Quick, but still tasty

Hello, there, my long-neglected blog. I promise to try to get back into the swing of things here, and to start that off here’s a quick tip on pie crust that only just occurred to me to try last night but turned out quite successfully:

Pretty, I think, if a bit rustic.

Instead of trying to do something pretty and decorative with the edging (and wasting a lot of delicious crust in the process!), I just grabbed both layers and folded them up like a galette. Fast, easy, and delicious!

Rememberance

I just finished my Intolerable Cruelty skirt, and I love the way it turned out. Except…there are a few rows near the end which are worked at a much — visibly — looser tension than the rest of the skirt. This is unusual for me. I have incredibly steady gauge. I can switch from flat to round to DPNs, from picking to throwing, from wooden needles to aluminum, working while calm/excited/angry/tired, all with barely a stutter. On the rare occasions when I have gone off tension, I have immediately ripped back and reknit. This time, though, I know why those stitches are off…those rows were knitted during my last visit with my father…as I sat with my stepmother at the hospital and we watched him sleep…as we joked and laughed and planned what we would do when he got home…as I avoided watching the nurses do things that made my squeamish stomach roil a little.

I made most of the skirt — all but the first and last few inches — while I was visiting my dad, first back in January and then again just a few weeks ago. It’s mostly stockinette stitch, which was perfect to work on while we chatted and watched TV and read and just enjoyed each other’s company.

I hadn’t seen my dad in a couple of years…travel had gotten so expensive, and the kids were too young to drag across the country, and my stepmom needed to stay local so she could take care of her parents. Then last November I made my annual Veteran’s Day call, and he told me he hadn’t been feeling great and was waiting for some test results. When the results finally came, it was bad: Stage IV pancreatic cancer, which had already spread to his liver. Despite the diagnosis, though, he was optimistic. He was in good health otherwise and his doctor was starting him on an aggressive chemo regimen. I knew my stepmom and stepsisters were there to take care of him, which made me feel somewhat better, but I needed to go see him, too.

I flew down in January, and we spent a great week together. He cooked chili for me, and spaghetti, and took me shopping for boots. He was tired, and thin, but otherwise much as he’d always been, cracking jokes and teasing and full of fun and life and laughter. I hadn’t realized just how much I’d missed spending time with my dad and my stepmom and stepsisters until I was there…when I lived down there, we all got together once or twice a week for a meal and to hang out a bit and always had a great time. Dad and I didn’t talk a lot on the phone after I moved up here — maybe once a month or so, whenever one of us felt the urge to make sure the other was doing okay — and when we did chat, it wasn’t ever for long. We just weren’t great at talking on the phone. I always knew, though — as I had from the time I was a little girl — that if ever I needed anything all I had to do was say so and he would make sure I was taken care of. No matter what I did or how big I screwed up (and believe me, I’ve screwed up pretty big a time or two) I knew my daddy loved me and would do whatever was in his power to help me. Just as importantly, I knew I could count on him to let me do what I felt I needed to do…he was always there, supporting and available, but never imposing.

I’d only been back up here for a couple of weeks when he went into the hospital — he couldn’t stay hydrated (I’ll spare you the details). They had trouble keeping him hydrated in the hospital, too, so I flew back down, just in case. I flew down on a Friday and was scheduled to fly out on Monday, but figured I’d stay if I needed to. He seemed to be improving, though — at one point he’d had a feeding tube (which he’d threatened to pull out and stick up someone’s ass, much to all of our amusement) and nothing at all by mouth, but by the time we left the hospital Sunday night they’d started giving him some solid food again. There had been some other issues, too, with his blood pressure and heart rate and respiration, but those also seemed to be stabilizing and improving.

By the time I got home Monday, things had turned around again and he was getting worse. Tuesday evening he seemed to have stabilized, but then his system just started shutting down. He passed away while I was in the air on my way back down Wednesday morning. My flight down had a connection in Houston, and on the way there, I looked out the window and saw the ring of a rainbow underneath us. It stayed with us for a good 15 minutes, maybe longer, and I thought, “Won’t that be odd, if he’s just passed?” (If you know me, you know I am not a particularly spiritual person, nor given to flights of fancy. So it was odd even that this occurred to me. But there it is.) When we landed, I had a message from my stepsister to call…he had passed at just about the time that rainbow appeared.

Those rows are visible reminders of my last conversations with my daddy. I wish more than anything that he was still here for me to ask advice from and laugh with and enjoy time with…but I’m glad he’s not in pain or discomfort anymore, and I’m so thankful I got to spend time with him, that I got to tell him I loved him, that I was lucky enough to have a wonderful father, that we got to spend some time doing some of our favorite things one last time. I miss him but even though it hurts that he’s gone, I smile when I remember him.

I can’t bear to rip those rows out, so I have left them. The skirt is beautiful, and fits beautifully, and I can almost hear my dad say, “That looks real nice, Laura. You did a good job on that. What’s up with those rows, though? You forget how to knit for a minute there?” in that great way he had of complimenting and teasing and making you laugh at yourself when you were taking yourself too seriously. My dad was a great guy, and a good man, and the best daddy a girl ever had.

If you want to read more about my dad, his obituary is online here. There will be pictures of the skirt on another day.

Freebird. Free bird. Whatever.

Amongst my shortcomings — and there are many — is this: I am truly, truly terrible at keeping in touch with people. I make friends, I enjoy spending time with them, and then I change jobs or move or change my schedule or start having panic attacks and not leaving the house or whatever and I never see them again. I’m just really bad about picking up the phone, or writing an email, or texting, or whathaveyou. But now, there’s this magical thing on the interwebbys called “Facebook”.* You may have heard of it. What Facebook has done for me is allowed me to stay in touch, sort of, with all of these people who formerly would have been swept away by the tides of my life changes. I can see what they’re up to, they can see what I’m up to, we can make the occasional pithy comments back and forth, bring funny internet memes to each other’s attention, and so on. And I can see when one of them is doing something really cool, like my friend Duane Romanell, a very talented artist who I used to work with at Tutor.com.

When he launched his photography page, I went and flipped through the albums, which pretty much just confirmed that Duane is indeed a very talented artist — they’re gorgeous. You should go look. G’head. I’ll wait. There was one photo that I kept coming back to in the “By the Sea” album: a solitary seagull in an empty sky. It was one of those photographs that just touched something inside me. So when he had a little “like me on the Facebooks and I’ll enter you into a drawing for a print” contest and then drew my name(!!!), it was a no-brainer which photo I’d choose.

So I got the print and then needed The Perfect Frame, of course. I ended up finding one at a flea market, but apparently have absolutely zero concept of size, because it was way, way too big. It was only $5, so not like it would have been a huge waste of cash, and I could’ve just framed something else in it, but then I had An Idea™. I had a bag full of seashells and chunks of driftwood, and decided to plop my lovely photo onto some mat board (not under — I learned way back in art school that I hate cutting mat board with a fiery passion and also suck pretty hard at it), slap a quote under it, and decorate around it. I absolutely love how it came out:

No, the photo doesn't really have a big flash over the bird or a giant "C" on it -- the photo is Duane's intellectual property and you should head over to his site if you want to see it. This is just a picture of what I did with it.

 

I put the new mat behind the mats that came with the frame. They were kind of gungy and scratched up, so I used the shells and driftwood to strategically cover the gunge. I just laid everything out, then hot-glued it on. I believe, incidentally, that this is my first successful hot glue project. Usually the stuff I hot glue just falls right apart, but this seems to be holding fine. The quote is this: “Love and desire are the spirit’s wings to great deeds.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

*Yes, I’m aware that the period is supposed to go inside the quotes according to the rules of American punctuation. I think that’s a stupid rule, so I’ve decided to punctuate like a Canadian/Brit. 

Baking cakes ain’t like dusting crops, boy!

I’m working on a new recipe to give you next week (I’m in the testing stage, because I overcooked it while I was writing it down the first time. Oops.) so this week’s Tasty Tuesday is a rerun.

Originally published April 25, 2010 on  the A Frayed Knot Knits blog:

Somehow, my daughter Becky has become a huge Star Wars fan. I know, right, how could this possibly have happened? She has recently:

- cried when watching Darth Vader’s body burned on a pyre at the end of Jedi
- told me that I shouldn’t be watching Fanboys because “We don’t watch other Star Wars movies! Only Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi!“
- declared that she wants Darth Vader to be her father instead of Luke’s because “Luke is a bad boy and doesn’t deserve him.”
- announced that she wants to be Han Solo when she grows up
- requested demanded a Millennium Falcon cake for her birthday, with Han Solo, Darth Vader, Chewbacca, and Princess Leia, but not Luke, “because Luke is too whiny.” Because I’m a sucker for the Millennium Falcon, and a challenge, and my little girl, I said, “Sure! How hard can it be?” And then I found out:

The party was Saturday at 4pm. Giant props to Kit for handling every detail of the party, from scheduling the space (Build-A-Bear) to taking care of the invites to greeting the parents and filming the party, leaving me free to concentrate fully on the cake.

I had originally thought to do gum-paste figures, but the tiny little sane part of my brain said, “Hey, dummy — they make perfectly good action figures, and then the kid will have a bonus birthday present, too!” So I went out and got everything but a Leia (because the Toys’R'Us I was at didn’t have one, but she was not terribly missed, so it’s okay). I had already ordered the most awesomest birthday candle EVAH for her: Darth Vader holding as his lightsaber a red candle.

After some hemming and hawing, Becky settled on both chocolate and vanilla for the actual cake. I do not particularly enjoy actually baking cakes, which means I don’t do it often enough to get really good at it, which means I bought mixes. My mom’s in town (hi, Mom!) and she helped me get the mixes all, well, mixed and into the oven. One large (13×9) chocolate rectangle for the bottom, and two 9″ vanilla circles for the top + accessories. They came out fine, and we were ready to carve them Friday.

Now that I think about it, perhaps “ready” isn’t the right word…I wasn’t quite prepared for the reality of carving cake, and got pretty frustrated, especially with the cockpit. I finally ended up with something I thought would work, but it was clearly unstable and would need to be attached just prior to putting the fondant on, which I had planned for Saturday morning. Here’s what it looked like Friday night when I was done:

Bright and early Saturday, Kit took the kids for a walk, and I started putting it together and getting it ready for frosting. I had done the carving on a board, but wanted to transfer it to the actual presentation board before frosting. This necessitated planning the layout, so we opened up all the action figures and the candle, which promptly broke at the ankles. All attempts to repair it failed, and actually broke the base even further. Lacking the time to panic, I decided to just set it aside and deal with it later.

We decided where the ship should be on the board, and I commenced frosting it (in case you’ve never worked with fondant before, you put a thin layer of regular frosting on to “glue” the fondant). This meant it was time to attach the cockpit, which promptly disintegrated. You can see in the picture above that I had originally carved the cockpit piece out of the vanilla cake, and as it turns out, the chocolate cake holds together a little better. So I quickly re-carved it out of a piece of chocolate cake that was in my big bowl o’ cake scraps, and skewered it on. And then the bottom fell off, and I panicked.

While part of my brain was panicking, the other part was applying frosting and considering the situation. I finally came to the conclusion that the solution was to cheat. So I went upstairs and got some styrofoam and carved my third cockpit. This one didn’t fall apart, and I moved on to the actually fondanting.

There were a couple of tricky things about applying the fondant, mostly because the shape has a lot of nooks and crannys and this is only the second time I’ve ever used fondant, so I’m not particularly well-versed in manupulating it. But I got it on the cake with no real problems, and despite some cutting errors and a little bunching on the back, I thought it looked pretty good. It was, at the very least, the right shape:

Oh! Before I did the big fondanting bit, I decided it would be a good idea to practice a little and remind myself of how the fondant moves and acts. So I built the sensor dish, which ended up being my favorite part of the cake:

Now that I had the fondant on, it was time for the decorating. I cut out the dots that are a recognizable part of the top of the MF, with the plan of spray painting them with the black frosting I’d purchased for the dual purposes of painting said dots and also dirtying up the finished ship. It turns out that the “black” spray frosting is really more of a “light silver gray,” even after several applications. So it was off to Michael’s for emergency black frosting coloring…and where I found food-safe markers, including black. Win!

Back home, I set Mom to the task of coloring the dots, while I began applying the details with white piping. Then I changed my mind and decided most of the lines should be scored, with a very few details sticking up. So I scraped it down and started over, and let the sane part of my brain convince the panicky part that we had plenty of time as long as we didn’t get too carried away. Applying the blue of the engines to the back was considerably less stressful than I had thought it was going to be, and it improved the lines of the back of the cake quite a lot.

Now, Becky had specifically requested that we included the red/rust detailing — it’s on the real thing, and it’s on one of her toys but not the other — so I used the red marker to color that in, and then went back and piped in a few details here and there, using her two MF toys for reference (incidentally, I highly recommend having a 3D model on hand when doing something like this — much better than trying to find pictures with the right angles on the internet). I redid the cockpit a couple of times, and never was quite happy with it, but finally I had to declare it finished. I took it outside and gave it a quick spritzing with the “black” spray frosting, just to scunge it up a little.

I have to say, I was pretty pleased with the end result. It’s not the best looking Millennium Falcon cake I’ve ever seen, but I think I did a pretty good job for someone who doesn’t really decorate cakes:

I was a little annoyed about only having the foil for it to sit on, but then I had an idea while I was in the shower (yes, I finished in enough time that I was able to shower and even iron my skirt before we had to leave for the party!)…on the way I grabbed a couple bags of brown sugar and when we set the cake up, I think it looked a lot like it was parked on the sands at Mos Eisley:

And look! I solved the Darth Vader problem and the gun turret problem (at some point I realized that I should have guns up there and I wasn’t sure what the hell I was going to do) in one fell swoop! Yay me!

Next time, I’m going to make someone else cut the cake — it was a lot harder than I expected it to be. It took about 5 minutes to go from the above to this, and I really felt like I needed a good lie-down afterwards:

(Incidentally, when you stack cakes on top of one another, don’t forget to put a layer of frosting in there — you’ll thank yourself when it’s time to serve.)

I have to give tremendous thanks to Kit and Grandma Tedi for all their help and encouragement and keeping the kids out of the kitchen/dining room/my way. And especially thank you to Becky, who told me at every stage how awesome her Millennium Falcon cake looked, and made me remember why I was doing this even when I was so frustrated with the cockpit that I was seriously considering sending Kit to the A&P for a plain old sheet cake. Love you all!

Fighting the Common Cold*

Pattern: Vitamin C by Ruth Garcia-Alcantud (aka @rockandpurl) Yarn: Lion Brand Wool-Ease Chunky in Pumpkin

Back in November, this totally gorgeous pattern came across my Twitters. Since I was headed up to a friend’s house that very weekend for a stitch’n'bitch, I grabbed the pattern and some yarn and started when I got to the s’n'b. This pattern is definitely going to get made again…it’s got a ton of variety in the stitches, but each row is consistent and simple enough that you can work around while paying minimal attention to the actual stitches you’re making. The combination of variety and simplicity is absolutely perfect for a project to work on while hanging out and chatting with friends, or sitting in waiting rooms, or really, just about anything. Best of all, if you’re a bit distracted like I’ve been for the past few months, you can miss a couple rows and still end up with a great looking final project!

Get your own copy of the pattern here! And while you’re there, check out the rest of Ruth’s patterns and read some of her blogs…as I mentioned on Twitter the other day, she’s totally my knitter-crush.

Becky wanted in on the photoshoot.

*See, this would be really funny if we’d been having a cold winter. 

Found It on the Internet Friday #12

A quickie, because it is late and I am tired (and it’s actually Saturday and I still need to take pics so it’s going to be even later on Saturday by the time this gets posted and as it turns out that was last week and I never did take the damn picture so here it finally is yeah, I typed that before I took the picture and then never did…seriously it’s been like a month now but I really did finally take the picture). A couple of weeks before Christmas, I came across this great post on Pinterest about making snowflakes (which is awfully fun anyhow) out of junk mail. I get about a bajillion catalogs every week, especially at this time of year, so I decided to use those. The kids absolutely loved it. In fact, a couple of times Becky asked if we could cut out snowflakes instead of watching TV.  (!!! Yes, yes we can.) They’re both still pretty young and not that confident in their cutting skills, but here’s what we ended up with:

There is a giant grocery bag full of these. The kids cut them faster than I could fold the pages for them. They're still asking to make snowflakes these days, too, and starting to do more recognizable shape cutouts, which is very cool to watch.

The Big D

I’m in Dallas for the week, so the bloggy blog is pretty much hiatused. I had intended to set up a bunch of posts to be pre-scheduled to go up while I was away, but decided to get my submission for next year’s Jane Austen Knits ready to go early instead so I don’t have to panic about it when I get back. Look at me being all adult and stuff.

Speaking of submitting to magazines, there was a post from Rock’n'Purl’s blog last week (I will try to find it and link it but I’m writing this on my phone so we’ll see Hey! Lookee! I did it!) that made me realize that my litmus test for whether something is good enough to submit is whether I would be comfortable self-publishing it. I like to think this is a pretty high standard, and also, this means there are probably going to start being some more stand alone patterns available directly from me (and one of my goals for the next couple of seems is to get the patterned I already have available linked up here so y’all can get to them a little easier).

There may be another post or two from me this week, since I found this handy-dandy phone app, but mostly I’m just going to be hanging out and enjoying some quality time with my daddy.

We Have No Banana Today

It's so good I failed to take a picture until we'd already eaten most of it. I was busy stuffing my face.

Even Wikipedia doesn’t know why it’s called Monkey Bread. It’s not made of monkeys and doesn’t contain bananas or anything else monkey-related, but it’s definitely delicious. Also, it’s kinda fun to make and totally fun to eat. I used to not make it often, because it’s a yeast dough so it takes a couple hours to make the dough and then another hour or so to prep and bake the bread. And it’s really best fresh out of the oven. So it’s really not particularly convenient to have for breakfast, though it’ll do for second breakfast or elevenses, if you get up early enough. I discovered a few years ago, though, that you can actually bake it the day before, leave it in the pan, then heat it back up for 10 minutes or so (long enough to make the sugar gooey again) in the morning. Everybody wins! Except for the monkeys, because I’m not sharing.

Recipe

(adapted from AllRecipes.com)

Ingredients:

• 2 1/2 tsp active dry yeast
• 3 c all-purpose flour
• 1-2 tsp ground cinnamon, to taste
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/4 c white sugar
• 2 Tbsp butter, softened
• 1 c water
• 1/2 c butter
• 1 c packed brown sugar

Set bread machine to Dough. Put yeast, flour, cinnamon, salt, sugar, butter, and water in machine in the order recommended by the manufacturer. When dough is complete, turn out onto well-floured board and knead 10-20 times.

Preheat oven to 375°F. Butter bundt pan. In a small saucepan, melt together butter and brown sugar. Cut dough into 1″ cubes. Dredge cubes in butter/sugar mixture (Yes, it’s hot. Be careful.) and drop evenly into prepared bundt pan. Bake at  375°F for 20-25 minutes (until golden brown).

To serve immediately, place a plate over the top of the pan and invert them together. You may need to give the bottom of the pan a thump after you’ve got them flipped.

To serve the next morning, leave in pan and reheat at 375°F for 10-15 minutes (until butter/sugar mixture is gooey again). Serve as directed above.

Found It on the Internet Friday #11

Look at my pretty fairy lights!

They make me so happy!

I came across this on Pinterest and decided it would be a great project to do with the kids. I was not wrong. They did all the painting, and I did the cutting and hole-poking. One tip: paint first, cut the egg cartons apart later, especially if you’re working with small children. These were super easy and now I want them all over my house.

I gave the kids free rein with the colors -- no two are alike.

 

Some of them are even sparkly!

It Finally Happened

This is one of those posts I mentioned that’s been hanging around for awhile, just waiting to be finished. Here it is, finally, and you can look forward to a recipe (mostly) every Tuesday as part of a new feature called “Tasty Tuesdays”. I haven’t forgotten about Found It on the Internet Fridays — I’ve just gotten behind on taking pictures, but it will be coming back this week as well.

I have been wanting to make a turducken for years, and been wanting to eat one for even longer than that. This year was finally The Year of the Turbaducken (the “ba” is for “bacon”, obviously).

So much nom. Not shown: cranberry sauce, because I like it out of a can as opposed to homemade. Though it occurs to me that I would be just as happy with homemade raspberry jam, like with a Monte Cristo, so I might do that next time.

Let’s start with the easy/boring stuff: the green salad is just a bag of Romaine mixed with a bag of “spring greens” and topped with some grape tomatoes. I buy bagged salad because I hate making salad, and if I have to make it myself, it won’t get done. And really, I should eat more salad since it’s one of the few ways I actually like veggies. The bread sticks were easy but blah — I shan’t be making them again.

Now on to the good stuff (recipes below): first up, let’s talk about the Mustard Glazed Green Beans and Potatoes.

Seriously, are those not the cutest little potatoes you ever saw?

I had this idea just last week to toss some beans and potatoes with butter and mustard, and it is the easiest, most deliciously appetizing way I’ve ever had green beans. Even Becky agrees that they are not the most inedible vegetable she has ever tried, which from her is high praise indeed. Trader Joe’s sells these wee little potatoes that work perfectly in this recipe, but you could use fingerlings or new potatoes as well — if you use larger potatoes, you might want to cut them into 1″-ish chunks before serving.

Next, the Mac’n'Cheese.

Yes, those are penne noodles. I forgot to get elbow mac at the store and sure as hell wasn't going Wednesday night when I remembered I needed them.

It’s a no-bake, which makes it a great recipe for a big dinner like this — anything you can put together on the stovetop makes it a little easier to coordinate things. When I got my first apartment, my Aunt Valda gave me one of my very first cookbooks: Best Recipes, which is a collection of label recipes. I made either Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner (it’s been more years than I care to say so memory’s a bit foggy there) in that apartment for myself and my boyfriend that year, almost entirely out of that cookbook. There were cornish game hens, stuffing, rolls, two types of pie, and this mac’n'cheese, which was really the only keeper in the bunch. It’s also how I learned to make a roux, long before I knew what a roux was. To this day, following the instructions given in this recipe is the only way I can successfully make a roux.

I'll admit, there's a lot more "pie" than "sweet potato" to these.

The Sweet Potato Pie was always on the table of the Thanksgivings of my childhood, courtesy of the aforementioned Aunt Valda. I’ve simplified the recipe a tad (and actually screwed it up this year, due to an epic inability to count to three), but it’s still the same rich delicious dish it’s always been.

The stuffing was one I found online…I needed a stuffing for the turducken, and I thought a cornbread stuffing would hold up best to a couple of hours of having meat juices soaking into it. I decided to add sausage to the stuffing because, well, I like sausage in my stuffing. I went with plain ol’ breakfast sausage patties instead of the more traditional Italian sausage because again, I like the one better than the other. I ended up with a bunch left over after putting the turbaducken together, so I decided to serve the extra as a “dry” stuffing on the side. Delish.

So yummy, both in and out of the bird(s).

A couple of quick notes on the recipe itself: the cornbread you will get out of this recipe is blah, so don’t get excited about using just that part of the recipe. The version below has my modifications; the original recipe calls for a bunch of veggies, which I left out, and I only ended up using maybe half of the broth called for. Definitely pay more attention to the moistness of your dish than the measurements called for in the recipe.

Finally, the pièce de résistance: The Mighty Mighty Turbaducken!

Aw, yeah.

A couple years ago I had this genius thought: what if I made a turducken only with just breasts, thus avoiding the whole poultry boning issue. (I boned a chicken once, because I figured I should know how. Now I know how, and I also know I’d like to avoid doing it again if possible.)  It turns out I am not the only person to have had this genius thought: there are quite a few recipes out there, which worked out well for me, as I was able to gather some ideas about how long and at what temp I should cook it (as for the temp you should cook it to, it’s the same as any other poultry: internal temp of 165°F, taken at the thickest point, which in this case is dead center).

I had also heard tell of people replacing the traditional stuffing between birds with bacon. Now, we all know I dig on bacon, but I figured why replace when you can add? Also, a lot of the breast-only turduckens had bacon just on the outside. In fact, the main recipe I referenced for construction/cook time suggested that after cooking, you should remove the bacon layer before serving (emphasis mine). What the –? Are these people insane?!?! I decided to go ahead with my breast-only plan, putting both bacon and stuffing between each layer, and wrapping the whole thing up with a bacon lattice.

Look! Weaving *and* bacon. Maybe next year I should knit it.

Issues I encountered: I spent A Good Long While(tm) searching for a duck breast (I was originally going to do this as a birthday present for myself. My birthday is in February. You do the math.) with no luck. Finally, I could wait no longer and decided to just buy a damn duck and filet the breasts off. I got two nice size filets that way, but even together they were much smaller than the mutant chicken breast I had.

The duck is in the upper right hand corner (two breasts); the chicken is at the bottom right (a single breast). The turkey has been flattened and rolled up in this photo.

So I had to switch up the order a little there, but since it all gets rolled up like a jelly roll (in theory; keep reading), it’s really 6 of one, half a dozen of the other.  Also, the turkey I got was a “breast roast”. This apparently means large bits of it are dark meat, which I actually didn’t mind. What I did mind was that the whole thing was so lacerated by the string net they put around it to hold the different bits of meat together that it was practically falling apart.

See the scoring the arrow's pointing to (click to embiggen)? The whole damn turkey "breast roast" was like that.

This caused most of the lack of structural integrity you see in the final picture.  I will absolutely be doing this again, but I think next time I’ll consult with an actual butcher and see if I can get a whole turkey breast…or I could just filet it like I did the duck.

The biggest problem I had was that I couldn’t actually “roll” the whole thing once I got it together, in spite of having pounded all of the breasts to a 1/2″ thickness as directed. I just barely got it to fold in half.

I stuck some skewers into it to hold it together while I contemplated what to do next.

But I slapped some more bacon on it and maneuvered it onto the parchment, at which point I was able to roll that around the whole thing and hold it together.

"What to do next" = "more bacon" of course.

After that, I rolled it up in some foil, slapped it in a pan and threw it in the oven for a few hours (deets in the recipe).

Least exciting turbaducken pic EVAH.

Once it was within about five degrees of done, I ripped open the parchment/foil and let the bacon crisp up for half an hour or so (which was long enough to come all the way up to temp).

I cannot even begin to describe how delectable this smelled.

I let it rest for 20 minutes (It wasn’t long enough. Give it a little more time, hard as it is. Trust me.), then sliced me off a piece. And then I had a mouthgasm. Because O. M. G. So. Freaking. Good.

Turducken

(Based on the instructions here and here)

Ingredients:

• 1 Turkey breast
• 1 Duck breast
• 1 Chicken breast
• 2-3 lbs bacon
• 1-2 c Cornbread-sausage stuffing (see recipe, below)

Pre-heat oven to 350°. Line a 9×13 baking pan with foil, then parchment, leaving enough of both hanging over the sides to completely cover your meat. Pound breasts to 1/2″ thick (each, not total). On top of a piece of plastic wrap, make a lattice from strips of bacon (see above). Lay turkey breast on top of lattice. Cover with a thin layer of stuffing, then a layer of bacon strips (you do not need to lattice the interior bacon layers). Repeat layering with duck/stuffing/bacon, then chicken/stuffing/bacon (NB: I had a huge chicken breast and a relatively small duck breast, so I reversed this order. It’s okay to use common sense here.). Roll/fold everything up as tightly as possible: this is why I built my original lattice on plastic wrap — it’s a lot easier to maneuver everything into position when you have that outer layer that cover everything and keeps it in place. If necessary, add more bacon to cover exposed meat/stuffing. Skewer as needed for stability. Move into prepared pan and remove skewers. Close foil and paper, making sure turbaducken is completely enclosed. Bake for 1 1/2- 3 hours, until internal temperature reached 160°. Open foil/paper and bake for another 30-45 minutes or until internal temperature reaches 165°. Let rest for 30-40 minutes. Slice and serve.

Cornbread-Sausage Stuffing

(adapted from Allrecipes.com Cornbread Stuffing Southern Style)

Ingredients:

• 2 (8.5 ounce) packages dry corn muffin mix
• 1 (8 ounce) can cream-style corn
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1/2 c plain yogurt
• 1/4 c milk
• 8-10 sausage patties
• 1/2 c butter, melted
• 1 – 3 c chicken broth

Pre-heat oven to 400°. Grease a 9×13 baking pan. Combine muffin mix, corn, eggs, yogurt, and milk; stir just enough to moisten. Pour batter into prepared pan(s). Bake for 20 minutes or until lightly brown. While the cornbread is baking, brown and crumble the sausage patties. After cornbread cools, crumble it into a large bowl. Add sausage and butter, mix thoroughly. Add broth slowly, stopping when you have reached the desired texture. (NB: For layering in turducken, you want the stuffing to be pretty moist.)

At-Ease Macaroni & Cheese

(from Best Recipes)

Ingredients:

• 2 Tbsp butter
• 2 Tbsp flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 c milk
• 1 1/2 c shredded extra sharp cheddar
• 8 oz sour cream
• 2 c cooked macaroni (1 c uncooked)

In medium saucepan, melt butter. Blend flour and salt into butter. Stir in milk, then cheese. Continue to cook over medium heat, stirring gently, until thick and smooth. Stir in sour cream and combine thoroughly. Add macaroni, toss until completely coated and heated through.

Mustard Glazed Green Beans and Baby Potatoes

Ingredients:

• 1 pt snap beans
• 1 pt wee little potatoes (you can use new potatoes or fingerlings, but you should cut them into 1″ chunks before tossing)
• 1/4 c butter
• 2 Tbsp honey mustard

Bring 2 2qt saucepans of water to a boil. Cook potatoes in one for 7 minutes until fork tender

Sweet Potato Pie

Ingredients:

 Er, I seem to have misplaced my only copy of this recipe, but I promise I’ll find it (or get it from Aunt Valda or my mom again) and post it up soon. But this has been hanging around too long and needs to be published already.