Liquid Turkey

... or, Emmy's Best Thanksgiving Ever!

We did the traditional turkey-and-trimmings dinner Saturday with both sets of parents. Again, we brined the turkey overnight, following the Good Eats recipe, and other than a small glitch with the thermometer placement, everything went very well. The turkey was nicely roasted, moist, and juicy.

And that's where the problem started. Or, if you're the dog, that's where this started to be the best Thanksgiving EVER...

Neither Kate nor I really eat gravy, and it has the reputation of being fiddly to make, so we didn't do anything with the juices that accumulated during roasting. Maybe next year. Anyway, the turkey was in a foil roasting pan, on top of a cookie sheet, on top of our big cutting board, and there was a good two inches of liquid at the bottom of the pan.

My father carved the turkey, since he's good at that, and he did it without removing the bird from the roasting pan. Unfortunately, at some point in this process, he poked a hole in the foil pan. So the juices started leaking out onto the cookie sheet. Which filled up, and overflowed onto the cutting board. Which filled up, and overflowed onto the counter, making a little four-level waterfall of roast turkey juice, from the pan to the sheet to the cutting board to the counter to the floor, along the edge between the cabinet and the stove.

I'm not sure how long it was flowing before we noticed, but we had quite the puddle of turkey juice. Which the Queen of Niskayuna was more than happy to help dispose of. In fact, she continued licking the floor well after it had been mopped up, leading to the picture above.

Or, if you would prefer the LOLEmmy version:

As cooking mishaps go, though, this was a really minor one. And it doesn't seem to have had any adverse effects on her digestion (yet), so I think all's well that ends well. Or, at least, all's well that ends with the dog licking up two pounds of liquid turkey...