Happy Thanksgiving!

We can't celebrate Thanksgiving here at BaCon without recalling the most outrageous one we've celebrated to date.  It was 2007, and Mr. Luz and I had been dating for a little more than a year.  He'd just said "I love you" and then promptly moved to New York City, then Paris, France until January 2008.  (Law school wasn't hard enough for Mr. Luz, he had to go to Paris to study law in French.)  It was difficult, but I got to fly to Paris three times in one semester, including Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve. Somehow, I survived.
The only way to really sum up that Thanksgiving is to come out with it. We made a Turducken.  The Turducken is medieval preparation given new life in NOLA. Essentially, a deboned chicken is stuffed inside a deboned duck, which is stuffed inside a deboned turkey.  Its rich excess is borderline offensive for most non-New Orleanian Americans, so you can only imagine what our French guests thought.  Poor, poor French guests.

It took three days and several trips to the butcher and the American Section of the Bon Marche in downtown Paris (where we found canned cranberry sauce to serve as a bit of a joke even though I love it, cajun seasoning,  single cans of Dr. Pepper, and 12 types of pancake mix) to prepare The Turducken.  Mr. Luz and his flatmate and landlord, Beube (Bob, with a French accent) spent hours deboning each bird, layering them together and seasoning each layer, and then stitching the whole thing up. 

I, on the other hand, spent days drinking wine, sighing happily, and making stuffing and then pumpkin pie in shallow, frozen tart pastry shells.

In line with NOLA custom, our Turducken was stuffed with traditional herb dressing and New Orleans sausage and corn bread stuffing, and it tasted heavenly.  While it roasts, the duck fat permeates the turducken so it becomes self-basting and everything starts to taste like...well...duck fat.

In addition to The Turducken, we had cornbread, green beans, homemade cranberry sauce, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes and gravy, a cheese course, chocolate truffles, the aforementioned pumpkin pie/tart, and wine.  Lots and lots of glorious wine and champagne (presumably to make amends with our French guests for subjecting them to our holiday of obscene excess.)

It was an experience I'll never forget and reinforces the saying, "you never know where you might end up."  It just might be Paris, France, eating four whole animals all at once and drinking wine older than you are in celebration of our many blessings.  In other words, let's start planning for 2011.