I Want To Drown In Gravy.

Now that your turducken is out of the oven and your cranberry is sauce is simmering, it is time to make gravy and lots of it. It is an absolute crime and insult to your guests to run out of gravy. I usually tend to make about 5 litres so that I can freeze it and be guaranteed gravy yumminess for months to come. I mean, really, what doesn't taste better dunked, slathered, or swimming in gravy? How 'bout gravy gelato with bits of cranberry? Maybe I'll try that in a couple of weeks when I run out of turducken but I still have 3 litres of gravy in my freezer... but I digress.
I start by melting a bunch of butter then add approx. 1/2 - 3/4 cup of flour. Keep stirring the resulting paste. Let it brown and then slowly add the turducken stock you made and keep whisking to avoid lumps. Do not use the runoff turducken fat to season the gravy because it will be way too salty because of brining. Add at least 1 cup of white wine and 1 cup of apple juice for sweetness. Tweak with rosemary, sage, oregano, thyme, and fresh ground black pepper adding more wine and apple juice if need be. For the ultimate gravy science explanation and recipe mojo, check out this page by Alton Brown. He is a dude on Food Network and his shows are always chock full of fascinating food science and helpful tips. You should definitely program your VCR.

p.s. I'm serious about the gravy gelato. Stay tuned...

Cranberries. (Zom-bie, Zom-bie, Zom-bie-e-e)

What giant fowl feast is complete without cranberry sauce? Now you could go to your local outlet of some giant, multinational food conglomerate and buy a tin of that red glop that comes out of the can with a sickening schlurshlop and then just quivers in your serving dish still in its antiseptic, cylindrical mass. And in late night, turkey sandwich-induced, emergency situations, I have done just that. However, we are not going to advance the DIY slow food revolution and uphold our punk rock, more-gourmet-than-thou, smirking attitude if we stoop to that. We are going to make our own.
Freshly made cranberry sauce is the volume knob that goes to 11 on the vintage tube amp that is your beautiful turducken. And just like power chord rock and roll, it's beauty is in it's simplicity. You will need...

• 1 bag of fresh cranberries
• 1 thumb of fresh ginger, grated
  
• 1-2 oranges, zest and juice
• 1/2 - 1 cup of sugar
• a few splashes of some fancy booze that you have laying around. (I used leftover Champagne from making Mimosas for Christmas morning. Any sort of wine will work, sake would be very interesting, vodka would do in a pinch, gin... I'm not so sure of. Just feel free to improvise.)

Dump everything in a sauce pan on low heat. Start with less sugar rather than more. As you constantly stir, the cranberries will pop and release their juicy goodness. Continue and the sauce will thicken. Adjust sugar, orange, and booze according to your liking and you are done.

Slow and Low, That is the Tempo.

Because of the extreme delicious mass of the turducken, it must be cooked slowly at a low temperature so that everything inside is fully cooked while the outside won't become a diamond in a thousand years. It is a good idea to budget 10 -12 hours if you are cooking at 200 degrees. You should definitely not exceed 250 degrees. I got up at 5 a.m, took the beast out of the cooler, and massaged the skin with a butter/mayo mixture and sprinkled it with sage, thyme, oregano, and pepper. NO SALT!

Place a large cake tin upside down in your giant roasting pan so that the turducken sits on it and is elevated above the bottom of the roasting pan. This allows the fat to run off the bird while it cooks and collect in the bottom of the pan so that the bird doesn't go soggy in it's own fat.

Throw the whole thing in the oven (no lid) at 2oo degrees and go back to bed. When you eventually drag yourself out of bed and drug yourself with enough caffeine to feel human, resist the urge to open the oven. If you do so you will loose precious heat. Instead, pour yourself another coffee and go open your Christmas presents and bask in the love of your family and friends.

At around noon, grab your tin foil and a meat thermometer, and open the oven. Hopefully, your turducken will look like this...
The skin should be browned nicely, but we don't want it to burn and there is still a whole lotta cooking to still happen. Using the tinfoil, make your bird a protective breastplate and some shinguards to wrap around the drumsticks. This should keep the tasty, crispy skin from burning.

Plunge the meat thermometer deep into the bird just like the adrenaline needle scene in "Pulp Fiction". Now it is time for some independent, critical thought. Don't freak out, keep your wits about you, maybe you should get another cup of coffee. Your turducken has been in the oven for 7 hours already. Check the internal temperature on the meat thermometer. 165 degrees is our magic number where all salmonella beasties die a tragic death. We must get the bird to that internal temperature or else Grandma is making a special visit to the hospital and your family will be mocking you at every family holiday feast for years to come. You have another 3 - 4 hours to go. The big question that only you can answer is this...

Do you need to turn up the oven?

At this point I decided to go from 200 degrees to 225 degrees. As soon as you make your decision and have the tinfoil armour in place, close the oven as quickly as possible and don't open it until you absolutely have to. When the magic time comes to pull your finished culinary masterpiece out of the oven, make sure that you cover it with tinfoil (or the lid to your roaster) and let it rest for a 1/2 hour before you carve so that all your tasty turducken juices can sink back into the meat.

Assemble your turducken like a mad scientist.

Once your stuffing is done it is time to start playing with the splayed bird carcasses. Pull your birds out of the brine and thoroughly rinse them under cold running water. It is of utmost importance that you do not fudge this step or your finished turducken will be disgustingly salty. It is also important not to add any salt to any part of the turducken process after you have rinsed.

Spread the spatchcocked turkey flat out on your work surface. Smear on a layer of one type of your yummy stuffing. Lay the duck down on top of that. Add another layer of a different stuffing. Then lay out the chicken and put a layer of your last stuffing on top of that. It is important to remember the burrito rule...

Thou shalt not overstuff or extreme messiness shalt visit thine plate like locusts to your fields (or spam to your Hotmail).

Put your extra stuffing back in the fridge and warm it up in the oven just before the feast begins. For this next part you are either going to need the help of some friends or grow another two arms. I recommend enlisting some friends.

One of you is going to fold the turkey up with everything inside and hold it closed. The other person is going to grab a needle and some cotton thread and stitch this culinary Frankenstein up so that it resembles an actual turkey. Patience, a steady hand, and good light is the key here. Surgery training is optional but extremely helpful.


While you are sewing up the beast, try to stitch through as much meat as you can so that the stitches don't rip out of the turkey skin under the pressure of all that compressed stuffing. If you manage to pull this off, you will be rewarded with a delicious looking fat, juicy bird like this...

If it is 1 a.m. Christmas Eve (speaking from my personal experience), put the Frankenbird back in the cooler/fridge to keep everything foodsafe and go to bed because you will be getting up in 4 hours to put this sucker in the oven.

You can never have too much stuffing.

So you are going to need three different types of stuffing. Stuffing is easy, you can make it up just like punk band names, except that punk bands names use gross stuff like phlegm and maggots and stuffing uses yummy stuff like sausage and bacon.

If you need to name your punk band, do it here. If you need to make stuffing just take a bunch of yummy stuff, combine it with other yummy stuff, add some bread cubes and sage and you have stuffing. This year I did the following...
Roasted Garlic, Bacon, and 2 Types of Mushroom Stuffing

• 3 heads roasted garlic
• bunch of bacon, chopped
• white mushrooms, chopped
  
• shitake, portebello, or any other type of mushrooms that won't trip you out, chopped
  
• turducken stock
• toasted bread cubes
• sage, thyme, oregano, pepper
  

Fry bacon, add mushrooms and saute. Toss in roasted garlic cloves. Combine fried stuff with bread cubes in casserole dish. Season. Ladle enough stock over the mixture to moisten. Cover with tin foil and bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

Sausage, Leek, Apple, and Almond Stuffing

• 2 packs bulk sausage meat
  
• 1 large leek, white part only sliced
  
• 4 Granny Smith apples, cored and sliced
  
• 1 pack sliced almonds
  
• turducken stock
• toasted bread cubes
• sage, thyme, oregano, pepper

Fry sausage. Add leeks and saute. Toss in apples and almonds. Combine fried stuff with bread cubes in casserole dish. Season. Ladle enough stock over the mixture to moisten. Cover with tin foil and bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

Onion, Pinenut and Parsley Stuffing with Dried Cranberries

• 3 onions, chopped
  
• 1 pack of pinenuts
  
• 1 bunch parsley, chopped
  
• big fistfull of dried cranberries
  
• turducken stock
• toasted bread cubes
• sage, thyme, oregano, pepper

You know the drill by now.

Spatchcock... heh, heh, heh, yeah

OK, now it is time to prove your worth. The entire rib cages need to removed from all the birds. Make sure that your kitchen knife is really sharp. Start with the chicken and then the duck so that way by the time you get to the turkey you are a pro. No need to freak out.

All you are going to do is make one straight cut down the back through the skin and meat until you hit the spine. Then you are going to cut the meat away from the rib cage and bones on one side. When you hit a leg or wing, cut through the socket of the ball joint leaving the bone in the leg but freeing the rib cage. Do the same thing on the other side so that when you are done the rib cage is totally free and the bird is laid out flat like a book. If you hack to death don't worry but remember that you want to have mastered this process by the time you get to the turkey because the turkey must stay in one unmarred piece. For a more detailed explanation check it out here.

Keep all the bones to make stock and throw them in a big pot. Cover with water, bring to a boil, and simmer overnight. You will want this stock for the stuffing and to make gravy.

If you are looking at these photos and you are a professional chef, (I'm talking about you, Heidi and Ray) you will have already noticed that I have the knife skills of a blind woodsman. Please forgive me. I hang my head in shame.

Depending on your cooking schedule, either proceed to assemble the turducken, or throw the spatchcocked birds back into your brine. Change your frozen jugs to keep everything cool.

Turducken Brine

OK. Here it is. With the holidays bearing down on us like that 18 wheeler in "Enter Sandman" I thought it was time that I shared with you how to work the ultimate poultry mojo.

1 word, 3 birds. Tur. Duck. En.

(That's a deboned turkey stuffed with a deboned duck and chicken, along with 3 different layers of stuffing for those of you not in the know.)

First you must defrost. Get a big Coleman cooler and put the frozen birds in there and cover with cold water. Change the water every 8 hours and in 1 - 2 days you will have unthawed birds. Make sure to keep the temperature in there cool so that no one dies of samonella. Once the birds are thawed, empty and wash out cooler. Get a bunch of empty 4 litre (1 gallon for all my American friends) milk jugs and 2 litre pop bottles, fill them almost to the top with water, and freeze them for the next step.

Now it is time to get your brine on. Even if you are not up to the challenge of the turducken, you should definately master the art of the brine. This one secret will forever banish the feared flavourless fowl from your family festivities. For a complete scientific explanation of brining, check it out here.

Enough chit chat, it is time to whip up a batch of Wade's Happy Holiday Brine. You will need...

• 1 entire box of kosher salt
• 2 cups sugar
• 1 2 lb bag cooking onions
• 1 bunch parsley
• 2 heads fresh garlic
• 2 cups vinegar
• 2 cans cheap frozen apple juice concentrate
• 1 can frozen cranberry juice concentrate
• 1/2 cup pepper
  

Dissolve salt and sugar in boiling water. Cool down. Add all the rest of the ingredients into a food processor or blender and goo-ify. Dump blender contents and salt / sugar solution into cooler. Mix.



Put at least 2 frozen milk jugs into the cooler. These serve 2 purposes. One, it keeps the brine and the birds at food safe temperatures. Two, they occupy cooler room so that you don't have to dilute your brine so that you have enough liquid to cover the birds. Cram in the birds and add just enough water to cover all the birds. Use a few frozen pop bottles to help submerge the birds. Let brine for at least 24 hours.



Stay tuned for... Spatchcocking! Heh, heh, heh, heh... I just said "spatchcock"

Finally!

Well friends, it is true. I finally have a blog. It is my desire to share with you a few things that are very important to me like food, music, my gorgeous family, and the interconnectedness of life as it relates to food, music, and my gorgeous family. I started this blog in the spring when I went to Cambodia, but I never updated it. So for those of you who have been waiting patiently, here is a sweet picture of me in Cambodia eating a BBQ'd tarantula on the bus...





Yum.