Turkey

Perhaps the best way to summarize my family is that we make two turkeys at Thanksgiving and Christmas. And there are only four of us. Forty pounds of poultry should last four people for at least a week. However, the leftovers are usually gone by the end of the Mizzou-Kansas football game on Saturday afternoon. This is disturbing even when you factor in the meat eaten by relatives who often come for dinner on Friday evening.

The two bird strategy requires multiple steps. Step one is the purchasing of the birds. Materials science has Moore’s law, which states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit will double every two years. Animal science has Frankenstein’s law, which suggests a similar exponential trend in the amount of flesh that can be packed on the frame of a farm-raised turkey. Some consumers are alarmed by this trend. Not KC, whose mustache and Swedish heritage dictated that he search the grocery store freezer for the most Biblical birds he could find.

KC's enthusiasm was tempered circa 2005, however, when a particularly Leviathan 23 pounder almost did not fit into the outdoor smoker. I think that he now sticks to a strict 21 pound limit.

KC buys his turkeys frozen, so step two is thawing out the birds. A 21 pound turkey takes a while to reach room temperature, so this step requires prior planning—the birds must be removed from the freezer at least a day or two before Thanksgiving. Still, this is a relatively easy step. All you have to do is take the turkeys out of the freezer. But if you know KC, you already know that he will make this as difficult as possible. Despite multiple gentle reminders from his wife and children, he often forgets to thaw the turkeys. The first time this happened, we were in a particularly rough spot. It was probably midnight on the night before Thanksgiving when he realized that the turkeys were still frozen. After tearing asunder the peacefulness of the neighborhood with a cacophony of unprintable oaths, he summoned the combined knowledge of his food science degree from the University of Missouri plus 25 years in the in the industry and put the turkeys in the Jacuzzi bathtub and turned on the air jets. My mom was a little surprised when she got out of the shower and saw headless turkey corpses pinballing in the bathtub, but I think she connected the dots pretty quickly. “Ken must have forgotten to thaw the turkeys.” Fortunately the gambit worked. Now, KC leans on the Jacuzzi like a crutch, and I am certain that more turkeys than humans have used that tub in the last 5 years.

After thawing, the next step is to stuff the birds. As a little kid, I thought this was a very impressive process. My dad was chopping up vegetables, boiling things on the stove, sharpening knives, all the while referring to hieroglyphic recipe sheet. The glamour evaporated very quickly the first time I reached my hand inside the raw turkey’s wet, semi-frozen body cavity to remove the gizzard and organ bags. Instead of giving me a knife, KC handed me a jar of Crisco, and directed me to cover the uncooked turkeys’ slimy skin. “Lube it up good and make sure to get in the folds,” he said. Because I was not an altar boy, I had never heard this sentence before. I will repeat it to myself thirty years from now when I am sponge-bathing an octogenarian, gurgling KC in my basement.

After shoving the turkey full of vegetables, apples and breadcrumbs; rubbing its skin with lard; and covering it with a butter-soaked t-shirt, the turkey goes in the oven or the smoker. It comes out eight hours later, and it is always delicious.