VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – It’s the holidays, and for a lot of people that means a time to feast with family and friends.
    
If you’re looking to put on a bit of a show at your holiday table, and you can handle this much meat, why not try a turducken?
    
“It’s a full turkey that’s deboned, except for the drumsticks and wings, and then you layer in chicken, duck and sausage stuffing,” says Mike Moser at Echelon Foods in Calgary. “You put it all together and sew it up and it looks like a turkey heading into the oven.”
    
A turkey packed solid with meaty goodness! You can probably thank the Europeans for this protein bomb.
    
“There’s a bit of dispute if you do a Google search on this, but it tends to be a European item, probably from the middle ages when they were stuffing pheasants with a variety of different products. That was transported over to Louisiana as a Cajun product about 35 or 40 years ago,” Moser explains.
    
And you don’t have to be an aspiring chef to prepare a turducken, at least if you buy one already prepared.
    
“It’s simple. That’s the beauty of it — all of the work is already done for you. You put it in the oven, we recommend a low, slow temperature, maybe seven hours at 220 degrees, and it’s ready to go.”  Since it is boneless, Moser says even turkey manglers can carve it. Using a slow cooker or barbecue are also popular and easy ways of preparing turducken. The only surefire way to wreck it is to to drop it in a deep fryer.
    
“You get that a fair bit in the US. With a turkey, the middle is hollow, right? With this one, the middle is solid so if you deep fry it, by the time the inside is cooked properly the outside is extremely well done,” says Moser.
    
Like “lump of coal” well done.
    
Turduckens are generally sold by weight, typically costing $85-$100 but will easily feed 15 people. They can be found at specialty butchers and many local supermarkets.