TURDUCKEN

umm... yeah. a million apologies this post is so late, i've been uber busy at work playing corporate santa (don't ask). but yep - last weekend graham and i made a turducken and i'm here to tell you all about it.

okay... first off its a lot of work. it was every bit of work i anticipated and then some. and there is no way, let me repeat NO WAY i ever could have done it solo. i mean - not only does this little culinary feat demand a ton o manpower, but trying to attempt it alone without anyone there to understand what the hell you are experiencing would be enough to give your temporary insanity a permanent status. secondly... it was a lot of fun and i'm sooo stoked we finally did it. the story value and bragging rights are just an added bonus.

so here's sorta the way it all went down:

FRIDAY

after work i finished shopping for all the stuffing ingredients (graham was in charge of getting the birds, i was in charge of the stuffing and misc items). got home around 8:00 and chopped and cooked until about midnight. i did all the planning and recipe figuring out earlier in the week and decided to do the three stuffings as follows: (1) french bread with wild mushrooms, leeks & shallots cooked down in some marsala wine and loads o butter, (2) cornbread with andouille sausage, onions & peppers and (3) basic bread crumb (i cheated and used a box for the bulk of this one and then supplemented with some wheat sandwich bread) with apples, craisins, celery, onion & pine nuts. so i sauteed everything and prepped all the bread and i learned two things during this process: (1) jiffy cornbread mixes are rad and (2) so are the brobecks. my brother burned me happinest nuclear winter and i listened to it a couple times on friday... its awesome and perfect for zoning out in the kitchen. thanks john!

SATURDAY

graham came to pick me (and my five huge bags of stuff) up around noon and we headed over to his place to start da deboning. so yeah, uh, what do you want me to say? deboning is gnarly. bottom line. i don't know what else to say so here are the pics.

yep. this is the duck about 1/3 of the way through the deboning process.

yeah. so here's the duck completely deboned.

graham showing off the deboned chicken.

all in all deboning was very labor and time intensive but not really that complicated. i did the duck while graham did the chicken. my bones were coming out super gnarly and covered with meat while his were coming out clean as well... a bone i guess. he was way better at it and ended up doing the whole turkey too. yeah gp!

so while he was finishing the turkey, i was assembling about a third of each stuffing (mixing the wet with the dry ingredients and adding chicken broth). once we had everything ready to go we started layering it all on, wrapped it up and tied it with kitchen string. done and done! i don't have and pictures from this part of the day because not only were my hands were super sick but jeff and molly showed up to check out the madness and jeff took some pictures... so hopefully i'll see them and can pass them along. main things i learned on saturday are (1) corona consumption is a definite must and (2) so is my morning jacket. totally heart that cd... thanks guys!

SUNDAY

graham woke up and put the bird(s) in the oven at 5:30. i showed up around 10:00. we were anticipating at least 8 hours in the oven but we checked at 7 hours and it was done! actually a little overdone. this may have been due to the fact that we hadn't checked it and realized that the pan was totally on the verge of overflowing and the bird(s) were basically boiling in her own fat and juices. oops. we hooked up the baster, sucked out all the juices, put the bird on the counter and tented it... great! now only 2 hours until people show up!

we ate a couple hours later. everyone brought sides and the food was amazing! there were a good 20 people there and we ended up with a ton of leftovers but not that much turducken leftover... so the thing does serve about 25-30 people. it was good, a little dry but good. and it looked RAD. here are my last 2 pics.

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