of turkey and trepidation
well, yesterday was really thanksgiving, and i wanted to write this then, but work (a.k.a. "the opressor") has been "keeping me down" quite a lot lately. i'll get to that later.
so, right. i obviously didn't do anything for thanksgiving yesterday. but what i did do (don't ask me why) was to prepare a feast for 31 people (count 'em!) on sunday. in my [not-so] old age and [lack of] wisdom, i am finally beginning to glimpse bits and pieces of the true meaning of the word "harrowing."
friday, some people came over (ildar, markus, sara, sabine, olga) and we make 4 pies and ate one. saturday i picked up the turkey from the butcher (180 francs for ~11 kilos) and bought massive amounts of lots of things at the grocery store. around 10pm on saturday evening, i realized how much there was still left to do, and basically worked through until 4:45am at which point i took a brief nap until 6:00am, when i started trying to organize everything into bags to be transported. nikolaus picked me up at 8:30, and we went to meet the guy at the refuge and get the keys at 9:00am.
now, it would appear as though my communication skills, well, decidedly suck. i was sure i had been clear---on several occasions---that people were supposed to show up around noon, and then we'd have a nice afternoon, and eat around 4:00 or 5:00ish. i was also pretty sure that at least a couple people had told me that they were going to come in the morning to help out. reality: pierre was the first one to show up, at 12:30. enno and thomas came shortly before 3:00. and everybody else showed up sometime between 3:45 and 5:00. score: swiss time 1, chris 0.
that left me there on my own for the morning, peeling three kilograms of chestnuts (they're tasty, but i'm never doing that many of them ever again) for the stuffing, and getting the bird into the oven. oh, right, the bird. well, so i unwrapped it and rinsed it, like you're supposed to, and went looking for the neck and the giblets and all the other gross stuff you just throw away. but i couldn't find them. i guess the butcher was nice enough to dispose of them for me, which while thoughtful, didn't really make up for the oversight of his having left several other things in the body cavity... what i'm pretty sure were two kidneys, a liver, and several other organs i decided not to try to identify if i wanted to be able to make it through this without completely freaking out. therefore, with nothing but the sheer force of will brought on by the impending threat of failure and embarassment in front of my gargantuan guest list, i managed to remove them (from the premesis) and get on with it.
i stuffed the bird. i put it into a very large tinfoil pan on a cookie sheet, with a tent of tinfoil over the top (since i don't have a roasting pan). i then went to look at the oven, which, of course, was inexplicably marked with the numbers 1-4, instead of any useful temperatures. i picked three at random, and then attempted to load my makeshift roasting pan into it. this lasted all of about 6.73 seconds before the weight of my monster turkey (by swiss standards; it was really only ~24lbs) managed to bow the cookie sheet enough that it fell out of the channels on the sides of the oven and came crashing down to rest on the bottom. several subsequent efforts ended similarly. i let it be, and resigned myself to the fact that the bottom was probably going to be burnt, because there was nothing else i could do.
the turkey finally in the oven, i switched to other preparations (the extra stuffing, vegetables, side dishes, etc), and eventually people started trickling in, as described above. i put some of them to work, and sent most of them on a walk over to the big wooden tower (doug will remember it, as we went there when he came to visit me). so many things were happening that not even i'm all that sure of the details anymore...
at some point later, i checked on the turkey (using the meat thermometer, so as not to kill us all), and was shocked to find that it was actually cooking much faster than i had anticipated. even if the internal temperature was correct, i didn't feel comfortable shorting the scheduled cooking time by 2 whole hours, so i split the difference and left it for another 50-60 minutes. but when it came out, man, i'm still basically speechless just thinking about it. the bottom hadn't burned after all, and what's more, even though i only basted it once, and with a spoon, since i don't have one of those syringe thingys, this thing was **moist.** i mean, we're talking it looked **wet** when you cut into it. those of you who know me know that i hate tooting my own horn, and so therefore it must have been really impressive for me to say that this was seriously the best turkey i have ever tasted.
everything somehow came together, and we got all the food onto the table and sat down to eat sometime between about 6:00 and 6:20, which wasn't bad, all things considered.
dena's cranberry sauce was fan-freakin-tabulous (i'd never had any before then that wasn't what grandma used to get out of a tin can, which was just plain scary), and walter's potato gratin was pretty amazing as well. and there were so many other contributions that i'm sure i will feel bad for a long time about not remembering specifically.
there was much eating and merrymaking and, of course, eating. then the two sides of the room independantly came to the same conclusion that they wanted to start taking up a collection to help me offset my costs in putting this on (which was around 600 francs or more), and then the boxes met in the middle, which caused some confusion and a fair bit of amusement. in the end, my personal investment was down to around ~150, which is reasonable enough that i might consider doing it again, but we'll see.
and one can't forget dessert; katja made magenbrot (a delicious type of chocolate-covered ginger brownie), and there were other things, and obviously, the pies. sadly, there was a large refrigerator but no freezer, so the ice cream was more like a sauce than anything else, but whatever.
plenty of other fun conversations happened, but i'm getting tired of typing. to summarize, the most impressive part was that i hadn't really realized that apparently i really have been making friends here. i mean, there were 31 people in the room besides me, and i could probably name an equal number that weren't there but that i would have liked to have been. but the week before, if you had asked me to estimate the number of people i knew in switzerland (just "knew," not even "was friends with"), i probably would have guessed like 25. ha. anyway, i thought that was pretty cool. it was also fun to bring together groups of my friends that had previously been mutually disjoint, for whatever reason, so people got to meet other new people and whatnot.
and even though it felt like it was much later, we actually got everything cleaned up and locked up and home by around 11:30, which was amazing.
then, somewhat predictably, i crashed.
