I’ll never forget what’s her name, and the Thanksgiving dinner that came dangerously close to ending up a vegetarian repast, had it not been for some last minute ingenuity in the kitchen. What had been forecast as a relaxing holiday feast developed almost out of nowhere into a perfect storm of misunderstanding and misjudgment, with Miss What’s Her Name at the epicenter. Relaxing is not a word normally associated with holiday gatherings, as in most cases these events involve family, the ” F” word. But this particular Thanksgiving involved no family members, but instead a somewhat random group of individuals, casual acquaintances thrown together by friendships and fate.
A family-free holiday can be liberating, and in this instance the participants were all looking forward to a break from tradition. For some, it was a first visit to coastal Maine. This Thanksgiving would be a chance to have a nice meal, drink a little wine, and not worry about what one’s siblings, uncle, or mother-in-law thought about one’s own current life choices. Unfortunately, our first mistake was to allow Miss What’s Her Name to be in charge of the menu. A number of us knew she’d dabbled with vegetarianism in college, but we assumed it was just a phase. We were shocked to discover she was hard core, and not reassured by her claims that she could just go cold turkey and cook the bird.
The days preceding Thanksgiving included volleys of phone calls discussing the menu in detail. Various side dishes were selected and assigned, and given that she wouldn’t be eating the turkey anyway, our chef even suggested I make my hot Italian sausage stuffing. I accepted her suggestion with enthusiasm, and the rest of us started feeling pretty good about our plans. This was going to work out just fine; our fears of tofurkey were laid to rest. Late Thanksgiving morning the guests began arriving at my place, side dishes and beverages in hand. Around noon our chef arrived with the turkey, all sixteen pounds frozen solid as the Arctic.
That this might possibly be a problem had not occurred to Miss What. Her college major had been Philosophy, not Thermodynamics. My major had been Comparative Religions, and at this point I was praying what in God’s name were we going to do with this poor frozen carcass. Someone opened a bottle of wine, and that got the gang to thinking. The women in the group rallied around our chef and noted that there was ample food, even without the turkey. One of the men commented that perhaps his sister-in-law wasn’t that bad after all; at least they were having turkey at her place.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and as host I was desperate. I recalled from my experiences icing large quantities of beer during school that a lot of small ice cubes melt much faster than one big chunk of ice. And I never even took a physics course. The problem of course was that we had one large chunk of frozen bird on our hands, not a bag of turkey cutlets we could defrost in the microwave. My previous experience in the thawing things out quickly department had been limited to frozen water pipes. A small blowtorch usually did the trick, but I quickly rejected this option. I needed to think outside of the box, or the kitchen so to speak.
Like most Maine guys, my lifelong addiction to power tools meant that I had a pretty good stash in the shop. It usually starts innocently enough with a power drill, then a circular saw, and maybe a sander or a jig saw. By the time you’ve got a table saw, a router, and a sawzall, you’re ready for a twelve-step program. After carefully considering the characteristics of my various weapons of mass destruction, I settled on the sawzall, or as my builder friends refer to it, the carpenter’s eraser. This rig will cut through most anything if equipped with the appropriate blade; however, my blade inventory included none specifically designed to cut frozen turkey.
Given that it was a special occasion, I chose a brand new blade, one about six inches long with relatively fine teeth. I instructed one of the guys to distract the women for a few minutes, and another to help secure the bird while I carved it. Knowing that the sawzall makes a bit of noise, I cranked up the stereo a little to provide cover. A friend stood by with towels in the event that frozen flesh flew askew. We all swore an oath of secrecy, and luckily no one had a camera.
Much to my surprise, a frozen turkey cuts quite easily with the appropriate tool, and I had the drumsticks and thighs removed in a matter of minutes. My surgical team took a breather and a sip of wine before we tackled the rest of the bird. We decided on an incision from one end of the breast bone to the other, and then halved each breast. In a few more minutes we had reduced our gobbler to pieces that would easily fit into the microwave. After about 20 minutes on auto defrost, we had thawed turkey parts, ready for the roasting oven.
It’s interesting how much wine a hungry group can consume in a couple of hours, which is about how long it took to roast our deconstructed Tom. In retrospect this was a good thing, as the presentation of the pile o’ parts on the dinner table left little to the imagination. The buffer a few glasses of wine provided helped smooth some of the rough edges, at least for some of us. Following our Thanksgiving feast, Miss What upgraded from vegetarian to vegan, and a number of the women guests swore off turkey altogether, which just meant more leftovers for us guys to munch on while swapping shop talk.
A graphic designer, Michael Mahan cooks and occasionally writes in Bowdoinham.