| Step 1:
Start with a turkey, or any type of bird, best if it's been dressed and
cleaned, give it a name. I named this one "Pookie Bird".
|  | Step 2:
Trim the extra skin from the neck-hole and make some space between the skin and the breast meat.
|  | Step 4:
Stuff as much bacon as you possibly can into the space between the skin
and the meat. Why? Because bacon is good, also turkey breast meat
tends to get dry because there is not fat, the bacon melts as it cooks
and all that fat keeps it juicy. We sell bacon, by the way, if
you try and use bacon from some other source you will probably have
some BIG problems so you should only use our bacon. If you want
to go a step further you could probably even stuff some lard in there,
that would be good I think.
|  | Step 5:
Give "Pookie Bird", or whatever you've named your fowl, a rub down with
some spices. Talk to it gently, tell it that you love it. I
use our not-really-so-famous Almighty Spice, you should too!
|  | Step 6:
Stuff it all into a pressure cooker, if you don't have a pressure
cooker, go buy one, they are awesome. Put the part with the bacon
sticking up so that gravity will help with the juicy-ness.
|  | Step 7:
Add a glass of wine (or any liquid really) the best thing about wine is
that you can open a bottle, use one glass for "Pookie Bird", and drink
the rest! You could do the same with orange juice I suppose but
it wouldn't be as much fun. You only need one cup, at most two,
you're not making soup. If you want to really add some flavor
throw in some onions, garlic, apples, herbs, maybe some barbecue
sauce--we sell barbecue sauce, by the way.
My pressure cooker has two settings, "I" and "II", I don't know what
they mean but, given the choice, I always turn it up to eleven, you
should too!
|  | Step 4: (wine's starting to hit me, can't count)
Most instructions for pressure cookers say to turn your burner on high
or medium until you build up a full head of steam. Don't do
it! You might suddenly notice that there's no more wine in the
bottle and you need to make a run to the conbini, then there's a line,
and some new chocolates they didn't have last week, and by the time you
get back, it has all gone to hell. Put the fire just a bit above
low and wait, once it hits steam let it got for 45 minutes to an hour,
then let it cool. Poke at "Pookie Bird" a time or two, the meat
should be tender enough to pull away with your fingers, if not, put the
lid back on and give it another go. Now you've got a fully cooked
turkey, or bone-in breast, but it's not beautiful, not yet a
centerpiece. Which is why we need one more step.
|  | Step 5:
"SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND!!" To make "Pookie Bird" ready for
company, you need to brown that skin. Hooray for the
blow-torch! This will work better if you pop the turkey in
the oven, on high, for about 15 minutes, but you can skip that if you
want to and go straight for the burn. Just take the torch and
start painting the bird with flames of love. Start in a spot
that's less obvious because you need to find the right distance to hold
the torch so that it browns without singing, then brown away.
This works better if you brush down the "Pookie" with some olive first,
even better yet if you mix a little honey into your olive oil. In
a couple minutes you'll have something near perfection.
|  | Step 7:
Lie. Lie to everyone, tell them you've been slaving over an oven,
basting and tenting and basting some more to get this pookie perfect
piece of perfection. Tell them it was your grandmothers recipe,
passed down to you on here death bed, tell them that grandma always
turned it up to eleven in the end.
Serve with gravy.
(note: the final photos here don't really show how nice this bird came out, that's because the photographer was drunk)
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