Turkey Trauma

I spent the entire day yesterday cooking a turkey dinner.

Turkey, stuffing, mashed sweet potatoes, squash, an aborted attempt at gravy and some canned cranberry sauce.

I now understand the pain my mother went through every Thanksgiving and Christmas, and why she would so readily accept invitations to dine with extended family on these holidays: turkey fucking sucks!!

Initially, I was expecting to cook it on Monday and share it with Grumpy and Janky.  This would leave me plenty of time to work up an appetite for another Thanksgiving with my fam.  But I miscalculated the amount of thawing time it required, and wound up cooking it on some kind of demonic hangover (one of those hangovers that actually gets worse throughout the day?).

The turkey also took three hours longer to cook than what it claimed.  And I couldn’t find the neck piece that needed to be removed; it was tucked away in its butt cavity, which I also couldn’t find until it had been in the oven for two hours.

Eventually, I found the butt, the neck hidden inside (that’s so perverse), along with some other unrecognizable part of the bird’s anatomy.

Blech, by the time it was finished, carved and beautiful, I had absolutely no desire to eat the fucker.  But I did.  It was delicious.

Then I decided that I should totally make a stock out of the carcass.  I looked up instructions online, which suggested that it needs to simmer for FOUR hours. This is after having baked it for six hours.

So I heaved a sigh, did what needed to be done and boiled the carcass.

Except by that point, my hangover was taking control over my life.  It was all panic attacks and nauseating headaches, so the smell of the boiling bird bones made me want to vomit.  I ended the stock after two hours, and forgot to put it in the freezer, so now it’s garbage.

Fucker.