The Real Turkey

- Bones to pick at the carving station on Thanksgiving 2005. Among other things, my hand mixer somehow resembling Casper the Friendly Ghost.

I took it as a welcome sign when my youngest daughter asked me about holiday cooking recipes. The question from an inquiring mind may have revealed my culinary skills, my age, and a glaring weakness in my personal recipe book. Now I have general recipes for how to clean and cook a turkey as well as for making homemade stuffing but the written information isn’t organized step-by-step so that it could be deciphered by the bequeathed.

It should come as no surprise to any regular reader of Freudian Slips that about 4:30am on Thanksgiving morning with everyone still asleep and the stuffed turkey cooking, I returned not to bed but the computer to write down the step-by-step directions still as fresh as my kill. I sequenced my thoughts with tiredness put on the back burner. I not only saved the file to hard drive, but printed and laminated a hard copy. I forced myself to add it to the three ring binder of my recipe book before scaling the staircase. Job done. When you run out of things to do as an obsessive compulsive, sleep becomes a welcome mat. My mind and body hit the snooze button around 5:30am. Sweet dreams.

I arose around 7am and my first peek in the oven convinced me that my new enamel pan was doing too good of a first time job. I didn’t want to cry fowl but the bird had already started to brown inside a covered pan during the second hour. This was extraordinary for a 20 minute per pound golden rule of thumb in the poultry annals. I kept a close eye on the bird for the next couple of hours but there was no denying that the turkey was cooking at mach speed.

After a few frantic calls around town, it seemed to be a well known fact that enamel pans cook turkeys a whole lot faster. Everyone had a leg up on me and I was the real turkey. I also learned in my drummed up conversations that turkeys cook moistly at 350 degrees. What kind of chef was I wasting valuable time and sleep preparing birds in pre-dawn hours only to cook them at 325 degrees in an inferior pan year after year? By pumping the oven up a Emeril Lagasse notch can save hours off of cooking a big bird. I did the new math. When it was all said and done, this talk of the town 33 pound bird was cooked in a record 8 hours. Looking ahead to a brighter future, I crunched the numbers. Even another 30 pound monster should take no longer than six hours if I cook it at 350 degrees in my enamel pan.

I guarantee sleeping from dusk till dawn the last Wednesday in November of 2006 even if I choose to cook an entire ostrich for offended vegetarians next Thanksgiving. Heavens to Betsy, I just realized that I got to update my recipe book again to reflect the pertinent changes. If my kids could see me now.