Organ-filled turkey tragedy

This Thanksgiving was my first one away from my family. I’m not a freshman; it was just the first time I didn’t spend a day of travel to get to family for two weeks of boredom and face-stuffing.

Instead, I stayed home and cooked my own Thanksgiving dinner. My immediate family never cooked turkey; we tend to go pretty light on meat, and not many of us like the idea of handling cold animal carcasses.

Yum, carcass.

Anyway, I collected advice from everybody on cooking turkeys. My favorite housekeeper offered advice. The cashier at Kroger reminded me to cover the entire bird in aluminum foil. Several people told me to make sure the bird was completely thawed before cooking it. I got recipes for gravies and suggestions for stuffing. My friend Tyrone bought a turkey injector and scrounged up a butter injection recipe. I was all set to produce a wonderfully cooked carcass.

I faithfully removed the bloody, watery bag containing the neck, rooted around for the organs and didn’t find them, and injected my bird after smacking it playfully on the breast. My lovely, dead bird. Yum. After a few hours of sitting in the fridge, it went in the oven, covered in foil with a thermometer carefully jabbed into the leg. After a total of about 5 hours, I took out the bird and we cut it.

It was an oddly colored bird. Parts were definitely cooked. Others were less clear, with ambiguous carcass-juice colors and very dark dark meat. I’m dubious about any meat that isn’t burnt to a charred crisp. There was no way I was making any kind of gravy from that stuff.

Digging around looking at the meat revealed... the organ bag! Cue Link’s “I got the thing!” music. I was warned about that, but it wasn’t where it was supposed to be! It broke the laws of both biology and physics for that huge bag to have fit in that tiny neck carcass crevasse.

After gingerly dropping the steaming mess of organs in the trash, I turned around, convinced nothing else would go wrong. Then I heard Tyrone’s voice. “What I want to know is why that stuff is green!”