Last night was about Getting The Food. My roommate G was tasked with making The Turkey, as in The Turkey To Feed the Entire Faculty At Her Elementary School. Her librarian gave her a Fred Meyers' coupon touting a very familiar holiday promotion: Spend $100 and get a free 10-20 pound turkey!
With coupon in hand, we ran around the store buying enough of our hearts' desires to meet the $100 mark and then proceeded to the frozen turkey aisle to claim our prize. Because it is no easy task feeding a horde of under-appreciated elementary school teachers, we were, logically, looking for the biggest bird.
I ceremoniously zipped up my winter parka and announced, "I'm going in." I opened the door to the Narnia of Frozen Turkeys, determined to not return until I had found Mr. Right Bird.
Unfortunately, we kept encountering only 14-15 pound birds - large by standard measure but sure to cause a brawl between hungry teachers. And to make matters worse, a number of large frozen fellas kept rolling out of the doors as I dug through the pile.
In minutes, after I had inserted almost all of myself into the freezer section, I began to get quite cold man-handling inadequate birds. I finally spotted a large lump at the very bottom of the pile, in the way back of the freezer. Its hard-to-reach location seemed to suggest that this one might be an undiscovered gem. I pushed a few hard birds aside and finally got in far enough to reach for the tag.
19.19 lbs!
A winner! A good four pounds over his trim brothers, this bird was going home with us. Now there was the business of clearing a birthing canal for the bird. I burrowed into the precarious pyramid of poultry, shoving the giant turkey boulders to the side, and when I got a good grip on The Turkey, G did her best to yank me out.
I gave a little yelp, but The Turkey remained silent.
A sense of pride filled us as we took our free turkey to the cashier. "NINETEEN POINT NINETEEN POUNDS!" we exclaimed, hardly believing our good fortune. She was skeptical and tried to downplay our miracle.
"That's too big. You can't get a free turkey that big." Waving the coupon in the air and pointing to the "10-20 pound" provision, we proved her wrong!
We took the turkey home and put it into the refrigerator for its long thaw-out. There was a debate as to how long it would take to defrost a nineteen-pound turkey which reminded me of the last time I personally defrosted a turkey.
I was in my last year of law school at Michigan and had been gifted a turkey from a classmate going to an out-of-town Thanksgiving and who no longer needed his bird. We had a conversation about the turkey drop-off and finally decided he should bring it to class on his last day in town.
M showed up that morning with Eleven Pounds of "Honeysuckle Goodness," as the turkey's outer packaging boasted. The turkey sat through the lecture, like all of us, and was handed over at the end of class. Because I had additional classes that day, that turkey became a very well-educated Eleven Pounds of Honeysuckle Goodness. (After all, very few poultry have the opportunity to receive an education at a top ten law school.)
Legal knowledge aside, Eleven Pounds of Honeysuckle Goodness was also the very best tasting Thanksgiving turkey I have ever prepared. Perhaps it had to do with the fact he was pre-injected with broth (hence his "honeysuckle goodness") or maybe it was because we roasted him upside down, allowing the juiciness of his fatty dark meats to permeate his dry breasts. Or maybe it was because one of the cooks was a vegan. Regardless, I have been unable to recreate the recipe perfectly, so the perfect Thanksgiving turkey still remains somewhat of a Holy Grail for me.
Perfect Thanksgiving Turkey
- Make sure it has "Honeysuckle Goodness" written on the packaging.
- Defrost using one day of law school classes.
- Have a vegan rub it with butter and spices.
- Roast it upside down.
The truth is that the Perfect Thanksgiving Turkey is somewhat of a Holy Grail for all Chinese people. For whatever reason, even though the Chinese are an omnivorous lot and finely gifted in the art of eating and cooking, the turkey is an ungainly, unfamiliar bird to us. I often urge friends to turn down Thanksgiving invitations if they come from a Chinese home. We do NOT understand the turkey. In case I have not made myself clear:
DO NOT GO TO A CHINESE HOME FOR THANKSGIVING.
This doesn't just stem from my personal memories of our family Thanksgiving, which admittedly are nightmarish recollections of what was a misunderstood holiday around our house. My parents always got the free grocery store bird but always went for size rather than tenderness. So I am sure we roasted our share of 19.19 pounds of bird. In an era before the flavor injector had been invented, my father would inject the turkey with soy sauce using the kind of needle he probably would have used at the hospital. My mom would inevitably start roasting at around 8pm, thus ensuring that we had to eat turkey no sooner than midnight, in our pajamas.
The bad Chinese Thanksgiving was not confined to my immediate family, however. In college, I once went to my uncle's house for the holiday and was served a half-frozen turkey loaf and giblet stuffing. The turkey loaf was horribly processed but alarmingly not fully cooked. (Nothing is scarier than raw processed turkey loaf!) The giblet stuffing caused every bite to have a rather disconcerting crunch and was included in the dinner only because "It's President Clinton's favorite stuffing," and my aunt was priming my little cousin to become President some day. On the side was a serving of lifeless canned green beans. Presidential stuffing or not, it was the worst Thanksgiving meal of my life and that includes yet another Chinese Thanksgiving where the turkey had been prepared by local Kroger grocery store and a Thanksgiving meal eaten at the Hyatt Hotel in Princeton, New Jersey.
But this year, the Nineteen Point Nineteen Pounds of Goodness in our refrigerator will not fall into Chinese hands. G will roast it for school, and I'll be going home and bracing myself for my own Thanksgiving with the Chinese.
No comments:
Post a Comment