the turkey gods hate me!

SnowyShiloh · Nov 22, 2007

Let me preface this by saying that I HATE raw meat. I'm not phobic about it, but nearly. When I'm preparing meat, I practically have a surgical field set up and use rubber gloves and lots of disinfectant (and multiple types of it) to clean up. Oh, the germs. They horrify me.

Now on to the story: We bought an 11 pound frozen turkey on Sunday. I read that you can count on 5 pounds of bird to thaw every day it's in the fridge, so theoretically I only needed to put it in the fridge two days ahead of time. Just to be on the safe side though, I put it right into the fridge, giving the bird a good 4 days to thaw. Yet when I took it out of the fridge this afternoon, it was still definitely still mostly frozen. Oh no! And even more oh no... in spite of being frozen, it managed to LEAK raw turkey juice onto the two shelves below it! I very ignorantly put it to thaw on the top shelf, thinking the impermeable plastic sheathing on Butterball turkeys would keep the juices in, and then put it in two plastic bags (first inspected for holes) just to be safe. It still managed to leak though, and trickled down, down... right into the spout of my perfectly positioned pitcher of iced tea. I now have a pitcher of raw turkey juice and solidified fat iced tea. It actually formed layers in the pitcher. Oh my God. It also got all over a bunch of other stuff in the fridge, and I just doffed my HazMat suit after spending an hour disinfecting everything. Okay, I'm kidding about the suit part, and thank goodness it's all cleaned up.

I still have a big frozen turkey, even after running it under hot water for 45 minutes, my boyfriend suggested we just cook it tomorrow. Right now we're trying to figure out exactly what we'll be doing tonight! In any case, at least now I have a story to tell :biggrin2:

okiron · Nov 23, 2007

Hahahahahaha xD Turkey tea!!! That I wanted to see.

Brandy456 · Nov 24, 2007

What did you do for turkey day instead?.

If that would of happend to me I would have called KFC or Swiss Chalet (sp).

Id be like 'Ill tade you a 11 pound butterball turkey for some schicken or something'. LOL

tundrakatiebean · Nov 24, 2007

SnowyShiloh wrote:

I still have a big frozen turkey, even after running it under hot water for 45 minutes, my boyfriend suggested we just cook it tomorrow.

Just for future reference Shiloh, when thawing something you really shouldn't use hot water, it spoils the outside of the meat without getting to the center of the meat...

SnowyShiloh · Nov 24, 2007

Hey guys! Well, we had a great Thanksgiving anyway. Right as the turkey problem was unfolding, a friend who we thought was going to be out of town called and asked if we had any plans and invited us over. We brought the pumpkin cream pie I had made, a bottle of Martinelli's and 2 6 bottles of Alaska Amber beer. They had about 12 other people over and an incredibly huge amount of food, my goodness. It was all delicious and a lot of fun! They had the new Rock Band game and their friends had all brought their dogs over and they have a foozball table and stuff. It was nice having fun with other people on T day. It seemed like everyone we knew evacuated town for Thanksgiving so it was going to be just the two of us.

So, after stuffing ourselves there, the day after Thanksgiving, we had Thanksgiving again! The turkey was thawed, so I got it all ready and popped it in the oven. Paul made cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes with lots of help from me (he knows next to nothing about cooking and it's very cute to see him proud of himself when he helps make something LOL) and I made green bean casserole, sweet potatoes (the recipe from a member here), mac and cheese and stuffing (reheated from the day before as it cooked in the crockpot for 8 hours and was started before the turkey thing). It was all very yummy and the turkey was great, Paul said it was the best turkey he'd ever had and I agree that it was very moist and had great flavor. We also went out shopping in the afternoon and looked at Christmas stuff. All in all, it was a wonderful day spent with my boy and our pets. And now we have lots of leftovers! I'm picky about meat, and when I picked apart the turkey carcass, I collected about a cup of meat that was too weird for me to eat but the ratties would love. They indeed did love getting a little piece each, as well as stuffing and carrots. I'm sure they would be happy to know they have an entire sandwich bag of turkey in the fridge just for them!

Katie, thanks for your concern! I know about the not using hot water thing, you're supposed to put the turkey in a big bucket and fill it with cold water, changing the water every half hour and it should take about 30 minutes per pound to thaw that way. I was wanting to speed things up and was personally standing there with the bird the whole time, and as soon as I gave up after the half hour-45 minutes, I put the turkey in the roasting pan, covered it with foil and put it right back in the fridge. I do agree that letting hot water blast away on it for hours would be a bad and unsafe idea! I don't think what I did hurt though, and it did help thaw it faster. We don't have a bath tub, a plug for our sink or a bucket so we would have had a tough time thawing it in the cold water fashion, plus we wouldn't have been able to start cooking the turkey until like 10 pm.

I hope everyone else had great Thanksgivings!