Death of a Dream, er, Turkey

Turkey is one of my very favourite foods.  The giant roast turkeys of Thanksgiving and Christmas tables are, of course, a wonder, but I like it sliced too, or ground, in casseroles, chili, and sandwiches.  I like it even more now than I used too since I've only eaten it about half a dozen times in the last 11 years.  Finding any kind of turkey is a rare, rare thing in South Korea, assuming you don't live on an American military base around the holidays.  I found some smoked in a bar once.  It tasted just like ham (my least favourite meat).  Once I was invited to a friend's house at Thanksgiving, for a roast turkey he'd somehow managed to track down somewhere in the city.  That bird was a thing of beauty.  The other 4 times were on various visits back to Canada.  Which is why, last November, finding a frozen turkey at Costco in Busan was practically a miracle.

I have rarely been so excited to buy anything in my entire life.  I kept looking at it in my cart with glee, imaging the crispy golden skin and juicy flesh that I would be digging into for my holiday feast.  No delivery chicken for me this year, no ma'am!  I would be celebrating properly, Canadian style, with a giant roast fowl that, gosh darnit, I would roast myself.  People would come to the house.  They would be impressed.  We would all eat until our buttons popped and our bellies hurt and it would be a perfect, perfect day.

I have never roast a turkey before.  First I tried to put the bird (still frozen) in my little countertop oven just to make sure it would fit.  It filled up the entire cavity, with perhaps an inch of clearance on all sides.  Worrying, but not enough to dampen my enthusiasm.  Finding a roasting pan to put it in...that was another issue.  But I figured I would worry about that later, when the big day came closer.  In the meantime I read up about safe defrosting methods, calculated how long it should take in the fridge, and left that big beauty on a huge platter there for the 3 days the internet told me it should take.  Every time I saw it there in the cool, I smiled, anticipating.

On the morning of the third day I took the turkey out of the fridge to prep for the oven.  I'd decided on a cake pan lined with excessive amounts of tin foil as the best roasting pan I could fake, and it was all ready to go on the counter.  I started taking off the heavy plastic wrapping on the bird...and discovered that the turkey was still frozen.  Solid.  As if it had never been taken out of the freezer at all.  Hm.  Problem.  Definitely no time to thaw it before our company arrived in the afternoon and a busy week ahead with no roasting days available.  Reluctantly, I wrapped it back up in its plastic and put it in the freezer.  For dinner we had all my favourite side dishes from holidays in Canada, and delivery chicken, just like every year.  And the turkey?  Bits of this and that got placed around it in the freezer until it was out of site at the back and out of mind...until now.

Fast forward more months than you're probably supposed to keep an animal frozen before consumption.  While cleaning out the freezer, I unearth the frustrating fowl and decide it's now or never.  I'm going to cook the bird.  By now the little oven is behaving rather badly, unevenly baking even smallish things like trays of muffins, so I know that trying to do a whole turkey is not a good idea.  Ignoring the internet admonitions that leaving it to defrost at room temperature will kill everyone who eats it, I leave it in the sink for most of a day and find it thawed just enough in the evening to wrestle the legs off of it before putting the rest (still frozenish) into the fridge overnight. It feels good to finally be doing something with this beast.

The legs go into a slow cooker with tomatoes and wine and rosemary and wake me up during the night smelling amazing.  By morning the sauce is wonderful, but the meat is like sawdust.  I don't know if that's because it was frozen for so long, or because I've over cooked it.  But it's terrible.  I set it aside to cool while hacking up the rest of the carcass with a dull carving knife.  One breast I manage to get off almost intact.  The other looks like it's been pre-ground on the bone.  I continue the massacre until only the mangled frame is left, still bound in the odd plastic truss that it came in, which I never figured out how to remove.  The meat goes into a food processor, where it is whizzed in the absence of a proper grinder into something resembling pate.  It's destined for chili, because I figure the texture won't be so noticeable there and the long boiling will hopefully kill anything nasty that's had a chance to start multiplying during its time on the counter.  The bones go into the trash.  Which promptly falls over spraying the floor with raw turkey juice.  Which is also all over me from my wrestling match with the knife.

While the chili bubbles away, I scrub and scrub and scrub and scrub and scrub the kitchen.  And myself.  My fingers are all wrinkly from all the scrubbing.  My head hurts.  I don't want to go near what's in the pot, even though it seems to be turning out okay.  I'm thinking I may never, ever, ever cook another turkey again as long as I live. Certainly not as long as I live in Korea.  Turkey is highly over rated anyway.  What I'm really looking forward to is delivery chicken.  Bring it on!