gingerly, I began digging through the layers to get Larry. I lifted him out, carefully, in his roaster. Our mitts had been buried with him and were soaked through with turkey juice. He was all leaked out.
I put him on the counter. My heart was thumping. This was the big test. I asked for latex gloves again. I needed to examine Larry's body cavity to see if he was warm. Did he cook? I stuck my hand in him. YES! Larry was still hot inside. My roommate handed me a knife, and I stuck it through Larry's breast, parting the layers of meat to see their color.
He was cooked! It was a miracle! We had done it!
I relinquished Larry to my roommate, who shepherded him over to the neighbors for final browning. Merciful gawd, it was over.
Approximately 30 minutes later, Larry returned in full glory, browned and hot. Naturally, none of us knew a thing about carving. One of the guests actually came in to see Larry because she had never seen a cooked turkey before. But my roommate proclaimed she could do it. I helped. We carved Larry in the kitchen. I had to twist his legs while my roommate hacked at his joints, then I set about picking off the dark meat while she attacked the breast.
Larry was beautiful. He had tasted great and cooked well, only slightly dry from his ordeal with losing his juices. I proclaimed it was all worth it in the end. When dinner was over, my roommate and I picked his carcass clean and practiced pretending to talk dirty about our turkey.
Larry has a beautiful body.
Larry tasted great.
Larry was huge.
Larry spilled everywhere.
Etc.