something very wrong

I'm told I'm doing something wrong. I'm messing with the natural order of things. Fucking with the program. It feels good, though, so I'm going to keep doing it.

54. Roast turkey

It's a week before Christmas. I bought a three and a bit kilo free range bird from Coles--not one of the expensive Tasmanian ones, just reasonably priced Hunter Valley one (no idea what the difference between the two variants is, aside from hundreds of kilometres). I'm going to roast it for a sort of, kind of Christmas lunch.

Larousse Gastronomique provides, as always, a basic formula for roasting. You season the meat. Add extra fat (a sage and garlic butter, in my case, as in my local area it's hard to find proper streaky bacon). You roast it for 20 minutes per 450 grams at 160 degrees. The turkey weighs 3.274 kilograms. Maths tells me that I therefore have to roast it for 182.5 minutes: three hours, basically. I'm determined to not let the bird dry out so I'm going to cover it in foil for most of the cooking time. The idea is to roast it all low and slow and gentle like. How sensual.

I know it's boring--I know, goose is more exciting, more truly traditional, and pork is pork--but I associate turkey with Christmas day. My mum, she'd always roast one of those turkey breast rolls. She was afraid to touch a whole bird, figured she'd ruin it, but she was determined to have turkey. The couple of times we went out for Christmas lunch instead, she'd have to order turkey as a main, no matter what else was on the menu. For me, Christmastime means eating turkey and ham for two or three days. Cold. With salad, maybe. My mum's mashed potato.

I'll presumably have some turkey left over after today's lunch so I'll be looking through Larousse Gastronomique for ideas on using it up.

55. Mushrooms cooked in butter

Larousse Gastronomique suggests serving turkey with mushrooms. I like mushrooms so I'll listen to the Good Book on this point. The recipe says to slice some farmed mushrooms and saute them in butter. They are then sexed up with some sauteed onion. I'll throw some garlic in too, I guess.

Sides

The other side dishes are old favourites. I'll be throwing some pearl onions in with the turkey when it has about a hour to go--a bit like the 'a la bonne femme' stuff I've been doing recently). I'll be cooking baby carrots in butter as per something Heston Blumenthal said in In Search of Perfection or Kitchen Chemistry or whatever. And of course I couldn't roast meat without roasting potatoes, too. Lots of them. In glorious, wonderful, lovely duck fat.

Happy birthday, dear Jesus. Happy birthday to you.