This is the first year I came seriously close to not having turkey on my table for Thanksgiving. "My Gawd", I see you thinking, "First she stops loving football, and now she's thinking about not serving turkey two days after Thanksgiving. How unAmerican!" Well, yes, color me red, white and boohoohoo. There are only so many things a goyl can take without the help of serious barbituates.

Tom set me back five hours yesterday. Five hours is a mighty long time. Five hours is like three naps and a Miller time all rolled up into one. And he almost killed me. But I will say this, he's a done Tom Turkey.

Some of you who live over here are probably aghast that I found a turkey that big, so big he would not fit in our oven-a full size one for here but still small by American standards. You're probably wondering what a huge French turkey looks like. Well, wipe the image of a round Butterball from your mind. Imagine in its place BB's tall, lanky cousin. That's our turkey. The base of his neck to the tip of his tail was longer than my largest roasting pan-the one that just fits the oven. When in the oven with the rack as low as it can go, Tom's breast touched the top of the oven and his legs stuck out the door about five inches. And while I was able to close the oven door-for all of five seconds before the smoke over took me-doing so meant crushing his legs into the oven's roof where they soon set themselves on fire.

When the laughter died down and my tears dried up, I decided to be very practical about the whole thing. Tom sat patiently on my table covered in herbs and salt and other things to make him taste like something good. I figured why bother roasting him. No one is going to eat his wings or his back. So I figured let's roast his breast and legs, things people might actually eat. Yah! Good answer.

So I set about separating his parts from his other parts and got almost done taking the top of him off when I realized that his innards hadn't been completely taken out. Agh! Lungs and heart were still attached. This is really disgusting. And all at once my body decided to be very pregnant. (Admittedly some of that lost time was spent in the toilets doing something I do very well when knocked up.) After taking a good dose of anti-puke pills, I drug myself next door to enlist the help of my mother-in-law, who found it funny (to say the least) that I needed help scraping innards out of Tom, but then this is a woman capable of killing, skinning and eating the Easter Bunny.

So Tom is cooked. And between his boobies and his legs I have a 9 x 13 pan chock full of turkey. And I have another half million things to do today before the people arrive and start to praise me for my culinary genious. So back to the trenches I shall go and, barring any more disasters in the kitchen, you'll hear more when I've recovered.