Let's Talk Turkey

Eighteen pounds and 11 ounces of it, in fact.

Yep, that's how much the freebie turkey the husband got from his company weighed. To go from a multi-year turkey boycott to having nearly 20 pounds of the stuff to prepare, I was a wee bit apprehensive about the big meal of December 25.

So as not to roll over and surrender to any sort of conventional tradition, I vowed I would not simply roast the carcass in the oven with a bit of salt and pepper, a light rubbing of butter and with an onion shoved down its throat or up its ass, which was how Mum typically prepared turkey for the turkey-eating holidays, along with some Stove Top and brown-and-serve rolls. Ugh, how...all-'merican. And you know well, Gentle Reader, all-'merican is not how we do things here at Chez Boeckman-Walker.

Instead, I turned to an old friend for some inspiration. Okay, never in a million years would this person be my friend, but she's helped me out in a pinch more than once. I'm referring, of course, to Madhur Jaffrey. In late November, I was lucky enough to find a 1973 hardcover, beat-to-hell copy of her first cookbook, An Invitation to Indian Cooking. It's her first book and represents how she learned to cook via correspondence with her mother while she was living in London and is also her way of sharing to a much larger audience her native cuisine, although with some alterations made for the Western lifestyle (waaay back in the early 70s). The introduction itself is fascinating reading because it unintentionally speaks a lot about how globalization has changed how we eat and shop for food.

Anywho, there's not a single turkey recipe in the "Chicken, other birds, and eggs" chapter (because there are so many turkeys in India), but there is one for a roasted chicken with a spicy rice stuffing that sounded delicious enough for me to ponder the possibility of substituting a big-ass turkey for the chicken.

Roast Chicken Stuffed With Spiced Rice1 4-pound roasting chicken, thawed
2 T olive oil or vegetable oil
1 T lemon juice
1/4 t salt
1/8 t freshly ground pepper
1/2 t ground cumin
1/4 t ground garam masala
1 medium onion, coarsely chopped
2 garlic cloves, coarsely chopped
1" cube of fresh ginger, coarsely chopped
1 C canned whole tomatoes, drained OR 3 fresh tomatoes, peeled and chopped
1 t ground coriander
1 t ground cumin
4 T vegetable oil
1/4 t whole black mustard seeds
1/4 t whole cumin seeds
2 C (well-packed) cooked rice
1/2 t salt (or as needed)

1. Combine the olive oil, lemon juice, salt, ground pepper, half teaspoon of ground cumin and garam masala in a small bowl.
   
2. Wipe the chicken well with a cloth or paper towel so it is as dry as possible.
   
3. Brush three-fourths of the marinade all over the chicken, inside and out, and then let it sit, unrefrigerated, for about 2 hours. Reserve the remaining marinade.
   
4. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
   
5. Place the onions, garlic, ginger, tomatoes, coriander and full teaspoon of cumin into a blender and blend on high speed until you have a smooth paste.
   
6. Heat the vegetable oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat and, when very hot, drop in the mustard and cumin seeds.
   
7. When the mustard seeds begin to pop (15 to 30 seconds), add the paste from the blender, keeping your face averted to avoid hot, splattering tomato-based paste.
   
8. Fry the paste on medium-high heat, stirring frequently, until browned and the oil has separated from the paste (about 10 min.), stirring more frequently as the moisture evaporates.
   
9. Add the cooked rice, as well as the salt if you need it, to the skillet, reduce the heat to low and mix the paste with the rice.
   
10. Loosely stuff the chicken with the rice, truss it, place it in an ovenproof baking dish, breast up, and then put it in the oven.
    
11. Let the chicken brown for about 20 min., basting it with the remaining marinade every 5 min.
    
12. Reduce the oven to 350 degrees, then allow the chicken to cook another hour or until you can easily move a leg when pushing it up and down in its socket, all the while basting every 10 min. with the juices that come out of the chicken.
    
13. After roasting, remove the bird to a warm platter and let sit 15 min. so the juices do not flow out when carved.

Yield: 4 servings

Nutritional Info
As with her other book, Ms. Jaffrey provides no nutritional information. Do you really think such things were obsessed over as they are now in 1973? Maybe. Maybe not.

The Faudie's Futzings
I'm sure you can gather, Gentle Reader, from the directions that this roasted bird is quite involved--and that's just with a 4-pound chicken. As much as I was looking forward to the flavor of my finished bird, I wasn't going to go to all the effort. Thanks the FSM for Reynolds self-basting turkey bags! Even ones that are more than 10 years old work.

Yes, that's right, Gentle Reader. I still had an almost-full box of Reynolds oven bags from 1997 in my pantry. We weren't even living in Chez Boeckman-Walker in 1997. That box moved twice--from our first apartment to our second and then to Chez Boeckman-Walker. Yes, I can't throw anything away.

After cleaning (and plucking from pin feathers from) my big-ass bird, I dumped it into an oven bag and did my best to glaze its cold, dead skin and hollow visceral cavity with the marinade. Let me tell you, it was quite a workout. Mind you, I regularly do bicep curls with a 50-pound bar, but a dead turkey is incredibly difficult to handle with care. That's some awkward weight to manage with one hand, let me assure you, Gentle Reader. But I coat it coated, used a twistie to close up the bag and stuck it in the refrigerator to marinate while the boys and I cleaned up from the big gift-unwrapping extravaganza and made the requisite phone calls to family, none of whom had opened their gifts yet, but it was only 9:30 or so in the morning. Since the bird would need four and a half to five hours of roasting time and supper was to be on the table no later than 6 o'clock, I wasn't exactly lamenting our early start.

Here are a few other ways I "lazified" the recipes:

I used jarred minced garlic instead of chopping up my own.

I used one canned Roma tomato from Muir Glenn--those tomatoes were big and one looked to be about the equivalent of a measuring cup.

For roasting my seeds, I used maybe a teaspoon of canola oil. I would have used less, but I knew I'd be adding more to it than just seeds.

Lest you think I'm some uneducated, illiterate fool, please know, Gentle Reader, that I did not stuff the bird with the rice. There were enough warning labels on the sucker cautioning consumers about the health hazards of putting consumables in the raw carcass that even if I didn't already know said hazards, I would have learned them over and over again by the time I'd removed the bird from its packaging. Furthermore, can you imagine how dry and disgusting that rice might have been after four and a half to five hours in a hot oven?

Anywho, since the bird didn't get stuffed with rice before roasting, that meant three things: (1) I got to shove half of a big yellow onion down its neck, (2) I could be a bit more leisurely with putting together the masala for the rice and (3) I had time to play with the turkey's carefully bagged innards and neck. "Oh goody! Guts!" I can hear you crying out for joy now, Gentle Reader. You're not alone.

While I've read a few articles on how to prepare broth from leftover bird bits, I had no intention of doing so. But why let edibles go to waste when I've got four hungry cats outside? So I simmered whatever organs were in the bag (do turkeys have multiple livers, because I swear ours came with three of 'em) along with the neck in some water, and the kids outside got a tasty treat--or so I presume. Hell, I wouldn't touch that stuff. But more on the kids later.

The turkey spent just a smidge over four and a half hours in the oven. Its little timer had popped and nothing seemed amiss with the bird when I took it out of the oven, except that somehow the Reynolds-provided zip-tie had come off the bag and melted in the bottom of the oven I'd just recently cleaned. Le sigh.... Instead of removing the bird to a platter--I don't have one large enough and had to use an oversized round, oven-safe casserole pan I got for Mother's Day in 2008 to roast the thing in because I didn't have a baking pan large enough--I just cut away enough of the bag to get at the bird and start tearing away hunks of breast meat with a fork.

That breast meat was moist, but I didn't get much of the flavor of the marinade. That probably was lost since turkey seems to have a more pronounced flavor than chicken--or at least it seems that way to my taste buds. Turkey, to me, is sort of like salmon: You can do a few things to dress it up, but you really can't escape the basic flavor of the meat. And it's probably a good thing since I still had probably 18 pounds of bird to deal with after supper, and being stuck with the same flavor would have severely limited my ability to shovel that leftover meat down the boys' throats.

The rice, unlike the turkey, was wonderfully flavorful. I'll admit I was a bit skeptical about the mouth feel of the final product; after all, you'd kind of expect, well, mush after blending a tomato-based paste with cooked rice, right? Well, perhaps you'd get mush if you used a blander rice (I saved up Basmati from prior meals) or badly overcooked it, reducing the grains to mush before you even added the paste. I also think reducing the amount of canola oil helped too.

After supper came the task of stripping the bird of as much meat as I could and then figuring out what to do with the rest. Simply tossing the bones and the juices in the trash seemed wasteful--and would stink up the garage since trash day was many days off. So after spending a good 90 minutes tearing away chunks of meat, enough to fill to large Snap Lock bowls, I was dog tired and just put the casserole pan--oven bag, juices, onion, bones, particulates and all--out on the deck storage chest on the patio, right beside the bowl with the untouched turkey organs and neck I'd set out earlier in the day that no cat had touched. For the next two days, the outdoor kids had quite a feast.

Stay tuned, Gentle Reader, to read all about my turkey leftover culinary misadventures. Getting rid of more than a dozen pounds of turkey meat ain't easy!