Some Thanksgiving cooking advice

According to the great chefs no one has ever heard of and who probably don’t exist, there are many ways to cook a turkey – bake, smoke, fry being but a few of these many ways.

The problem always is deciding when the turkey is done. According to medical authorities who assured us in the early 1980s that cocaine was not addictive, undercooked turkey can result in people who even look at the turkey contracting horrific and disfiguring diseases like Reboobican and Damnocrat. If you actually eat undercooked turkey, Heavens!, you might come down with an even worse illness, your friends will abandon you, your hair will fall out, you’ll be reduced to driving a Yugo and you will support nationalized health care.

Talk about scary. Makes me want eat nothing but bacon. 

I wonder why turkeys don’t develop these deadly diseases. After all these large fowls are walking around completely raw carrying dreaded disease and illness that can lay even the most healthy person lower than a member of Congress. Maybe we need to spend some money looking at turkey immune systems. We might even come up with a cure for Swine Flu, cause the pigs aren’t being much help.

But I digress. The subject is cooking turkey and how to tell if it is done.

The obvious and easiest way to tell if a turkey is done is to feed it to someone you do not like and wait a day. If the person does not get sick, the turkey was either done, not laced with deadly bacteria or the person you don’t like has turkey genes and is immune to the diseases. The drawback to this plan is you have fed someone you don’t like and you have to wait a day to find out if the turkey is safe. Plus, there’s a one-in-three chance the turkey is not safe because the person is immune.

Another way that finds much favor among people who really shouldn’t be allowed to cook is, cut the turkey open and see if it is done. I mean, ANYONE can cut open to the turkey to see if it is done. Pfft. Real cooks disdain this method. Real cooks prefer doing things the right way. Examine the turkey. Is the skin a golden brown like a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model? Is the bird wearing about as much clothes as a swimsuit model? Grab a leg and twist it. If the turkey squawks, it is not done and is probably still alive in which case you should call a Swimsuit Model and have a Thanksgiving Swimwear photo shoot. You can prod, poke and jab the turkey with all manner of implements like thermometers, forks, knives, chain saws, politicians and small children to see if the meat is fully cooked.

You may have heard you can stuff popcorn in a turkey’s body cavity. Bake the bird. When the popcorn pops and blows the butt off the bird, it is done. Turkey cooking experts tell me this is not true. Exactly what part is not true I do not know, but it certainly sounds reasonable to me. 

I would make sure the bird is pointed in a safe direction in case the popcorn acts like rocket fuel and launches the bird.

You may think I speak here from personal experience. 

I am not. I do not know if the popcorn will generate sufficient thrust to turn the otherwise nearly flightless bird into a sky-swooping dynamo.

I can tell you that stuffing popcorn in a bird and frying it will not make the bird fly.

The butt will explode off. Popcorn will fly into space training streamers of ultra hot peanut oil which will catch fire on the flames from the fish cooker and create a fireworks display that rivals any backyard show on the 4th of July.

Just sayin’.