SOB Turkey & Poisonface

I realize this post is super long, but if you read it, I promise it won't disappoint.
The makings of one GREAT day:

Saturday was one for the books. I'm super allergic to mother nature & for 3 or 4 out of the last 6 winters, I have gotten some manner of poison ivy or other, unspecified contact dermatitis ON MY FACE. You can imagine my dismay when, during a staff meeting on Friday, my face began to itch. I felt around, and had itchy bumps on my left cheek and temple. Shit. I excused myself from the meeting, dug around in the meds cabinet and work, and slathered my face with cortisone. The itching was briefly satiated, but the angry red bumps spread. By Saturday, they were on my eyelid and jaw as well. Not one to panic, I persisted with home remedies of oatmeal, benadryl, cortisone, and caladryl, toughing it out until I could get in to see the doctor and get some steroids today. On Saturday, though, while my face was inflamed, itching and raw...

You see, every year a kind member of the community gives a 20 pound turkey to each of my coworkers and myself. Most of us 20 somethings have never cooked a whole bird before, and have done things like not so accidentally forgotten to pick it up, or given it to our moms for the family dinner. Well, this year I thought I was doing my friends a favor and picked their turkeys up for them. I had them in my trunk and made my 2 friends take theirs out before they left work, because I didn't want turkey thawing all over my car. One of my coworkers went home and crammed the obligation into her tiny fridge to cook when she feels like it. The other forgot his in the trunk of his car. You can imagine his disappointment the next day when we informed him that he must now cook his turkey, and that re-freezing it would be a small disaster.

"Hey," I said, "You can borrow my roasting pan. Or, for that matter, you could come over and cook the turkey at my house so you're not alone in your apartment cooking and eating a bird for hours and hours all alone."
"OK," he said, "that sounds good."
And we made an event of it. 2 other friends came over, and Jenny and Ben were here, too. The bird wasn't quite totally thawed, so the meat handlers did their best and we got the beast into the oven. We seasoned it well with lots of aromatics, herbs, and garlic injected into the meat. Everyone broke and went about their afternoons engaging in solo activities. I opened the Timothy House and waited and waited and waited for my volunteer, who I eventually had to call at home, to arrive.

I got home a little late at 6:30pm and our friends arrived shortly thereafter. Ben took the internal temperature of the bird, and found it to be a tepid 120 degrees. Hmmm... 60 degrees to go. So I made some dip, we talked and played games and I enlisted Jenny, who has prepared multiple birds to check into things, assuming that, since the temperature had risen 100 degrees in 3 hours, it had surely risen another 60 degrees in the last hour and a half. Jenny takes the temp...still not close. Jenny flips the bird over and takes the temp from the other side. It is now 8pm.

"Oh, this is quite raw," she says with big, distressed eyes. "If we want to eat before 11pm, we're going to have to cut it up and cook it some other way."
Everyone frowns. I suggest eating all the side dishes and just letting the turkey cook all night. Ben points to OUR obligation, now thawed and resting in our sink. "But we have to cook ours, too. It won't keep now, and we said we would bring it to church."
By this point, the owner of the raw obligation has joined us in the kitchen. "I'm fine with throwing it away. I was told this was the 'easiest thing I would do today.' I'm fine with throwing it away."
Jenny's eyes grow bigger and more distressed. The oven door rests open, and she is still holding the roasting pan handles with oven mits, contemplating the albatross. "I can't throw away 20 pound of meat. That doesn't happen in my world." Everyone murmurs agreement and I find the sharpest knife we have.

The struggle was epic. As she hacked into the carcass, I brainstormed ways to cook the bird. We settled on braising some on the stove top in BBQ sauce, George Foreman Grilling some, and letting the rest finish baking. After half an hour of hacking and another half hour of cooking, we had meat to eat. We stood around staring at each other, but finally someone stepped up and served themselves some. I took some of the George Foremaned beast, as the BBQ sauce looked too much like blood for me to cope. I cut off a small slice, popped it in my mouth, and it crunched. Oh...oh no...oh, it's a piece of garlic. Man. My first bite of the hot, cooked obligation was 80 percent crunch garlic. It was gross. But I plugged away and finished my supper, as did my friends and husband.

The highlight of the day, by far, was the bananas foster Ben made for desert--way to save the day, babe. After desert, we left the picked carcass cooking and watched The Big Lebowski. Near midnight, as the plot was wrapping up, I remembered the carcass. Ben, who feels the most obligated to follow through with any obligation, ran up to check on it. We all heard laughing. He had tried to pull of a drumstick and the whole femur had fallen off in his hand. "It kind of looks like that bird from Christmas vacation," was his report.

Upon inspection, we discovered that the carcass was, well, not food anymore. Our trash was overfull from some home construction projects earlier in the week, so I asked the owner of the obligation to kindly dispose of it in whatever way he saw fit, provided we had our roasting pan back so we could prepare our obligation, which was still staring at us from the sink. Recalling the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, I half jokingly suggested he heave the cursed albatross into the sea, or, as we call it here, the Hocking river. He laughed, hesitated, then buoyed and left with the bird. I wanted to go along really badly, but didn't want a $500 littering fine. He didn't make it all the way to the river, but settled for a creek that was closer by and much more out of sight. I've protected his anonymity in this post b/c I don't think he's a criminal--desperation will make you do things out of character.

Once the pan was returned, Ben had a mild existential crisis. He contemplated ditching our bird, too, but his deep sense of duty came through and we got our albatross in the oven by 2am. The people at our church said it was delicious. I wouldn't know. I don't like turkey--I choke it down, but in the end, I always think it tastes like dark meat on chicken.