Time for Turkey

Hey, anyone can grab a Butterball and shove it in the oven. Here’s how you make a real turkey: first, you brine it. Soak it for 24 hours in enough water to cover, with ½ cup salt and ½ cup sugar for each gallon of water. Take it out, pat dry and rub with olive oil. Add salt, pepper and any other seasonings you like. Put it in a V-shaped rack in a roasting pan, breast side DOWN. Yeah, I know. That’s crazy. But all the juices from the dark meat run down into the breast, making it really, really moist.

In the bottom of the roasting pan, add white wine, water, and roughly chopped celery, carrots and onions. About an hour before it’s done, turn it breast side up to crisp up the skin. Keep adding water, wine or chicken stock to the pan. Strain the juices and thicken with a lightly toasted butter/flour roux for the best gravy you ever had.

Don’t carve the breast by taking thin slices along the length like they always do on TV. Instead, remove the whole breast, then cut thicker slices across the breast. You get little turkey breast steaks, each with a rim of delicious crispy skin.

Or you could go with one of these theme turkeys:

5. The Sarah Palin. The turkey’s free but the dressing costs $150,000.

4. The auto executive. They’ve picked all the meat off the bones and now they’re sitting around the table waiting for the government to fill their plates again.

3. The Clinton. Hope you like lots of leftovers, because this one is never going away.

2. The Dubya. You can turn up the heat and keep sticking forks in it all you want, but it still won’t be done until January 20.

1. The Karen. It’s a Swanson’s frozen turkey dinner, because our kitchen looks like this.



Those are the pieces of our living room sectional, piled up into the kitchen so the living room ceiling and walls can be textured and primed. We were just going to have the popcorn ceiling scraped, but then the contractor said he couldn’t match the existing wall texture on the places that had been patched for moving light switches and putting in the new patio door, so he’d have to texture the walls as well. That meant everything had to come out. Every other room is already stacked to the ceiling with stuff from the kitchen and dining area, so that meant the living room had to move into the kitchen.

So at the top of your list next week, be thankful you have a functioning kitchen. And that your living room furniture is in your living room.