Spatchcock!!!

Above is a picture of a ten-pound turkey which I spatchcocked - by which I mean, I removed the backbone of the bird with a VERY sharp knife and then pounded its sternum vigorously with a rubber mallet until it was a floppy poultry rag-doll. A meat puppet, if you will. The purpose of this spatchcocking (is that not the BEST verb?) is to substantially reduce the roasting time of a big-arse turkey. I will not ruin the suspenseful ending of this multi-part turkey dinner post by telling you whether or not it worked, but can divulge at this point that the spatchcocking itself was breathlessly easy and also made me feel like Sweeney Todd. The floppy turkey was brined in a pot on my back porch for eight hours, nestled in the snow. During that time, I made the gravy and the stuffing, about which more later. When the brining period was over, I disposed of the brine, thinking as I always do while pouring out the liquid in which raw meat has been marinated, "I wonder how much you would have to pay my husband to drink a cup of that?" Which may tell you all you need to know about my qualities as a wife.

Once the brining process was over according to Bridget Lancaster of America's Test Kitchen, for whom I would swim across a lake of fire and whose instructions I gleefully followed throughout this whole shebang, I arranged the turkey as you see above. The posture can be best characterized as legs-crossed-as-if-it-REALLY-has-to-pee. This photo gives a bit of an impression of the masterful feat of three-dimensional tesselation involved in rearranging the contents of our petite refrigerator (affectionately referred to as "the dorm fridge") to accommodate this affair. We had a babysitter that night and when I preemptively showed her the turkey in our fridge by way of warning, she visibly startled like a skittish Preakness contender. So our beleaguered poultry was tucked in for the night in its dark, refrigerated boudoir. To be continued.