1996 Thanksgiving - Wild Turkey
And the 11th Commandment was, thou shall not cook an alcoholic turkey. For if you fire up this bird, my wrath shall come upon your oven with raining fire and loud thunder. So, it was, the word of God.
Yet, we are all sinners. And this is the tale of a lady who loved her liquor (she is from East Texas, where Natural Light Beer is the region's "water"). Judith, and we are not talking the Biblical Judith....though, they are a bit similar in demeanor. The Biblical Judith was a wealthy and beautiful young widow, who when her town was under siege, hacked off the head of her enemies as they lie in a drunken state. And you know how Thanksgiving is, family chaos...maybe by attempting to get the family intoxicated by bird (we'd never know what hit us as we ate...), she'd just "off" a few members of the offending visiting family!? Anyway, I digress, back to my mother's defense of "Oprah Winfrey" made me do it!"
Typically, on Thanksgiving, my family orders a smoked turkey which cuts down the preparation time of the turkey. However, when it arrived, the turkey was more like the turkey the Crachits (Bob Crachit was Ebeneezer Scrooge's clerk) from "A Christmas Tale" had, it was a hen...or a pigeon...something small. Even our very small Yorkie Terrier dog thumbed his nose at this bird! So, we went to the grocery store where a fat, juicy Butterball turkey saved us and the smoked hen could garnish this bird!
My mom, the artist, the creative one - can't deal with a normal turkey at her table. She had seen on "Oprah Winfrey" a Bourbon-soaked turkey and envisioned a quiet table of zoned out guests and kids, and thought, that is for me! After all, the 1980's of "Just Say NO!" was so 10 years ago! Did my mom follow the recipe or safety precautions? Hell, no! The cook was having too much fun with the Wild Turkey Bourbon and the bird in the kitchen - she was serving more drinks to that bird than an oversexed frat boy to the sorority girls. My mom used gauze (same thing used in disasters for band aiding victims...read on till the end) to butter and bourbon this turkey all over, then poured the rest of the bourbon that she had not already consumed (wink, wink) and popped it into the oven! She then poured all of us some champagne and we settled whilst waiting on our main meal. Tick Tock, Tick Tock, that is the sound of God about to make his presence known.
KA-BOOM! Wait, it was more like, KAAAAAAA-BOOOOM! (Just make the text in your head REALLY big!) The oven door flies open, with such force, a hinge was broken and the turkey bursts into delicious smelling flames of burnt turkey flesh laced with liquor! Everyone's eyes were really big at this point and my Aunt Catherine made the sign of the cross on her chest. I was really supportive of my mom by attempting to choke her neck for ruining our dinner and saying, "You cooked us a devil turkey!!" My mom's niece was in distress, "Auntie J -you are going to ruin this turkey!" My mom, in all of this chaos, remained cool. She put her asbestos gloves on that she uses for her art welding, got out the turkey, smothered the fire with another pan and calmly put the offending bird into another oven (not on convection bake) and replied to all, "It's just a good charred bird!"
You may wonder where the men were in this scenario, they were watching football - did hear the boom, but couldn't be bothered during the play. After a commercial came on, my father came in to check out the kitchen, went past the blown out oven door and straight to his empty bourbon bottle. "Damn! Is that my GOOD bourbon??"
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