After experiencing deep-friend turkey last year, the Snook and I decided that in 2005 we needed to tackle an even greater poultry challenge: making a turducken. I posted an AskMeFi request for advice that yielded some good tips and links (including this thorough and entertaining article which formed the basis of our recipe). Thus in mid-November I stopped by our local butcher to ask about ordering boned poultry. I hesitantly explained what we were going to make while they all just stared at me incredulous. Finally one guy stepped forward and admitted he’d heard about this “turducken” business before. We ended up ordering a 2kg chicken, 2.5kg duck, and 8kg turkey from them and they agreed to do all the tricky boning work. On the day before the party I picked up two giant parcels: one full of meat, and the other full of bones…

Here’s the Snook unwrapping the bag of meat. We had a slight communications problem regarding the duck and the chicken – in addition to boning them, they’d cut them in two! – but Mr. Turkey himself looked beautiful.

Mr. Snook, however, decided that Mr. Turkey needed to have the first bit of his thigh bones removed, as the butcher had left them in. So here he is using a pointy knife to scrape the meat away from the bone.

Still boning. He also removed the first bit of the wing.

Dr. Amy Jones thinks all her Christmasses have come at once!

Here’s the turkey being spread with the cornbread stuffing we made two nights before. We were wary of overstuffing and causing the turducken to split so we tried to go easy with this stuff. (In fact, we opted to only use two of our three stuffings inside the bird and serve the sausage and smoked oyster stuffing on the side.)

Next the duck was laid out and we began spreading the second stuffing: chicken with chestnuts and truffle.

Here’s the completed duck layer. We also grated fresh truffle (courtesy of our friend Toast) on top of the stuffing.

Lastly comes the chicken layer, again spread with the truffle stuffing…

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