I'm seeing lots of recipes and suggestions and methods and prinkings of old family favorites on lots of blogs right now, and I'd just like to add one which NOBODY should try to cook. Trust me. Do Not Try This At Home. Or anywhere.
You know how great a nice big honey/brown sugar-rubbed baked ham is? And how delicious smoked turkey becomes when honey butter is rubbed over it, and melted honey/butter is injected into the meat before smoking for several hours? Great ideas, right? Do NOT, on your life, try this with a turkey you intend to deep-fry.
Chris is the world's greatest outdoor cook. He can grill anything, smoke it, pit barbecue it, deepfry it on all burners, but his talent fell prey to an error in judgement several years ago when he figured one is good and a combination will be even better.
He melted the butter and honey, added spices and herbs, and inoculated that turkey like it was traveling to a third-world country. His very obvious thinking was: if you've hit every muscle once, and STILL have some of the liquid left, better use it up.
That turkey went into that hot oil with a rumble not heard since Pompeii . It roiled up and almost out of the pot, subsiding just enough to lull him into a false security which lasted about ten minutes. That thing cooked FAST. The scent of burning cookies wafted into the house, and I opened the back door just in time to see a Cajun-blackened bird emerge magically from a pot which should have produced a golden, honey-fried one. Paul Prudhomme would have been PRAAAOUD.
Great clumps of char littered the surface; big black pocks sank into the flesh all over that bird---it looked like Tim Burton’s dream of Thanksgiving. The wingtips, which had not been injected but were somehow contaminated by heat or transfer, fell into crisp ashes at the touch of a finger.
As it started to cool just a teensy bit, the blackened drumsticks crumbled with little tik-tik sounds, falling like hunks of shattery coal onto the plate.
At least I think that's what it sounded like. I was laughing too hard to hear it.
Bless his heart! He was trying. Oh, dear. It's so funny!
ReplyDeleteKeetha!!!
ReplyDeleteI enjoy your Kudzu blog so much, and now you're HERE!! Lovely to see you.
Normally, your words put me in the worst craving state, for whatever you're describing. For once, I'm thinking, "perhaps we should have a nice casserole for Thanksgiving, this year..." What an entertaining read, and it does my heart good to see that I'm not the only one that's failed something on Turkey Day :)
ReplyDeleteOH, Lili---that was really a funny thing to witness, and it wasn't for Thanksgiving---it was the middle of Summer, and the kitchen counter looked almost as bad as the turkey (an impossible feat), as strewn as it was with jars of mixtures and bowls and the funniest of all---the assortment of hypodermics the size of garden hoses, as well as one weird turkey-baster thing, stainless I think, with little threads on the end for screwing on the needle itself.
ReplyDeleteWith all that sticky conglomeration lying around in need of cleaning, and our feet going scrick, scrick on the linoleum, I truly wished for the bees that used to come in and clean the honey rooms when DS had finished taking off the season's honey. Or the ants that cleaned up after the champagne. Maybe I'll post that soon.