“So how did that … thing go that you were making with your mother?”
“You mean the turducken?”
“Yeah. What happened?”
“Well …”
I had variations of this conversation many times over Christmas, as people asked whether Mom and I had been successful in our second attempt at making a turducken.
Readers of The Western Producer may have seen a story in the Dec. 24 edition, which told the sad story of our first attempt to make a turducken – which is a deboned chicken stuffed into a deboned duck stuffed into a deboned turkey, with dressings between each layer.
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After many hours of hard work at Thanksgiving, we had successfully constructed a turducken, but the project failed when the power went out in the middle of the night as the bird cooked. We had to throw it out because of fears of food poisoning.
Undeterred, we committed ourselves to making one for Christmas. We hunkered down and repeated the exhausting process over a long day and night of Christmas Eve.
I can now announce that this turducken was a complete success, and our family was able to enjoy the fruits of its labor. I have some suggestions for others who are considering making a turducken:
- Hire a masseuse – After spending three or four hours deboning birds, your back feels like a maze of ropes that someone has bound too tightly together.
- Trust your mother – Though all the internet instruction sheets I could find said the turducken would take 13 hours to cook, mom insisted on putting it in the oven 18 hours before Christmas dinner. I warned her that if it was done five hours before the meal, she would take the blame. After 13 hours the interior temperature was nowhere near 170. After 17 and a half hours it was right where it was supposed to be, and perfect. I grudgingly had to admit she had been right.
- Lie to your girlfriend – Because a turducken is so monstrously large, and because all of us added up to only five people for Christmas dinner, we ended up with 15 pounds of leftovers. Since Christmas we have had turducken stew, turducken soup, turducken fajitas and turducken quiche.
I am now mightily sick of the taste of turducken. But Wendy, who doesn’t believe in waste, insists we eat all of it. So I have been sneaking plastic bags of turducken into the garbage, hoping it’s all gone before she notices.
- Don’t explain – If anyone asks you why you spent all the time and energy to make a turducken, don’t answer them. Because, really, the kind of person who would ask a question like that is the kind of person who would never understand the deep spiritual urge behind a turducken. You have nothing to apologize for.
- Move forward – You’ve now made a turducken. Don’t let that be the end of your culinary adventures. In Arkansas they’ve taken the turducken one step further by making a pigturducken – a turducken stuffed inside a boneless pig. In South Africa people have made the osterducken – a turducken stuffed inside a ostrich. And I hear that in Saudi Arabia there are recipes for a whole stuffed camel.
I wonder what mom would think of that.
