Over the years Mr NQN has had to get used to me. When we first started dating he used to say “Do you have to get so dressed up?”. He is a country boy after all and there were mutterings of overdressing and I suspect too much makeup (although he was smart enough not to comment on that). There was the singing in public, the fact that I liked biting him because I thought he seemed tasty, the way that I’d enjoy my food a bit too much, the odd food that I’d make and the other strange things that I did that embarrassed him. Until one day he actually said to me

“Oh I like the way you used to dress”

This was of course after I had dressed more casually to try and not embarrass him. I looked at him and I smiled. Did he actually like me being me? Did I no longer embarrass him? Success! I had indoctrinated him into my world and he seemed to like it there (and a good thing because I don’t like having to do things any way but my own). Now he is used to shopping adventures where we travel to buy a good free range ham. He is used to buying bottles of root beer and pouring them over said ham. He is used to me inviting people over for food (he is naturally very shy and inviting people over just would not occur to him).

And speaking of that ham, this Christmas we were seeing  our families as we planned a small family dinner combining my family with Mr NQN’s. His family were all over the place (their natural state of affairs being chaos), and trying to find a date that suited everyone meant that Christmas was going to be on December 26th. I had to point out that December 26th was no longer technically Christmas so I invited whoever could come over to our place on December 24th for dinner. Christmas Eve is when the Finnish celebrate Christmas and this is when my family celebrates Christmas because quite honestly my sister and I couldn’t wait another night to open our presents and our parents just relented and it became tradition.

Aura Lily

Well it turns out that all of the family members could make it on December 24th after all (I guess it was that annual tradition of herding cats preceding Festivus that the Elliotts seem to delight in!). And suddenly our small family celebration burst out to a table for thirteen…around our table that seats 8! But not to worry, we had plenty of food. My ham was a 5 kilo beast-modest enough and covered in a crunchy, moreish breadcrumb crust and then basted in a flavoursome root beer caramel. I had made this many years ago before the blog and before Mr NQN and was so besotted by it that I vowed to make it again when I had a lot of mouths to feed. The ham is easy enough to do and just requires a basting every 30 minutes and then a coating of a breadcrumb crust. It is then baked and basted to glistening perfection before being sliced up with some of the breadcrumb mixture and the sweet, fragrant caramelised syrup.

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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).

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As you read this, I will no doubt be frantically preparing for Christmas. It will be an onslaught, self induced, of the familial kind. Mr NQN’s eccentric family will come crashing into my own eccentric-but-in-a-different-way family in our annual Christmas celebration. Somewhat foolishly, we had volunteered to have the dinner at our place as I am attempting my first roast goose for the meat eaters and I didn’t want to schlepp it across town to another place.

“Oh it will be fine to have 15 people!” I said to Mr NQN. “We had more for Halloween!”

“Yes but everyone wasn’t sitting down at a table” he pointed out, quite rightly. I hate it when he’s right.

“Oh yes…that…But look! I bought some red ribbon!”

I don’t quite know how we’ll fit fifteen people around our table that seats eight comfortably. We tossed around the idea to have a separate, smaller table, not for children but for parents. We pictured using smaller chairs and cutlery and telling them to “Keep the noise level down so that everyone can enjoy dinner!”. Ahh that remains a fantasy…Perhaps it wasn’t such a great idea after all and I am hoping that it will go off with a minimum of fuss and without us feeling like a horde of people had breached our perimeter.

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