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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
7:04am
Up with the sun to prep the turkey for the Thanksgiving Day feast. This year, I told the missus to leave the bird to me. No fussing around in the kitchen this time, sweating over a stove with her arms elbows-deep up a turkey tush. I’m taking care of all the biggies this Thanksgiving — a nicely brined and grilled whole turkey, butternut squash and sage stuffing, and gravy. Dinner’s in twelve hours. Let’s cook.
“Pale, dimply and wrinkled, it looked like an overfed shar pei. Or my grandfather’s bald head. So much for poetry.”
I looked through the kitchen window and saw a slow rolling mist covering the back yard. It was beautiful, conjuring images of majesty and poetry in the early morning light.
Also, it made me have to pee.
After taking care of that, and washing up — food safety first, kids! — I took a look at the turkey thawing in the fridge. Pale, dimply and wrinkled, it looked like an overfed shar pei. Or my grandfather’s bald head. So much for poetry.
7:21am
The brining recipe called for at least two gallons of liquid, in something called a ‘stock pot’ or a clean bucket. I’m afraid I wouldn’t know the first one if it conked me in the giblets. And the second, well… I have sort of a flexible definition of ‘clean’, when push comes to shove. But the only bucket I knew of in the house is used for mopping. Or was, sometime during the Clinton administration. And the mop’s been stuck in the bottom of it ever since.
Barely dawn, and already time for Plan B. Peachy.
7:48am
I managed to get the brine ingredients all prepped and mixed. I had to increase the recipe by a few fold, and ran a little light on the apples and cinnamon sticks, but I think it’ll work out fine, anyway.
My wife shuffled in, bleary-eyed and yawning, just as I was submerging the bird into the liquid.
“Um…”
“Yes, dear?”
“So… why is there a turkey in the bathtub?”
I patiently explained the bit about the ‘stock pot’ and the mop bucket, and assured her that dinner was well under control. She muttered something about needing a shower and ‘better not taste like Tilex’, but she was too sleepy to put up much of a fight. The turkey — that’s the bird, not the missus — thus settled in, I returned to the kitchen.
8:14am
Gravy calls for giblets, which I’m told are some of the little bits you find crammed in your turkeyhole when you bring home a Butterball from the store. The only question is — which little bits? It wasn’t quite gravy-making time yet, but I thought I’d better have a look.
It didn’t help.
I laid the little fleshy bits and raw organs out on the counter, but I had no clue what I was staring at. There were some parts that could have been giblets, I guess. One of the bits might have been a cow wang, too, but I wasn’t about to make that call. I’m pretty sure it was throbbing, though.
The missus told me later it was the neck. She also told me that all the extra parts are called giblets. But by that point, I had the neck in a pair of tongs, looking for a drum of holy water to dip it into.
Maybe we’ll have gravy next year.
9:23am
My wife returns from brushing her teeth to report that the tub turkey is looking ‘a little fuzzy’.
“Fuzzy?”
“Sort of hairy, yes. I’m not about to look any closer… but did you clean the bathtub before you put that thing in there?”
“Hmmm. My kind of ‘clean’, or your kind of ‘clean’?”
She sort of stomped off after that, so I went to check on the turkey. It looked fine to me. Some of what she thought were ‘hairs’ were probably bits of rosemary or apple peel.
And some of the rest were probably hers, anyway. Plus, it’s not like they weren’t clean hairs; they were in the shower, weren’t they?
Jeez. You’d think she was a health inspector or something. It’s not like I knocked her loofah into the tub when I went to check. Not as far as she knows, anyway.
10:15am
I forgot the giblets were still on the kitchen counter. I returned to find the dog chewing something that looked like a gas bladder. Do turkeys have gas bladders? Maybe it was a tentacle. What do I know about turkey anatomy?
3:25pm
Returned from the animal hospital, after the vet assured us that since the dog didn’t manage to eat the raw turkey bit, the risk of salmonella or other food poisoning is relatively low. The vet also claimed that turkeys don’t have gas bladders, or tentacles.
And she was none too impressed with the John Holmes parody I did with the turkey neck. Wife’s response to her was:
“How do you think I feel? He’s cooking for us today.”
The vet gave us a bottle of ipecac as a ‘precaution’. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t meant for the dog.
3:42pm
Time to fire up the grill for the turkey. The mutt’s caper ran us a little off schedule, so I wanted to get the coals running hot as fast as I could. I briefly considered using a touch — just a touch — of gasoline from the lawnmower canister to goose things along. But I thought that might make the bird taste a mite… gamy. So I used the lighter fluid, instead.
Rather a lot of lighter fluid.
Seriously. A lot.
You don’t need eyebrows to cook, right? I’ll pencil something in before the wife even notices they’re gone. No problem.
3:57pm
While the coals were incinerating heating, I gathered the ingredients for the stuffing recipe.
Heh. Butternut squashes are kind of funny-shaped. I never noticed that before.
3:58pm
“Hey honey, look at me! I’m John Holmes!”
*sigh*
4:15pm
I lifted our deliciously brined and now slippery turkey out of the bath, taking care not to drop it on the bathroom floor any more than was absolutely necessary. Which turned out to be three times. On the bright side, that probably shook most of the hairs off.
I left the apples and herbs and peppercorns in the tub for my wife. Because girls like taking baths in smelly stuff like that, right? It’s on all the shampoo commercials.
As I lugged the turkey out to the grill, I became aware of a teensy logistical snag. The turkey weighed about fourteen pounds, with a wingspan of maybe two and a half feet.
The grill was a rusty little Hibachi I picked up in college, and weighed around three pounds — with charcoal — and a radius of maybe sixteen inches. Also, it’s missing a leg, so it wobbles a little. That’s a lot of turkey. And not so very much Hibachi.
Clearly, I was going to have to trim some parts from the bird to fit it on the grill.
4:18pm
The wings snapped right off. That was easy.
But the turkey’s still too big.
4:26pm
Off go the drumsticks. Still too much bird.
4:38pm
Okay, I don’t know the technical term for the bit of the bird I just cut out.
So how about I call it ‘the bit that keeps the turkey from disintegrating into tiny pieces’. Which are now strewn all over the kitchen table. And much of the far wall.
(The missus informed me later that was the ‘sternum’. Huh. Ster-num. Whaddaya know.
I wonder if that’s a ‘giblet’?)
5:11pm
I managed to salvage a hefty chunk of the turkey breast, plus the drumsticks and some fleshy strips of darkish meat that I can’t easily identify. Skin? Feet? Dorsal fins? Whatever.
There’s not a lot of meat left, but at least it finally made it to the grill. And it’s okay, because there are only two of us. Plus, the coals were mostly dead, so if there was any more to grill, we’d be feasting at three in the fricking morning.
Time to start drinking.
5:25pm
The squashes are split, scooped, and baking in the oven. And I managed it completely incident-free.
I’d call that a win. Another drink to celebrate.
5:31pm
The rest of the stuffing ingredients have to be mixed. I don’t think I know where the mixer is. I should probably ask my wife.
Or… I could have another drink and figure it out on my own.
5:42pm
I found the mixer! Yay, me!
Another round, barkeep.
5:51pm
Heeeeey. Lookit them little spinny things go around and around, all fast like that.
I wonder if there oughta be something in the mixing bowl with ’em.
And what smells like squash?
And where’d all the cooking sherry go?
Oh. Right.
Heh.
6:33pm
The missus pulled the charred remains of four butternut squashes from the oven. The other stuffing ingredients were neatly arranged on the counter, next to the abandoned mixer, still stuck on ‘Whip’. Meanwhile, I was busy in the back yard, looking under rocks and trees to try to figure out where all the mist went to.
Who really needs stuffing, anyway? The turkey’s the star of the show, right?
6:53pm
The three-legged Hibachi finally gives out, toppling over and sending the lid, the charcoal, and the turkey tumbling into the yard. The dog took a break from licking the kitchen wall to pounce on a drumstick and drag it off to a safe place to cool and eat. Probably our bed.
The wife and I managed to find two tiny scraps of meat that weren’t crusted with dirt or coal dust, and had a taste. Delicious. If only the other thirteen and three-quarter pounds were still in play, we’d have had one hell of a Thanksgiving feast.
7:40pm
Thank heaven for Burger King. And for a wife who bans me from the kitchen — but who still lets me finish her French fries. Finally, something to be thankful for.
(DISCLAIMER: No ornery dogs, succulent birds or dilapidated Hibachis were actually harmed in the writing of this post. And the only animal I would subject to my cooking is me.
Happy Thanksgiving, all!)
Permalink | 2 CommentsSometimes, you just can’t win. Other times, you can win… but you end up wishing you hadn’t.
Take this afternoon, for instance. I was hanging around the house watching football with a buddy of mine. And I was explaining, between plays, how I spent several hours this weekend trying to talk sense into my TiVo.
It’s not the TiVo’s fault, of course. The TiVo’s like any other computer; it mostly does what you tell it to do. And for months now, the missus and I have been telling the TiVo this:
‘Tape Law & Order. All the Law & Orders. Ditto CSI. And if you miss the Simpsons, you’re done. We’ll gut your circuits and mount your CPU on a spike.
“Every time we turn on the television, it’s recording blood and gore, murder and depravity, sketchy perps and brutal policemen. And hardly ever softcore porn yoga.”
(That last one is mine. I’ve been hurt before, see. A while back, our old VCR went on the fritz and I missed the Treehouse of Horror episode that year.
I turned the insides of that machine into a set of wind chimes. To warn the other appliances when we bring them home.)
The point is, we do like other shows. House, for instance. Good Eats, of course. Various home improvement shows (but not ‘Home Improvement’). And yoga.
(Because we’re interested in staying fit, and maintaining overall health. Not because all those limber women in skimpy outfits is borderline softcore porn.
That’s my story, anyway. So far, so good.)
Problem is, when you tell TiVo to tape your favorite shows, you have to rank them. And with the various permutations of Law & Order and CSI on nineteen different channels every hour of the day and night, that’s mostly what we get. Every time we turn on the television, it’s recording blood and gore, murder and depravity, sketchy perps and brutal policemen. And hardly ever softcore porn yoga. Or Alton Brown. Or anything else.
So I fixed it, which was easier said than done. We bought one of those souped-up refurb TiVo models, and the hard drive holds a couple of hundred shows at once. As a computer programmer, I’m morally obligated to use every byte of free space on the device, so our list of shows to record has ballooned to nearly one hundred. And seemingly, ninety of those are cop shows.
I spent the bulk of Saturday taking care of that. Some rerun-only requests came off the list. Other shows went on the list. And lots of shows we like — but never see any more — moved way up to the top. It took a while, but it was worth it.
(And besides, what else does a Syracuse football fan have to do on Saturday afternoons these days? Watch them get their asses handed to them again by thirty points?
I see plenty enough carnage on the police dramas, thanks.)
Back to this afternoon. My friend and I were sitting here, drinking beer and talking football. Between the vicious hits and long bombs, I explained my little project — and wondered aloud about what interesting new entertainment we might soon have. With the old cop show reruns out of the way, what cool shit would we get instead? Monty Python classics? NFL Films Presents? Even skimpier yoga?
Just as we were discussing the possibilities, the TiVo beeped to say it wanted to change the channel. Away from football. To tape a show. Right away. The show?
“Divine Design“. On the Home and Garden network.
So the reprogramming worked. The missus is happy, because we’re getting more shows that she likes now. But I’m pretty sure my Man Card has been revoked. And my friend is frigging relentless with the digs. This is so not cool.
On the other hand, the girl on the show did show us how to make some really nice chenille curtains. Those would look fabulous in the living room. Or so the wife said, when she poked her head in to investigate all the laughing and pointing my buddy was doing.
I guess that’s my project for next Saturday now. Ah, well. It still beats watching another David Caruso episode. But just barely. Stupid TiVo.
Permalink | No CommentsSo, my dog Susie (obligatory adorable snapshot) has cancer.
That’s not a joke, unfortunately. The pooch started looking sick about a month ago, and after several vet visits, a major surgery and a pet hospital stay later, we got the bad news. It was disappointing, and a little shocking, and certainly depressing. You might think, in such a trying time, that it would be impossible to find anything amusing about the situation.
You would be wrong.
Here are a few of the moments over the past few weeks (in chronological order) that I’m sure I’ll someday look back on and laugh. If I haven’t already.
Comatose Canine
A week or so after Susie started looking ill, we got our first snippet of diagnosis: an enlarged spleen. Dogs (and people) can live quite happily without a spleen, so the recommendation was to have the overinflated organ removed.
“The mutt’s either got the sunniest attitude on the planet, or the shortest memory on record. Or she’s a fuzzy-eared drooling idiot.”
(The spleen actually does some good in the body, it turns out; it’s just not absolutely essential for survival. So it’s not an entirely useless bit of vestigial fluff, like an appendix, or a prehensile tail, or the electoral college.
Rather, the spleen performs some useful work — but when there are complications, you’re sometimes better off without it. More like a prostate, or a gallbladder, or a bicameral legislation.
Look, it’s November. I like to get my one political joke for the year out of the way in an election month, all right? Moving right along.)
So a few Tuesdays ago, we scheduled the pup for a splenectomy on the following Monday. I came home that Tuesday night and found something resembling a dog-skin rug lying on the living room floor. Only not as comfortable. And a lot more gassy.
The point is, she wouldn’t move. For anything. Wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t drink. Wouldn’t wag and yap for a squeaky toy. Nothing. If I got right in her face and stared at her all bug-eyed and cooing, then she might — might — grumble and turn away. But that was it.
(Except for the farting. Good gravy, the dog could’ve dropped a moose at forty paces with those air biscuits. I began to wonder if she was actually going to shit her spleen onto the carpet and save us a trip to the surgeon.)
The next morning, nothing much had changed, so I decided to cancel the next week’s surgery and take the poor pootying pooch right to the animal hospital. She didn’t have the energy to make it down our stairs, so I had to carry her to the car. While avoiding pressing on her spleen — which was quite a neat trick, since I don’t know where the hell the spleen is located, exactly. If I hadn’t been able to scoop her up behind her back legs, I might have just thrown her in a sack and hoped for the best.
Of course, Susie is a ‘people person’ sort of mutt, so as soon as we got to the hospital, she perked up. Which led to a rather awkward exchange with the emergency nurse:
Me: Yeah, the dog has been really listless. Just won’t move at all.
Nurse: I see, I see. This dog here?
Me: That’s right. Like she’s on her last legs, almost.
Nurse: Mmm-hmm, got it. Low energy, no interest… this is the dog?
Me: Right.
Nurse: Uh-huh. So, could you tell her to get off of my lap? All that wagging and panting is kind of distracting. And what’s that nasty smell?
Luckily (for my credibility, at least), the pooch ran down pretty quickly and was soon resting on the floor. The hospital took her info, admitted her, and scheduled the surgery for that afternoon. Which was a relief, because I’m not sure Susie would have made it through the weekend.
And I know we couldn’t stand the farting that long. The floorboards under her ass were starting to warp.
The Universe is a Smartass
Susie didn’t fare so well immediately after the surgery. The procedure went off without a hitch, but the pooch still wouldn’t eat for the next couple of days. The hospital staff managed to get a little food into her — given their descriptions, I pictured them with a turkey baster full of Alpo frappe, trying to squeeze it down her gullet when she opened up to yawn — but mostly, she was getting by on an IV.
I planned to visit the persnickety pooch in the recovery area that Friday evening. If she’d taken a turn for the better or would eat for me, there was a chance I could take her home with me. When I arrived, I found her in about the same shape she’d been before — listless and cranky, only now in a strange place with weird smells and sounds and a needle jabbed into her leg. And by the way, without a fist-sized organ that she had probably been planning on using for a while longer, thanks.
Nothing much changed in the hour they let me stay, so I had to leave without my dog and hope that she’d perk up soon. Or ever. As I drove home that night in a cold, steady rain, I have to admit I got a little emotional. With my eyes tearing up and a lump growing in my throat, I tried to hold myself together. I turned on some music to take my mind off the worry and dread and worst-case scenarios bubbling through my head; I’d recently burned a CD of some older, upbeat ‘poppy’ sorts of songs, and I thought it would do the trick. I slipped the disc in, hit ‘Random’, and waited for the tunes to take me away from my troubles.
First up was a song by Tonic:
‘If you could only see the way she loves me, maybe you would understand….‘
Well, shit. That’s not helping. Next.
The Eels. Novocaine for the Soul.
‘Life is hard, and so am I. You better give me something… so I don’t die.‘
Damn it. That lump’s getting bigger. Next.
An old song by X called The 4th of July. As far as I can tell, it’s about a troubled couple finding a glimmer of hope together when they quit arguing long enough to remember it’s the 4th and share a moment watching fireworks together. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s a metaphor; I can never tell with these kooky rock stars.
At any rate, the song’s got nothing to do with dogs, dying, hospitals, spleens, or anything else I didn’t want to hear about. But here’s how it starts:
‘She’s waiting for me
When I get home from work…
Oh, but things just ain’t the same.
Oh… come on. Can I get one freaking song here–
‘She turns out the light
And cries in the da-ark…
And she won’t answer when I call her name…
Right. Fuck. You.
I turned off the music. And cried halfway home.
The universe is a perverse little shit when it wants to be. And aparently, my taste in music is a lot more depressing than I realized.
Frankenfarter
The good news is that our plucky puppy perked up the next day and started chowing chow again. The missus and I returned on Saturday afternoon to retrieve what was left of our woozy woofer, and took her home.
That’s when we saw… the staples.
Apparently, the spleen is a pretty large organ in dogs, proportionally speaking. And an enlarged spleen doesn’t exactly get sucked out through a straw. Or for that matter, a garden hose. The incision on our pooch’s underbelly runs a good six inches, from the base of her rib cage well down near her nethers. Maybe her withers are involved, or her brisket, or her hock. I have no idea. Does she have a brisket? Who the hell knows. I heard it on a dog show once, but maybe they were talking about the handler’s brisket. Whatever.
Anyway, a cut that long has to be held together by something, and evidently super glue isn’t the closer-upper of choice for these dog docs. So they used surgical staples — twenty-four surgical staples, to be exact — to put all our puppy’s horses back together again.
The silver lining was, this was just a few days before Halloween. So I almost — almost — made the dog a ‘costume’ involving taping a “100% Cotton” tag to her ear and calling her a stuffed plush toy. That would have gone over great with the kids trick-or-treating, I think.
Sadly, removing her spleen did nothing to help her flatulence, so we didn’t parade the rancid thing out to see the children. Nor did we let her anywhere near the candy. Who wants Kit-Kats that taste like dog ass?
Helpful Hints? Hardly
Sadly for Susie, the biopsy on her liberated spleen eventually revealed that she has lymphoma. That’s a circulatory sort of cancer, so it’s highly unlikely that removing the offending organ wiped it out entirely. So now, my dog’s a chemo patient.
Luckily for her, animals don’t respond quite as poorly to chemotherapy as some people do. The hair they shaved for her incision won’t likely grow back soon, but the rest of it shouldn’t fall out, either. And she probably won’t get nauseous — at least, any more nauseous than usual on a diet of horse meat and rawhide and whatever it is she’s licking off her privates at strategically embarrassing moments.
But she does have to return to the hospital for her treatments. Which is fine with her — she doesn’t seem to mind stepping paw into the place where she was poked, prodded, split open, poked some more, and jabbed into repeatedly. The mutt’s either got the sunniest attitude on the planet, or the shortest memory on record. Or she’s a fuzzy-eared drooling idiot. Based on the past experiences I’ve shared, I’d say it’s a little bit of all three. And maybe a lot of the last one.
Speaking of fuzzy-eared idiots, the hospital ‘offered’ us a ‘helpful’ little ‘client feature’. When I say ‘offered’, I mean ‘foisted upon, without asking’. When I say ‘helpful’, I mean ‘entirely and utterly useless’. And when I say ‘client feature’, I mean that they send us email reminders about our early-morning appointments, which also include a number to call — at least twenty-four hours before — should we need to reschedule.
They send these reminders, invariably, at four o’clock in the morning, on the day of said appointment. Gee. Thanks. If I have any schedule conflicts, I’ll hop in my time machine and get right back to you. Jackholes.
So that’s the Susie saga so far. Three weeks post-op, her staples are out and she’s still wagging her tail, wolfing down food, and generally doing all the goofy, questionable, mostly disgusting things her old canine self used to do. I’m hopeful for quite a few more good weeks or months for our pooch, and in the meantime, I’m trying to keep a sense of humor about the craziness going on. So far, I think it’s going okay.
Now if they could just open her back up and take out that farting gland. Good god, this mutt could peel the paint off a Pontiac. Jesus.
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