A DELECTABLE THANKSGIVING REPAST, MAYBE!

If you are tired of having a plain old traditional roast turkey dinner this Thanksgiving you might want to consider creating a Turducken instead. The food section of our local newspaper ran an article last week on this dish, where a chicken is stuffed into a duck and then the duck in turn gets stuffed into a turkey. Since I wasn’t cooking this year, I didn’t pay much attention to the article, except for a little blurb that caught my eye where it said the nice thing is that your slice of Turkey will show the various layers of fowl.

I didn’t think any more about it until the next day when I mentioned the recipe to one of my daughters and I realized that I didn’t have a clue as to what the recipe really said. She and I laughed ourselves silly at the thought of taking a chicken and stuffing it through the rear end of a larger duck, and then stuffing that kit and caboodle into the end of the Turkey., My God! we thought. To get a slice of Turducken on your plate you would have to use a chainsaw on the turkey, hacking through bones and all. Obviously the recipe meant something else had to happen, but I didn’t have a clue as to what it was.

I snooped around on the internet, and believe me, producing a Turducken isn’t for the faint of heart. The first step is to make an incision along the spine of the Turkey and then gently, with the point of a very sharp knife, tease the flesh away from the bones (!) of the entire turkey. When finished, the turkey is to be laid flat out on its back, totally boneless and spread-eagled (or spread-turkeyed, to be more precise.)

Once that is out of the way, the duck and then the chicken are worked on in the same manner. Possibly if one is a professional cook or butcher, this could be done easily, but for the rest of us, we’d probably have to be carted off to the looney bin before we got the bones out of any of them.

But assuming total boning was possible, the recipe goes on to say that a sausage dressing is to be slathered across the spread-eagled Turkey. The duck gets spread-eagled on top of that dressing: he gets a cornbread dressing slathered across him. Finally, the chicken gets spread-eagled on the cornbread dressing and his dressing is a yummy (?) oyster dressing. But if you think you are to roll this up now, you are wrong. That would make it a roulade. To get a Turducken, you have to reconstruct the Turkey shape by pulling the sides up and over the various stuffed fowl and then quickly sew together all the openings. The recipe says you need at least two people to accomplish this.

We now are getting closer to completion. Once you get the mess looking like a turkey again, you stick it in the oven and bake at 190 degrees for 12 to 13 hours. When it is fully cooked, voila! You have a Turducken. It can be sliced longways first and then each side sliced crossways into serving pieces. All three dressings and all three fowls will lie there on your plate looking beautiful!

Tell me what nut would do this?