A holiday cooking experiment gone very, very wrong
"The turkey will be ready by five, honey!"
Perhaps it was the cold weather. Perhaps I didn't replenish the charcoal sufficiently. Perhaps there were errors in my extrapolation of cooking time from a quarter-pound hamburger to a 20-pound turkey. Whatever, the great winged beast refused to cook despite the fact it caught fire on several occasions.
To make matters worse, the more my relatives drank, the less inhibited they became in pointing deriding fingers at my now openly shivering body on the porch.
I had a meat thermometer at standby. Had I done some planning, I might have known that the barbecue lid would not close when the thermometer was in place. I was reduced to repeatedly cutting into the bird, desperately searching for "clear juices" to gush forth. Sadly, this never happened.
The juice remained pink until, by late in the day, I had made so many incisions that NO juice came forth. Uh oh! It was Sahara dry!
The holiday turkey's fate
It was very dark and very cold by the time the cooking process mercifully ended and the platter of what could best be described as "remains" was placed before the guests. The wings had been reduced to charcoal and the lower portions of the bird were essentially fossilized. The white meat transformed to saw dust.
It was not a total loss, though. Anticipating the worst, my wife had quietly placed a ham in the oven some time earlier. And despite the shriveled remains of a once proud bird, the dressing somehow emerged in edible form. In all, it wasn't a half bad meal.
The silver lining? As long as the in-laws could draw breath, we were not asked — no, not allowed — to cook Christmas dinner again. It's an ill wind, as they say...
Merry Christmas and may your turkey be moist and delicious!
Want to do it up right? Homemakers shows you to grill turkey to perfection in a Best-Tested recipe for Grilled Cranberry Glazed Turkey.
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