061224 12:51 by iDRMRSR

I went to the butcher shop yesterday to buy a turkey. I could have paid $0.89 a pound for one, but instead the butcher told me about a new movement in the meat industry, the open source meat initiative. Under this new plan, you could just get a free turkey, or rather, a type of species very close to a real turkey, equal in nutrition and almost exactly the same in every other regard. Rather than raising them on the farm, small hobbyists all over the world raise their own turkey-like birds and exchange them for free with each other, hoping that one day all the inbreeding will produce a species much tastier than the usual mechafarm produced crap.

So I opted for the free turkey! The butcher gave me this carcass with all the dark meat but no white meat.

I asked, "What good is this?". The butcher said, well, most of the FLAVOR of the turkey is in the DARK MEAT. Due to a legal issue with the HunnySuckel corporation, he couldn't just give me a whole turkey. However, he said his brother was in the parking lot out back, and had the white meat in his trunk for all the free turkeys. He explained to me that it was up to me, if I wanted white meat, I could go out to the back and get it. He said a lot of the free turkey people simply content themselves with the dark meat. "The Free Turkey people are believers in CHOICE", he intoned.

But I would not be so content.

So I went out back, and sure enough, there was his brother, and he pulled from the trunk a nice set of breasts and wings, and even gave me a little handy sewing thing so I could sew them back on myself.

I got it home, sewed it back together, and put it into the roaster pan. Unfortunately, the free turkey was too oddly shaped to fit in the pan. So I ended up having to buy a FOIL pan and kind of mashing it into the right shape for my free turkey.

It suddenly occurred to me, I didn't remember exactly how to cook a turkey. So I searched the internet all over and found a nice recipe to cook my free turkey. The recipe went something like this:

1. Slice and serve the meat but not until you have read the full cooking instructions (unless you have done this before and know exactly what you are doing, and realize that some people have no business trying to cook a turkey unless they know avian anatomy and physiology and food science cold like us, in which case they should stick to eating at McDonald's).

2. Before you do that, you must thaw the turkey, unless the turkey is already thawed, but do not skip step 3 below, EXCEPT when the turkey is already cooked. However, if you want it warm, prior to eating, do not do step 1 first! Instead, heat the turkey and then do step 1. THIS IS NOT ROCKET SCIENCE! Do we make ourselves CLEAR?

3. Bake the free turkey for 250 * 10^6 microseconds per kilogram at a temperature of 449.816667 kelvin. IMPORTANT: if you pierce the breast with a sharp knife, and the juices are still running pink, the turkey may not be fully cooked and you risk intestinal disease if you eat it at this stage. To prevent this {TODO list - insert additional cooking instructions in next build along with documentation referring to desired final temperature of cooked meat}.

So I got out my slide rule and computed the cooking time, popped the bird in the oven and turned it on. I crossed my fingers and presumed the juices wouldn't run pink and all that. Then I noticed the very strangest thing.

With this open source turkey in the oven, I went to set the oven timer. It's a digital timer on a Westinghouse oven. Every time I set it, it displayed 88:88. I could set the timer OK with the free turkey OUT of the oven, but every time I put it in, the display read 88:88. After a while, I simply decided to use my pocket watch to do the timing.

While the free open source turkey was cooking, I did some more GOOGLING and found out that if I had used a KENMORE oven instead, the timer would set properly. Since the turkey was free, I decided it wasn't such a big problem to do without the little timer, especially since I had this nice little pocket watch around.

After about two hours, the smell of turkey began to fill the room and it was heavenly! I could see through the oven window, the skin was browning and crisping nicely. I could hardly wait until the cooking period was over.

That's when, all of a sudden the light in the oven blew out. I could not see inside at all! Panicking, I reached for my oven mitts and opened up the oven door to peer inside.

I discovered that somehow the free turkey in my oven had completely locked up the oven door latch! I could not get inside the oven. The timer still read 88:88 and I had no idea what was going on inside. Normally, I'd just flip the little safety lever and the door would open, but with the free turkey inside, it was frozen shut.

To get it out, I finally had to break through the glass in the oven door. This is not a simple thing because it's tempered glass. Shards of glass got into the turkey, and I then knew I couldn't eat the thing. It was corrupted totally in the process of finalizing the cooking. The smell of the house was very enticing, I must admit, and the parts of the free turkey that weren't full of broken glass were very nicely browned.

I ended up going to Denny's for a turkey dinner. They're open 24 hours, even on Xistlessmass. That dinner cost me $14 including the tip. It wasn't the best turkey around, but the stuffing was pretty tasty and it filled me up. Even though I kind of resented throwing more of my money at a big corporate food place like that.

The day after Xistlessmas I'm going to go out and buy a new oven door, and see if that butcher has any free, open source FILET MIGNON around, just to give that a try. Maybe if I try a different SPECIES this time, I can find a free food alternative that is ready for my kitchen!