This post is totally a stub. I had a great vision of writing about the hilarity of trying to do too much and the fires that sometimes result, along with the genius of basting a turkey by tossing a pork butt on top of it in the smoker. Maybe I’ll get around to it someday. Meanwhile, you can see why you should never overheat a pyrex dish over at Flourarrangements.

I’ve cooked a turkey or two in my time. Just never 2 in a day. I kinda bit off a bit extra this thanksgiving, even before I started eating, but it gave me a great excuse to try some cool shit with the birds. For some crazy-ass reason, I ended up signed up for cooking a thanksgiving lunch for my inlaws and a thanksgiving dinner for a different 20 family members.  I got one oven, and it’s small.

There was the thought of cooking a giant bird early in the day and just serving cold turkey for dinner. Not sure how I’d shove an ostrich in the oven, though. Plus, reheating the meal would be bound to fuck it up. One of my brothers used to be a professional chef, so I don’t want to embarrass the hell out of myself with a really crappy dried out turkey dinner. I also had to make this all look easy because my mother in law gets nervous about mankitchen shit blowing up around dinner time.

I left all the baking stuff to the wife, who’s got those mad pie skills. This time she said I could use her bread for the stuffing, so we were cool there. Now I just needed to get two birds killed and stoned or something.

Plan was to do a small bird for meal #1 in the oven. Big bird #2 would go in the smoker. I figured out that I wanted about 22 lb, but that made me really nervous about whether the bitch would even fit. I ordered up a fancy hippy bird to pick up a couple days before turkey day which wouldn’t leave me much time to figure out a plan B. I went to the grocery store with a tape and measured a 22 pounder and figured it was 16″ long… that might fit in the Brinkman smoker, but then again, maybe not. Worse came to worse, I figured I could always sawzall the tips of the drumsticks.

Monday and Tuesday, I was busy with work… got home at 10:30 on Monday night and whipped up a brine (about 4 cu salt and 4 cu brown sugar) then yanked the bird out of the fridge. It was maybe a little more frozen than and “fresh” turkey has any right to be (thanks hippy), but nothing I could do about it now.

We moved this year, which brought us nearer to the wife’s family. So we invited them over for Thanksgiving dinner… all well and good. But then one of my brothers asked if we wanted to travel to some desert shithole to have Thanksgiving. I said NFW, and threw out that if they wanted to see us, they could damn well show up at our house. I didn’t think he’d do it, but I was psyched when he said ok. Par for the course for this brother who thinks nothing of driving across the country for a weekend… did I mention that he lives about 3,000 miles away? Anyway, he said he’d drag his family all the way here, so that kinda put me on the spot to get a Thanksgiving dinner on. Then another brother called up and said “hey, dude, did you know Tim is planning to come to your house for turkey day?” Which I did, so I told Tony he’d better be there too. Suddenly there were a lot of folks showing up. Got to think about this one.

And don’t forget the inlaws. They eat their turkey early, while my family eats late, so we are doing two separate sittings of full on turkey dinner. And I have one small oven. But wait, I also have a smoker… we’ll make this work.

To be continued. Someday.