Last night I attempted my first big hol­iday feast. I will not say I suc­ceeded, although my efforts were appre­ci­ated by the per­sons eating. I had a few dif­fi­cul­ties along the way.

First, there was the turkey. I put it into the refrig­er­ator the night before last to defrost. Unfor­tu­nately, our fridge runs quite cold. Two hours before I was sup­posed to begin cooking, the turkey was still frozen solid. To make mat­ters worse, I really had no other way to defrost it. Since we live in an apart­ment, we have tried to keep our kitchen appli­ances small. Our microwave is too small for even the small half-bird I was working with. In a des­perate effort, I filled the largest bowl I have with cold salt­water and soaked the turkey in that for a few hours. Some parts were def­i­nitely still frozen when I decided it was get­ting late and needed to begin the roasting…

In addi­tion to the turkey, the other items on the menu were:

• wild mush­room risotto
• brus­sels sprouts
• stuffing (from the box); and
• salad

From a purely tech­nical stand­point, I think the risotto was a suc­cess. The rice was al dente and creamy if a little bit dry or sticky for a risotto. How­ever, I might have added more than the proper amount of parmesan cheese. It ended up as a cheese risotto with mush­rooms than a truly mush­room risotto. Brus­sels sprouts are easy, they came out fine. The box stuffing was unbe­liev­ably simple. Monica did the salad for me.

The turkey took a long time. I removed it from the oven after a little over 2 hours and much of it (the top of the breast, the wing) were fin­ished. At the center, it was still bloody. I removed what I could and fin­ished it in the microwave so we would have some­thing to eat and then stuck the rest in the oven for what turned out to be another hour. Still, it turned out very well. Crispy skin, good flavor. The turkey was pre­pared simply:

• rubbed with oil
• smashed garlic was spread over the top and tucked into what­ever crevice I could find
• cov­ered with kosher salt, coarse-ground pepper, and white pepper; and
• finally sprin­kled with some lime juice.

Once we had our fill, I stripped the bones and saved the meat. Then, in a flash of inspi­ra­tion (thanks goes to my friend Giles’ mother, who I guess does this as a hol­iday ritual) I set the bones, skin, scrap meat, and drip­pings from the oven into a pot and boiled them for about 2 hours. In addi­tion to the intox­i­cating smell it gen­er­ated a few cups of rough turkey stock.

I was going to use it to make congee this morning, but we’re out of rice!