So, flash back to several days ago: Anne was cooking things in the oven, and they were just going …wrong: bread was burning, cakes were coming out uneven, the oven was just acting funny. A quick check with the thermometer and she confirmed that the oven’s thermostat was malfunctioning, and a look inside the oven showed one side wasn’t even firing. Our oven was on the fritz.
Our oven was on the fritz, that is, three days or so before we hosted Thanksgiving. Maybe it’s just the thermostat, but the last time the repairman came out (to fix the thermostat if I remember correctly), he said we needed a new oven — if we even got a repairman out before the holiday we would probably not be able to get parts, much less a new oven, in time. A turkey, a ham, many side dishes and pies and cakes, and 17 guests coming — what to do?
Well, first we panicked, but then Anne did a bit of research and we decided to cook the turkey in the wood-fired outdoor oven — the wonky indoor one, with some supervision, would work well enough for the (pre-cooked) ham as well as those side dishes that couldn’t be repurposed to range-top cooking, and guests would bring plenty of their own food. The only real hit would be the extra work of starting and running the fire.
This mostly fell to me, and was a two day process. We got up early Wednesday and I got a fire going, and fed it periodically during the day while doing other prep chores. This fire was just a pre-heat to get some temperature into the core thermal ballast; all we cooked on Wednesday was the pizza we had for dinner. A little measurement told us the whole turkey, with a pan big enough to cook it, wouldn’t fit in the oven, so Anne split the bird in half as part of the prep, while I got the fire going again Thursday morning. At around 900 degrees we put the bird in to brown, then we put it back in again when the temperature was down around 500. It cooked in just under two hours, and it came out fabulous. Everything else was awesome too, and the whole day was a fun success.