On Sunday, we had a Thanksgiving potluck at church. It was good to see that many church people spending time together at a time other than Sunday morning. It was some good old-fashioned church family time, and I think it was a good thing. The food was good for massive church potluck food. It sort of reminded me of the FBCSD Thanksgiving potluck from a while ago. Except in that one, I was a part of the kitchen crew. I want to believe that it was a massive turkey baking festival, but I can actually only remember making gravy and doing organizational tasks.
Thursday was Thanksgiving with my dad's side of the family. Since I flew home on Thanksgiving day this year, I didn't do anything food-wise for that one (which is the first time in a while that I haven't done any food). I think there were 15 people there.
The third Thanksgiving started at around 10 PM on Thursday night, when my cousin and I got to work on the Thanksgiving turducken (from scratch!). Neither of us had done this before, but we're both pretty competent people in the kitchen, and we decided we were up to the challenge.
We went with the Chef Paul Prudhomme Turducken Recipe. He is viewed by some to be the inventor of this dish, but I don't know whether it's actually true.
Chef Prudhomme is a Cajun chef, which is why there are so many green peppers in this tray. There were three different stuffings, so this is one tray out of three of diced vegetation. We also had a tray of ground andouille, chopped shrimp, and crumbled cornbread. Good prep work is key to pulling off any large cooking task.
The most daunting part of the whole task is the deboning of the birds. Since it was the first bird (and the largest bird), the turkey took the most time. I think it ended up taking about 25 minutes to debone the turkey. The important thing with this is that you must debone the bird in such a way that you can fold it back up again into a turkey shape. This means that the skin must be left completely intact (except for a single cut down the back). The basic idea is that you start from the spine and "unroll" the meat off the carcass.
It actually wasn't as hard as I thought it might be. Having a sharp knife helped, but really, it was a game of patience. After getting through the turkey, I watched my cousin do the same to the duck, and then she finished the chicken as I finished the vegetable prep. I think it was about 1:30 AM by the time we completed all of the deboning and prep work.
From here, we went to the stove work. Actually, my cousin did most of that. I think she's better at that part, anyway. I cleaned up the pans and brought her the trays as she worked her way through. The cooking of the stuffings is pretty uninteresting. After all of that was completed (at around 3:30 AM), it came time to stuff the birds with stuffing, then stuff the birds into the other birds.
You can see the stove clock on the last picture, which says that this part was finished at about 4 AM.
At this point, almost everything was prepared. The turducken requires 8 hours to cook plus an hour of resting, so we were aiming to put it in the oven at 9 AM. We put the turducken outside to keep cool (it was in the high 30s outside). At this point, my cousin and I went to sleep, but my dad (who was staying up with us) decided to stay up to clean up a bit, plus keep watch over the turducken so that the raccoon that had been spotted in the area wouldn't take it. (It was also about this time that my aunt and uncle were getting up for their black Friday shopping.)
I woke up at about 8:30, and we got the turducken in the oven at a little after 9. Very little work needed to be done from that point forward, and I found another couple hours of sleep on the couch before the afternoon rolled around and family started showing up.
The turducken was good, but it could have been better. The stuffings all tasted too similar for my liking, and the turkey could have stood a bit of brining, but it was all surprisingly moist for something that sat in an oven for 8 hours. I think it might be good to skin the duck, as well. The duck skin came out very floppy, which is not the best way to enjoy duck skin (crispy is the way to go).
I would definitely do it again sometime. I just need an excuse.
