The Boston BeanAtorium

Comments from the Waterfront by Colleen A. Kelley Ó 2003 Email: cak43@aol.com

So I broiled the turkey a little

(It's not my worse cooking snafu)

I cooked the Thanksgiving turkey this year. I have never actually cooked a turkey before but I've seen it done many times so I was sure I could cook one to. I bought a 23 pound butterball turkey at Shaw's (sorry PeaPod people). Tom sat refrigerated until the day of reckoning. At 4:45 AM on the day of Thanks, I took Tom from his carrying case, undid the handcuffs that kept his little feet together, performed a full body cavity search and removed all the icky acky things left inside. If any of those icky acky things were still attached to Tom, we would have had chinese for dinner. I stuffed the turkey with sausage stuffing, bound his feet together with mending surgical thread to keep the stuffing from falling out, oiled the bird with SPF325 and popped him in the oven set at 325 degrees at 5:35 AM. Tom was scheduled to come out of the oven about 11:30. I was aiming for a twelve o'clock dinner time in the hopes that we would eat at one o'clock but we would most likely not sit down to eat until 2, hopefully the same day.

At 6:00 AM I put an aluminum foil tent over the bird as he was starting to brown nicely. At 6:30 AM, I checked Tom again and the top of him was starting to turn black already. At this rate, the turkey will be ready for dinner at 8 AM. Why was this turkey blackening like this so quickly? It's doing a reverse Michael Jackson, I thought to myself.

I called the ButterBall Turkey hot line (1-800-BLACKBIRD) and luckily for me, Shawn answered the phone. "The turkey is turning black already and it's only been in the oven for an hour." I explained. "Where is it turning black?" questioned Shawn. "The top, the skin, the wings, the legs. Dinner will be ready in an hour and a half at this rate. Do you think I have the rack to high?" I explained and questioned. "Maybe. Lower the rack if you can. I'll be over in a few minutes." He said.

I lowered the rack in the stove but Tom was getting blacker by the minute. Maybe I used to much SPF325 and it had the opposite effect of what it was supposed to do. Shawn came over and found the trouble immediately with one look at the stove. "You have the stove on broil. The broiler is at the top. The turkey was getting broiled." Shawn turned the stove to bake and Tom cooked away like he was supposed to. Tom was a little cajun, or a little glazed as Grandma Kelley used to say, but otherwise edible. And dinner was served at one o'clock.

Okay, this is my worse cooking snafu and it's hardly worth mentioning, but it does get mentioned - every year around this time.

One Thanksgiving a long, long, long time ago, (I was about 8, 9...maybe 25 years old) the turkey was out of the oven and cooling nicely and Mom, alias Marjorie, was assigning vegetable preparation tasks. My task was to, and I will quote mom exactly, "Mash the squash." Three simple words to explain what I was supposed to do. "Mash the squash". I mashed the squash as per her precise instructions. Mom inspected the mashed squash and said, again I will quote her exactly, "This squash looks to watery, You couldn't have drained it very well," she said. "Drained it?" I asked. "You did drain the squash." she questioned declaritively. "You didn't say I had to drain it, you just said mash it. So I mashed it." Mom gave me that look that only she could give and I knew I had done wrong. "I didn't think I had to tell you to drain the water out of the pan. That goes without saying," she said. Well, it probably goes without saying but that was the last time that instruction went without saying.

That is all I have to report at this time.

Colleen A. Kelley Ó 2001 - 2003

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