So last night I was lacking inspiration for today’s blog when I decided to google “turkey recipes” (yes, I did just use the proper noun Google as a verb; Dr. Logan taught me that it is called verbing and it is ruining our language but I like it) and clicked on www.allrecipes.com. I had no idea making a Thanksgiving turkey could be so complicated.
First, the thing I remember most about making turkey as a little girl is removing the neck and the gut sack out of the body cavity. It grosses me out just thinking about. I know domestic turkeys are dumb; they can drown themselves in rain, but it bugs me that we chop their heads off and basically shove it up their behinds after they are dead. All I can say about the gizzards is eeew its a sack of guts. EWww. I know smart talented women can do amazing things with the neck and guts. I also know I will never be one of these women.
You need to brine your turkey. (whhaaa?) When I saw this all I could think is “like those stinky little shrimp?” Anyway, people who know this stuff say you need to soak your turkey in salt water and other stuff before you season and cook said turkey. Apparently, this makes your all succulent and juicy and stuff. Whaa? I get the mental image of pickled turkey bobbing around in a jar on a gas station counter. There are even like elventy billion brine mixture recipes from simple water, salt, and sugar to adding the ground up wings of a rare Amazonian butterfly that can only be caught by one reclusive tribe of natives on a full moon. This is before you even season the damnable thing.
Seasoning is another thing all together. There is another elventy billion recipes and techniques for seasoning your bird. Some are as simple as butter, salt, and pepper while other recipes call for a page and a half of herbs and spices combined with a chant and a few dance steps. Some recipes say rub the seasoning inside the body cavity and others swear by layering it all on the outer layers of the bird. You also can put pats of butter under the skin of the breast to make sure the turkey is juicy. If you want to get really fancy you can use an injector and inject your seasoning of choice directly into the meat. This just gives me a really awesome mental image of a heroin turkey with a needle stuck in its wing with a dazed look on its face. Its probably because I am a seriously twisted individual.
Most of the recipes agree on how to cook the turkey. Cover it in foil and bake it at blah blah temperature for blah hours and then uncover it and cook it for some more time to make it brown and crap. My favorite is that the Cajuns did something totally different: deep-fry that sucker!
My brother in law deep friend a turkey for us one year. It was AWESOME. I mean the turkey was tasty and everything because Matt is an excellent cook but the process was the really epic part. So you set a propane fire thingy on your back porch and put a big pot filled with peanut oil and turn on the fire and let the fun begin. After the oil is the approximate temperature of molten lava you lower the basket with the huge mother flipping turkey and an onion into the oil and let the sucker fry. It is like a modern take on medieval torture.
Because the frying takes place outside and it involves fire men consider this an acceptable activity for them to partake in. So basically you get a ring of men standing around this vat of roiling oil with massive wind-blown flames licking up the sides drinking beer and bullshitting about whatever it is that men bullshit about. Sounds totally safe to me.
Turkeys are serious business.
It makes me a bit curious what will happen when I look up pies and side dishes.
Geeks a Geeking