We've less than a week until Thanksgiving (here in Canada, Thanksgiving is the second Monday in October) so I thought I'd point out a couple of unusual ways to cook your Thanksgiving turkey.
The first is the Trash Can Turkey recipe from RecipeZaar. The intro blurb states: "A whole turkey roasted upright on a stake under a metal trash can. The moistest, tastiest turkey I've ever eaten. This is a Boy Scout Recipe. It's just great!"
And the second... oh, you won't believe this. Somebody's figured out how to cook turkey in the compost bin. Get this:
Malcolm Beck, composter extraordinaire and owner of Garden Ville in San Antonio, has a great composted turkey dinner story. He composts in large static piles (8+ feet high) turned every couple of weeks to a month or so, and some of his mixes maintain very high core temperatures for over a week after turning. Being an experimental sort, he decided one recent Thanksgiving to try cooking a few turkeys in one of his piles. He drilled a hole into one of the pile cores (I think it was shredded brush, sawdust, and manure, moistened with waste cola) and lowered a few carefull wrapped turkeys double-sealed in plastic bags by rope into the core (reading between 160 and 180 degrees F) and re-filled the hole.
Several hours later he retrieved the turkeys, too hot to touch, and reports that they were among the tenderest, juiciest, flavorful turkeys he ever ate. I would imagine that in this case, Pasteurization was adequate for relatively safe dining. As in most of his experiments, he documented the enterprise with slides.
And you thought deep fried turkey was unusual!
Update
Here's another one you should read, kids:
How the turkey nearly cooked our goose ("The flames shot 10 feet into the air out of the old, rusty barrel smoker in the backyard as we stood dumbfounded.") From the Christian Science Monitor, November 2003.