Pat's Turkey Cooking Escapades, 2006

Well. I think I'm ready for the Thanksgiving holiday. As many of you probably know, for fourteen years now, I have cooked the Thanksgiving turkey on the grill. And during that time I've made every stupid mistake one can possibly make and learned how to correct them all. For the last few years it has actually gone rather smoothly. Cooking the turkey on the grill is great. You smoke it with fruitwood as you are cooking it, it's tender, all the grease runs off into the fire (and not into the bottom of the pan) and it has a very good taste.

But the best part of it is that it gives me a good reason to get the hell out of the house while my wife and my mother are running around fixing all the other stuff, freaking out like chickens (turkeys?) with their heads cut off. Also, since all of the old geezers—oops I mean our parents—always descend upon our house for every holiday so that they can be with our two kids, it's a chance to go outside and have some peace and quiet. And a few beers, too ;-)

1996. An early turkey cooking at our old home in
Garner (which was wired by the Three Stooges).

Doing the turkey on the grill these days is old hat but this was not always the case. Over the years, the process has required a few modifications (read: whenever there was some sort of disaster it was corrected for the sake of future turkey grillings). Allow me to give you a brief history.

The whole idea originated years ago when I was a young kid and my dad got together with Bill McPeak, the guy who lived across the street, and cooked the turkey on the grill. Bill was a big hefty looking guy who smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish. His wife was my mother's best friend and on several occasions our family got together with theirs for Thanksgiving. One year they decided to cook the bird outside on the grill.

Looking back, I think it was just an excuse for the two of them to stand around outside talking and getting looped. I can still remember them standing out on the carport on Thanksgiving Day, 1964. My dad was dressed in his camouflaged pants and jacket and looked like he'd been out hunting all day with Elmer Fudd. He and Bill were both working on the turkey. The Wild Turkey, that is. Oh, by the way, they were also cooking the real turkey on the grill at the time, too.

Over the years, I had learned how to cook damn near everything on a grill. By the time I lived on my own, I used it exclusively for all the meat as well as shish kebobs, fajita vegetables, and potatoes. I was always seen outside firing up the charcoal and used to get some very strange looks back when I worked midnight to 6AM at the radio station and would come home and do this at 7 in the morning—with a beer in my hand—while everyone else in the apartment complex was stumbling out the door, rubbing their eyes and heading off to work.

I could easily do the "On The Grill" show on the Food Channel. So, back in 1993 after my daughter Kathryn was born I decided to try cooking the Thanksgiving turkey this way. Borne out of the desire to start a few "family customs" of our own—which is a typical reaction to having a baby—I got a few metal braces and screws and the drill and headed out to the porch to find the grill. I drilled holes and mounted the hardware. Then I attached the rotisserie motor.

2003. The new method, which uses sheets of thick
aluminum to hold in the heat.

I should note that the rotisserie motor was one that was made for a completely different make and model of grill than mine, one that my dad had found it in "EVERYTHING IN THIS CART $4.99" basket at the K-Mart. Attaching it to the grill required quite a bit of engineering savvy, but since I had just enrolled in the College of Engineering at N.C. State I figured that I knew what I was doing and a few hours later I had a contraption that looked like it was designed by Rube Goldberg and assembled by The Coyote.

About this time, an upscale grocery store called Wellspring opened in Raleigh. They are now called Whole Foods and are part of a chain that specializes in extra fresh produce, quality meat and fish, and "healthy" foods. Every Thanksgiving they take orders and on the preceding Monday, send a truck to a turkey farm in Pennsylvania where the turkeys are snuffed out on the spot, cleaned, plucked and tossed on ice for the ride home. This results in the freshest bird possible, which doesn't have to be thawed out first. So for the great turkey grilling project I bought ours there. Only the best for us!

Well, Thanksgiving morning rolled around and, aware that it would take all day to cook, I was out there at 7AM firing up the grill. Once the coals were hot I placed the fresh, 18-pound turkey on the spit and onto the brackets and into the rotisserie, which I plugged into the long orange extension cord that I had drug out of the dining room, through the double doors and onto the back porch. This, because the outdoor outlet was wired through a ground-fault connector and the wiring in our house was apparently done by the Three Stooges and every time you plugged anything into it it blew the breaker.

Well, upon plugging in the rotisserie motor the turkey turned about three turns and the braces which I had attached to the grill then buckled from the weight, leaving the turkey laying on top of the coals and me standing there saying "Oh hell!" I quickly removed it and put it back on the platter, then had to fix the braces which meant drilling additional holes and putting in extra screws and tightening them, all with my hands over top of the glowing pile of Kingsford coals. Ouch! Finally, all was fixed and about 8 hours (and about 6 beers) later we had a turkey.

The first turkey was dry on the outside and not done enough on the inside so the following year I decided to alter the process a bit. After buying and attaching stronger braces to the grill I went with a larger and hotter fire while basting the turkey frequently. And having just passed a college Physics course I was smart enough now to do a better job of inserting the spit through the turkey's axis of rotational symmetry (in other words: through the middle with respect to its weight distribution) so that it turned more evenly.

I figured that having a larger fire would ensure that the turkey would cook more thorougly and this would have probably been the case, except for the fact that on this particular Thanksgiving the temperature was about 30 outside and no matter how hot the fire was, the heat was just radiating off into the air and not cooking the turkey.

My father checks the cooked bird, while Paul
Kelcey looks on.

Because of this, all of our dinner was ready and on the table at 5PM but the turkey wasn't done until about 8PM and this went over like a forest fire on Arbor Day. All of the family was nice very patient and nice about this except for my bitchy ex-sister-in-law who was visibly pissed (ha ha...and I have to confess, the more pissed she got the more I dawdled around just to press her buttons). Thankfully, changes were to come in my turkey process which would speed things up in years to come. And even more thankfully, my brother-in-law ditched her whiny ass, is now remarried, and my new sister-in-law is great.

But clearly, something had to be done to speed up the process and make the grill more like an oven. I tinkered with the thought of building a fire inside in the GE Self-Cleaning oven like Granny did when the Clampetts first moved to Beverly Hills but knew that this would result in my burning the house down or even worse, whizzing off my wife.

When in Roanoke the following year I was digging through my father's storage shed and found a roll of really thick aluminum; thicker than heavy-duty foil but not as thick as a sheet of tin. I asked him if I could have it and—as my father is always trying to clean out his junky old storage shed—he was happy to oblige and let me have it under the condition that I also took the old leaf blower, the croquet set, two hammers, an old TV and two other boxes of assorted crap along with it.

With this foil I made two triangular sides and a front cover for the grill which allowed full movement of the turkey but also kept in the heat. This innovation changed everything. It was no longer taking all day to cook the turkey and now it was possible to start throwing in pieces of apple wood to give it a good smokey flavor. Also, as the turkey-cooking process now only took about five hours instead of eight, I was now able to reduce the number of beers I was drinking per turkey to about 4, thusly ensuring that I wasn't passing out at the dinner table, face-first in the dressing bowl, during the blessing.

Cooking the turkey with the foil "oven" around the grill not only speeds up the process but also ensures that it is cooked more evenly throughout. Prior to doing it this way the inside would be watery and undercooked while the outside would be overcooked, dry and blackened. Though this sounds kind of gross, it really wasn't that bad. Nobody ever eats an entire turkey at one meal so it doesn't matter if some of the meat near the middle is a little undercooked—just don't eat that part or, if you prefer, cook it a bit more in the microwave first.

As for the overcooked and blackened outer layer, well, if this ever happens to you just tell everybody that this is your famous New Orleans Cajun Blackened Turkey recipe from Emeril and yell "BAM!!!" a few times and everyone will tell you what a great cook you are. After tasting it they may not eat a lot, but hey, the less Uncle Hector eats, the less likely it is that he'll spend the rest of the night walking around with his pants unbuttoned.

Steve is now in charge of Beer Selection.

In 2001 I started inviting my friend from work, Steve Murry, to join in the festivities. Steve volunteered to bring something and since my wife had the menu under control, this meant Steve was put in charge of the beer. We now traditionally go out on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. The Whole Foods grocery store where I purchase the turkeys has a great selection of imported and microbrewed beers, so I get the turkey and Steve selects several varieties of beer including a few Scotch and Rogue Dead Guy ales.

That same year we began another tradition: taking the boom box out back and listening to Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" while cooking the turkey. Arlo begins by telling us "It all started a couple of years ago on Thanksgiving..." and describes getting arrested for littering and how this helped him avoid being drafted by the army. One year my father—an old Army guy—came out while it was playing and became visibly pissed. He muttered something about how us young liberals didn't know jack shit about anything then went stomping off into the house. Oops.

But most years, especially recently, things have gone smoothly. The weather has generally been very nice, the turkey is usually done by early afternoon and the family meal is always excellent. It truly is a wonderful day of family, friends, good food, good drink and relaxation. Cooking the turkey on the grill is the center of activity, my kids love it and in years when I'm apprehensive and feeling lazy and contemplating doing it the traditional way in the oven, they always insist that I cook it the way "that we always do."

So some Thanksgiving please stop by and join us. Cooking the Thanksgiving turkey on the grill is fun, it's an adventure, and now it's a family tradition. And it sure beats the hell out of sitting inside watching those hapless Detroit Lions muddling their way through a football game.