"Are you sure you know what you're doing?"
I rolled my eyes. "Grace, the instructional video was very clear that I need to be close to and paying attention to the rig at all times. If I talk to you right now the turkey might explode and get flaming oil everywhere."
I was deep-frying a turkey. Some people might think that that's a big step for a girl who'd mostly been making pizza and pasta from recipes and only recently started cooking for herself and that a little girl shouldn't be messing with an outside deep fryer over a propane burner, but screw you, I do what I want.
Besides, the recipe I found sounded so yummy: A turkey soaked for half a day in a brown sugar brine and deep-fried to a slight crisp in peanut oil... My mouth watered just thinking about it and if it turned out there was an entire world of possibilities that being able to deep fry a brined bird opened up. Did this recipe work for chicken? How about duck? What if I added crushed garlic and cayenne pepper to the brine? Or honey and lemon juice?
And if you can safely deep fry a turkey, you can deep fry anything. Bananas. Deli pickles... Cheese! I could blend up a mixture of cheeses and herbs and stuff, like if I was making a cheese spread, then roll it up into little balls or sticks, let it harden in the fridge for a bit, dip them in a batter, and... Bet it would be better than those deep-fried mozzarella sticks you get in a restaurant. Especially if I make up some of my red sauce to go with them.
"Well, if you're sure..." Grace didn't seem so sure.
"Look, if you're nervous you could check the cranberry sauce to make sure it's settling right," I suggested. "That way I can devote my full attention to the rig."
Honestly, I wasn't that worried about the cranberry sauce. It was just frozen cranberries, orange juice, lemon zest, white sugar, and a pinch of cinnamon in a boiling hot pot until the berries burst. I made it like an hour ago and left it to chill and thicken in the fridge while I set up for the turkey.
I'd also peeled and sliced thin some potatoes, soaked out the extra starches out, then boiled the potatoes in milk and crushed them through a ricer and mixed with butter and some of the potato milk to make some nice and smooth creamy mashed potatoes, and Mr. Turkey's giblets had been cooked brown, chopped fine, and then added to a mixture of beef and chicken stock, diced onions, unsalted butter, kosher salt, black pepper, and minced garlic boiled, pureed, and mixed with a cornstarch and flour blend and some mushrooms to make a nice brown gravy.
Once the turkey was done in the oil it'd need to sit for at least thirty minutes for the residual heat to do its carryover cooking magic and then it'd have to cool a little bit before carving and in that time I'd pop a dough I'd preprepared into the oven for a bit and then we'd have a nice homemade sourdough to round everything out.
...Did this make me a foodie?
No. I'm not a foodie until I start practicing molecular gastronomy. Because that makes sense and totally isn't an arbitrary distinction I just made up in my head and darn it now I want Dippin' Dots... No, Ashley. Bad. You are not a foodie, you are an Epicurean, and no matter how delicious they might be you are not going to go down that rabbit hole. We don't even know where we'd get food quality liquid nitrogen to make homemade little tiny flash-frozen balls of space-age ice cream. You can buy them like everyone else. We make the stuff ourself and that's a gateway drug to deconstructed bacon cheeseburgers, french fries with the ketchup in the fires and god knows what else. If I get into that then I'm never gonna stop.
"Mister Snuggles, does our host often have conversations with herself?"
"No, Scream, this is new. This one would suggest that Ashley bring it up at her next session with Doc Samson."
"No one asked you!" I said out loud... Just as Grace came back from the kitchen.
"Voices in your head?" She asked.
"Yeah."
"Okay... Well, I don't actually know how to check if cranberry sauce is setting right or not, so..."
It was then that the timer went off and I leaped from my perch to check the probe thermometer I had monitoring my turkey. 151 Fahrenheit. I killed the heat and lifted the bird out of the oil, and once it was secure went to get my sourdough in the oven.
AN: The fried turkey is based on Alton Brown's Deep-Fried Turkey found on the Food Network Website and the mashed potatoes are from one of the episodes of his show, everything else is an improvised list of ingredients based on composites of recipes I've seen elsewhere.