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Published on The Doomstead Diner on November 24, 2016

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Another Thanksgiving has arrived and the consumption of Mass Quantities of food will occur again today here in the FSoA. Even the Homeless will FEAST today at numerous Salvation Army and Church Dinners with the Traditional Menu of 3 Slices of Butterball Turkey Breast, Stouffer's Stuffing, McCormick Gravy, Mashed Ore-Ida Dried Potatoes, Ocean Spray Jellied Cranberry Sauce and a String Bean casserole prepared from Green Giant green beans with French's fried Onions layered on top. All kept nice and toasty warm on the Reynolds Aluminum steamer trays heated with Sterno cooking fuel.

The serving crew will be all the wives of the well-to-do who come out twice a year to fulfill their civic duty of helping the poor and building up the necessary Brownie Points for making it into Heaven.

I'm seriously tempted to go out tomorrow to one of these Church sponsored Feasts myself to sample the tasteless delights of the industrially manufactured foods served up to the poor for Thanksgiving. I'm relatively poor AND I'm disabled, so I qualify! However, I doubt I could down much of the food considering my appetite is so diminished these days, and then add to that the depressing nature of eating amongst the mixture of Valley Trash and well-meaning Church Ladies!

So my current plan for Turkey Day is to head over to Subway for a Turkey Club Footlong, which I will have the fast food jockey cut into 3 parts so I can have 3 days of Turkey with the leftovers, as is also Traditional. If I go out to the Salvation Army, I won't have leftovers! The only thing missing is I won't have the carcass and giblets and neck to boil up into Turkey Matsoh Ball soup.

I am a little disappointed I don't have family to cook for this year, because I just learned about the new Thermodynamically efficient method for Turkey preparation called "Spatchcocking". To spatchcock, you cut out the spine of the bird and then flatten it out for baking. According to the Spatchcocking pro in the video, you get a juicier Turkey with crisper and more tasty skin in much faster time if you spatchcock. The round shape is supposedly too inefficient.

Now, I'm not sure this is true for a few reasons. First of all, this is not really different from taking a whole quartered chicken and baking it, and I've never found baking chicken to be better or juicier than roasting a whole chicken. Second, although a Turkey is generally "round" in shape, the interior is hollow, at least until you fill it with Stuffing. "In the bird" stuffing is always tastier than stuffing prepared in a baking dish, so you're sacrificing the really good stuffing if you elect to spatchcock.

Then you can use those tricky methods like stuffing a beer can up the Turkey's Ass to add moisture and hops and barley flavoring coming from the inside out, which you can't do if you spatchcock the bird. Far as getting all the Skin to be nice and crispy and subject to the "Maillard reaction", the ideal method there would be to broil the Turkey in a large Westinghouse or GE Rotisserie Oven, which granted though most people do not have. Small rotisseries for chickens are common, but for home use I've never seen one robust enough to handle anything but the smallest Turkey, certainly not a large enough one to feed a dozen drunk relatives.

Another method that gained some popularity for a while was to Deep Fry your Turkey in Wesson Vegetable Oil outside on a Coleman Burner in a very large Farberware Stock Pot forged in China big enough to fit the Butterball turkey, along with all the gallons of Boiling Wesson Oil you need to sink the thing into. I had one Thanksgiving Turkey dinner prepared this way when I first came up here, I think it was right after the Financial Collapse in November of 2008. It was over at my ex-employer's daughter's house, who was also my Dance coach. I was not impressed with this cooking method for Turkey at all. First off it definitely was not Juicier than traditional Roasting, the skin was awful and on top of all that what a fucking WASTE of cooking oil! Maybe if you ran a commercial operation Deep Frying Butterball Turkeys every day and could reuse the Wesson Oil this would be efficient, but even after cooking just ONE Turkey in it it is useless for any other cooking! About the only thing it might be useful for after that would be to convert it to Diesel to run your recently recalled Volkswagen Diesel Beetle! Few people do that of course, so all the oil gets dumped down into the Septic, on the way clogging up your drain with rancid smelling gunk, which you then need to call the Roto-Rooter people to clear out. This keeps the post-Thanksgiving Day economy moving.

Deep Frying a Turkey also presents some danger for Darwin Award winners who drop a FROZEN Butterball Turkey into Boiling Hot Wesson Oil. Said turkey has so much frozen moisture inside it will promptly EXPLODE, completely ruining Thanksgiving Dinner and sending the Darwin Award Winner to the hospital on the local Meat Wagon staffed by underpaid EMTs, if he/she is fortunate enough to survive the shrapnel from the Farberware Stock Pot and 3rd degree burns from the Wesson Cooking Oil.

With all these considerations in mind, to me the best home Butterball Turkey you can present to your drunken relatives is a traditional and standard Roasting in a properly sized Granite Ware Roasting Pan for the Turkey you cook available for the Low, Low Price Every Day of $12.95 at Walmart. There is little danger of Death and Destruction from a Butterball Turkey EXPLOSION if you drop it in the oven still frozen, although you and your drunken relatives may die from Salmonella poisoining in the aftermath of your celebration of Food Cornucopia courtesy of Monsanto and ConAgra.

In addition to the Butterball Turkey itself stuffed with Stouffer's Stuffing, I suggest as well Jimmy Dean Sausage from the local factory Pig Farm added to your stuffing mix which adds a lot of JUICY FAT to your turkey and makes both the turkey and the stuffing much more moist and tasty. Also, in with the Turkey to fill up the rest of the Granite Ware Roasting Pan from Walmart, add FRESH Potatoes, Sweet Potatoes, Carrots, and Onions. You can get those from your Permaculture Garden, Raised Beds or Hydroponics set-up. Or just buy them in the produce section at Safeway recently shipped up from Mexico by COSCO if you're not a Prepper. A little brown sugar shipped up from the sugar cane fields in Brazil glazes over and caramelizes these root veggies nicely, but don't over-do it.

Your Butterball Turkey coming out of your Westinghouse Oven will present well, most of the upper surface nice and crispy and Malleardized, although the bottom portion will be kind of soggy with all the grease and not so tasty. Once presented on the table in full form and allowed to cool, your carving choices depend on your own skill with dismembering the bird and how much physical work you want to do. Manual Carvers might choose Henckel's Stainless Steel knives, which used to be forged in Germany but now come from China because steel is way cheaper there. If you want to do a little less work, you can use a Hamilton Beach Electric Carving Knife, also now produced in China. I originally did everything manual, but the electric carving knives make nicer more uniform slices, so I eventually moved to doing dismembering manually, then slicing with an electric for the family feast.

After everyone is finished gorging themselves, take whatever good meat is still left on the carcass or on plates of unfinished food because your relatives had eyes bigger than the stomach and chop up to make a Turkey Salad to eat all week for lunch sandwiches. Take all the bones and giblets and throw in a big pot or Rival Slow Cooker and simmer overnight to get a nice Turkey Broth to use for Matzoh Ball, Wanton, or Dumpling Turkey Soup, which you can add to your Turkey Salad Lunches.

By the end of the week, you will be sick and tired of Turkey and will not want to even LOOK at another Turkey again until the next Thanksgiving. That's why Christmas Dinner should NEVER be Turkey, but instead you should go witha Honey Baked Ham nicely spiral sliced on their machines, even though they are FUCKING EXPENSIVE! Saves a lot of work though, and they do a real good job on the hams so Christmas Dinner is not nearly as time consuming as Thanksgiving. If you do feel like cook-it-yourself for Christmas dinner, a Prime Rib Roast is a nice choice here, delivered straight to your local Safeway from the Feedlots in Chicago.

I wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving enjoying another year of Food Cornucopia here in the FSoA. Rich or Poor here today, you are likely to be stuffed with more Industrially produced food than you can possibly eat, and will have serious problems getting into your pants on Black Friday to go out and do battle with the other shoppers looking for Bargains on Chinese Toys for Christmas.