It is sitting in front of me face down, haunches up, goading me. I pry the legs apart but they modestly snap back together. It is a beautiful specimen and I hold up a knife to the goose fleshed skin and it retracts and follows the sharp blade. “Aren’t you a pretty one?” I say to it quietly.
“Do it, do it” it says back to me.
I grab a pair of shears, run my fingers down its backbone feeling the knobs of bone and cartilage against my fingers and murmur “This won’t hurt a bit dear” before savagely slicing through it’s skin and bone with the shears. It’s a particularly brutal act, made even more difficult by the size of the beast at over 7 kilos but it’s a necessary one. Although once I started cutting with the shears I wondered whether I had done the right thing. After hacking back and forth through the thick bone I remove the backbone and connected neck with a triumph raising it high but feeling like a serial killer at the same time that has eviscerated someone.
I haven’t turned Dexter. I’m making a turducken. For Christmas in July of course. Northern Hemispherans might wonder what on earth Christmas in July is and as far as I know, it is a Southern Hemispheran’s way of celebrating Christmas when our weather is at its coldest. Instead of our usual hot Summer’s Christmas of salads and seafood, having on in July means that having things such as baked mega turkeys make sense.
What is a turducken? Well you may have heard of it mostly in America which is the land of over the top excess (which is incidentally why I would love to live there 
). It’s origins are originally Ancient Roman and it was then taken up by the French in the 1800s, in a dish called a “Rôti Sans Pareil” or “Roast without Equal.” A large deboned bird is stuffed with progressively smaller, deboned birds the smallest being tiny enough to fit an olive in and nothing else. This version, a more user friendly version made popular recently, is a deboned turkey stuffed with a deboned duck stuffed with a deboned chicken, hence the name Tur-Duck-En as a portmanteau of the three bird’s names.
I was sent a glorious free range Thirlmere turkey and cranberries from the U.S. cranberry institute and if I had any sense I would have simply roasted it whole along with some lovely cranberry stuffing. But because I am something of a masochist for punishment (and it turns out also a sadist considering what I did with the turkey) my inner Franck Eggelhoffer came out and said “Let’s make zis a Christmas in July to remember! Ja? Faaabulous!”
Queen Viv and her son Michael and his fiancee Terri who were here on holidays were invited along to come along. A day before I decided to brine the turkey to keep it moist. Since I was sent the turkey I couldn’t ask for them to debone it for me. I had deboned quails before and spatchcocks and they were, anatomically speaking, a smaller version of the turkey. So I knew my way around them but I also knew that as a vastly larger bird it would require strength that my upper body doesn’t possess readily. I really needed Dexter or Jack the Ripper to do it.
In the absence of a serial killer friend I set aside a large space on my workbench and cut and sliced away. It took about 30-40 minutes all up to debone the seven kilo beast but that was including time to wash my hands and take photographs. After huffing, puffing, swearing, pushing and pulling I removed the final touch, the wishbone triumphantly and plunged the turkey into its brining solution made up basically of salt, sugar, apple cider vinegar and whatever herbs I had handy and some black peppercorns. The brining solution would help to keep the meat moist. Afterwards I slumped down at my desk exhausted clutching a glass of something stiff (for me an apple juice and soda water, I needed my wits about me).
What is NQN up to now? 
NQN on Facebook
RSS
