I was scheduled to cook, or at least help to cook two turkeys today. I had purchased my Turkeys Thursday. They were in the fridge four days ahead of time to defrost. It turns out that two turkeys near each other are like on giant turkey when defrosting. One was still frozen. I was getting close to the time of putting stuffing into the bird when this happened. I had to run to Safeway and buy a third, fresh and never frozen, turkey this time. I made it back, got home stuffed in the oven in plenty of time to take to my brother's house. I provided the turkey, stuffing, gravy, and a cheese board for before dinner.
There were about a dozen people there, only two of them were children. So there were a lot of other side dishes.
Meanwhile there was the half frozen turkey for home. It took a cold water bath. The water was cold enough to keep it in the safety zone. The housemates had a couple of pies to bake, frozen so they were no-brainers, and had barely got up when I was finishing. I had chopped the vegetable for the stuffing. Made sure that they had all of the ingredients, and gave them directions. It is only a turkey after all.
It was safely thawed before they ate do to its bath. And when I got home they were still cooking at about 7:00. My thermometer in the turkey said that it had still a little ways to go. But I helped with the last part. I wanted to make sure that it was properly done since it can be easy to place the thermometer in apart that is not the deepest part of the turkey. When the thermometer said that it was done I pulled it out and could not believe the weight of the thing. The housemate's son had decided that the turkey was so use to water from the bath, why not let it swim in the pool? Okay, not quite that bad, but the water did go over a third of the way up the bird. Almost half. The stuffing in the bird was rather soggy, but I had that mixed with some studding that was cooked outside of the bird. And luckily it was a bit over cooked. That helped. But the gravy was almost ruined. I had my strongest burner on high and was trying to reduce what appeared to be about a gallon of water when the Housemate said that they did not know when I would be back so they got a couple of turkey gravy packets. <shudder> We threw those in while I continued to boil and reduce and it was at least edible.
Talk about sacrilege. I like turkey. I like mashed potatoes. I like stuffing. But if you have an excellent gravy those three things become amazing. For me Thanksgiving is all about the gravy. And that was almost a total disaster.
At any rate I was still full so I have no idea how the swimming turkey turned out,. The meat was fine. But my two favorites, stuffing and gravy, may have been ruined.
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