the day we defeated 3 turkeys

So we decided to have another Thanksgiving outreach, which I was really excited about. Of course, the hardest part about this is getting all the american goodies you need to make everything. But luckily between visitors and a visit to America we got everything pretty easily...at least on this side. The couple days before we had spent preparing many pies and casseroles and everything was going quite smoothly. I was really impressed. Let me go back a couple of steps...whole turkeys aren't real easy to find here, but we had made an order from a butcher on our street for three turkeys because we were hoping for 100 people so we thought that would do the trick.

Now begins Thursday...we woke up early and continued in the casserole process and it was time to pick up the turkeys and take them to the guys place. So I asked a couple of the girls to come with me because "I might need a hand". We went to the butcher and he proceeds to bring out 3 of the largest turkeys I have ever seen! The smallest one weighing 30 pounds and the largest one weighing 37 pounds!! None of us knew what to do...what are we going to do with 100 pounds of bird! We had to call the guys to come and carry them for us because they were so big. When we finally got them inside, they took up the entire kitchen table! We had to pluck feathers out of it...these things were probably shot the day before.



So seriously now we have to figure out how we're going to cook these things because we have one "full size oven" which is really about half the size of a normal oven in the states so getting these monsters in any of the ovens we had planned on was not going to be easy. So we started making phone calls and somehow we had figured out 2 other places. Because of the size of the birds we knew we needed to start cooking them ASAP. So we prepped the smallest one, but it was getting it in the oven that was the hard part. We put it in this foil pan and it started bending and the the side racks started falling off so we had to abort mission. We pulled it out and had to disassemble the racks. So we put it in on this pan so we wouldn't have to set it directly on the coils and hopefully not start a grease fire. We shoved her in, bent her legs backwards, and quickly shut the door.

Turkey #2 was going to be cooked at our favorite pizza place. So that wasn't going to be a problem. Now we only have one left and our friend who owns a hotel said we could cook it there, so we were feeling pretty good at this point. The only issue was getting it there. Our best option was to put the turkey in a garbage bag and put it in a laundry basket, so that's what we did. Marti (my friend from Pisa) and I started our trek to the hotel carrying a 33 pound turkey in a laundry basket. Yes, we got as many stares as you think we would and we each put a glove on one hand to prevent our hand from falling off from carrying this thing. Ok long story short we walked all the way down there and it wouldn't fit. And the woman who we were talking to kept hitting the turkey and exclaiming how big it was and that their oven is only for pastries. At this point, our best option was to call a taxi, which was the best decision we had made all day.

So begins the scrambling once again. The time is now 3:30ish. Even if we find a place in the next 5 minutes the turkey is going to be done till 10pm. The next phone call was bring the turkey to the pizza place because we're putting it in the brick pizza oven. How amazing is that! So they pushed it on in with that wooden paddle thing and that turkey was done in like 2.5 hours.

As I said before this was the day we defeated 3 turkeys in the most dysfunctional country in the world. God was so good to us that day and worked everything out. Just to let you know we had about 80 students come that night so it was a huge success and we have about 30 pounds of turkey un-touched. So if you have any good turkey recipes let me know.