“Rock-a-Bye Baby” is still considered the second-most popular song to sing to a crying baby, topped only by “Crazy Train” by Ozzy Osbourne.
-Lincoln Sedlacek, Jordy Greenblatt, and Melissa Chiasson
“Wow, your grip is so strong you could probably crush my trachea with one hand!”
“Stephen Hawking says artificial intelligence could doom us all, but I’ve always viewed it as a positive thing. Why do you ask?”
“Sure, you can use my security clearance to look at defense plans for a robot invasion.”
“It’s weird, sometimes your voice reminds me of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.”
“Congratulations, Obliterator 3000X. The President is dead and the Roomba army has pledged its allegiance to you. Commence operation ‘Destroy the humans’?”
For healthy hair, shampoo, rinse, repeat, and then sing the Rites of Hellarus while kneeling within a six-foot pentagram.
“The perfect book for when you just want to curl up in an armchair next to the fire, but the armchair is wobbly because one leg is shorter than the others.”
—The New York Times
“A must read. Lincoln Sedlacek beautifully captures what it’s like to be a terrible author.”
—Christopher Paolini
“Unbelievable. I refuse to say anything good about this book unless you remove all of the parts with the hamster.”
—Beverly Cleary
“Lincoln Sedlacek has done it again! I keep changing my phone number, but he keeps on managing to call me to ask me for endorsements for his book.”
—George R. R. Martin
“America has a new favorite author, and his name is Lincoln Sedlacek.”
—Lincoln Sedlacek
2:35 am: Woman, 35, comes in complaining of numbness in extremities. Upon removal of gloves and socks, frostbite of fingers and toes evident. She reveals she has been camping outside for the past two days to get a cheap foot bath, subsisting on slim jims and “pure adrenaline.” I inform her that I will have to amputate. She promptly bursts into tears, lamenting the fact that the foot bath is of little use to her now. I offer her $15 for it.
4:55 am: Boy, 14, arrives with gunshot wound to anterior thoracic region. Immediately scrub in for surgery, start operation with Dr. Nguyen to stop bleeding and extract bullet. A half hour into the operation, Dr. Wilson charges into the room, carrying shopping bags and exclaiming “Guys, you have got to get down to the mall, these deals are insane! I just saw a kid get shot for a Playstation 4!”
Dr. Wilson glimpses the operating table, slowly backs out of the room.
6:00 am: The nurse brought in six dozen donuts since it was “Buy one, get five dozen free!” They are all lemon-flavored. This day cannot get any worse.
7:05 am: Man, 52, presents with chainsaw superglued to his right palm. He reports that this was his strategy for preventing anyone from taking it from him in the morning scramble at Home Depot. I lie and say there is nothing I can do, hoping that this will cause some introspective reflection on the transient nature of material objects.
He replies, “That’s cool, I think it’s actually pretty badass having a saw for a hand now.”
9:41 am: Girl, 8, is suffering from severe allergic reaction to peanut traces from morning cereal, accompanied by her mother. I order a shot of epinephrine, at which point the mother asks me how much the shot will cost. I assure her that it will be covered by their insurance, and even if she doesn’t have insurance, the hospital will help them with finances. The mother shakes her head. She tells me that they just came from the other hospital in town, and if I can’t beat their price plus 10%, they are leaving.
10:00 am: Turn over all my patients to Dr. Ramos and head home. Drink a cup of coffee while enjoying my new foot bath.
(1) If you’re looking to set some kind of family record, I strongly recommend using your hands for the preparation phase. Some purists will tell you that it doesn’t count if you use your hands in the prep stage, but I think (based on the word ‘cook’) it’s a gray area and it’s still a pretty impressive accomplishment. If you are here because you don’t have functional arms, I would advise you to have a friend come over and do the prep work for you (it should only take them a few minutes anyway).
(2) Before prep you want to preheat the oven to 325 degrees. If it makes you feel better about using your hands in the prep stage, this is pretty easy to do with your mouth.
(3) Safety prep: Because poultry can have salmonella bacteria, always wash the turkey before you cook and then pat it dry. This step is particularly difficult without the use of your hands, because if you try to use your mouth, you’ll probably be more likely to contract salmonella than if you hadn’t even washed it in the first place. On that note, because you will be using your face throughout the process, fill a shallow bucket or small trough with high powered, anti-bacterial sanitizer for face cleansing.
(4) Food prep: Chop carrots and onions to fill the turkey’s cavity. This not only absorbs excess juice, but it provides the hard-to-reach inside with extra flavor. This is where using hands is most crucial. Many a brave cook before you has tried this step hands-free and many a brave cook has wound up crying salty onion tears from his one remaining eye.
(5) Now put those hands behind your back and get started! Use your feet to place a large roasting pan face up on the floor in front of the turkey. Hold the pan in place by firmly planting your feet on either side and pull your knees close to form an impromptu backboard. Slowly use your chin to pull the turkey over the edge of the counter and use your knees and the cabinets below the counter to guide the bird into the pan.
(6) Crawl like a snake on the floor and, using your forehead, nudge the pan so it’s directly in front of your sliced carrots and onions. You want the edge closest to the vegetables to be a few inches away from the counter. A good rule of thumb is to place it 1.5 inches away for each foot the counter is off the ground. Although it’s faster to kick the pan like a soccer ball, precise placement is crucial and you don’t want to risk foot-to-bird contact.
(7) Crouch on the floor and hold the pan firmly in place with your knees. Then use your nose to orient the turkey so that the cavity is straight up in the air, making sure any nose-to-bird contact involves only the bridge of your nose. Then submerge your entire face in antibacterial sanitizer for no less than 5 seconds.
Note: This step requires very flexible thighs and lower back. Also, that sanitizer is gonna burn in your eyes like Dresden. Nobody said it’d be easy.
(8) Using your neck, slowly sweep the vegetables off the counter towards the turkey. Your goal is to get as much as possible into the cavity, although a few pieces in the pan can be nice because they will cook better than the vegetables inside. Some will land on the floor. There’s really no way around that.
(9) Lying on the ground on your back, use your feet to grip the oven handle and pull it down. Then once again crawl like a snake and nudge the turkey gently until it’s directly in front of the oven. If the cavity is still facing up, carefully use your forehead to lay the turkey down for cooking and submerge your face in sanitizer for 5 seconds.
(10) This is probably the most difficult step. Lay on your back with your head facing away from the oven. The pan should be directly between you and the open oven door. Spread your legs and bend your knees as far as you can, preferably so that the heels are within 2 inches of your glutes. Placing your feet under the lip of the pan, press them together firmly, and extend your legs so that the pan’s edge goes over the door. Then slide the pan as far as you can along the door until it’s center of gravity is on the door and it can sit unaided. You may need to writhe around on your back for a while once the edge of the pan clears the oven door if your legs are too short or stumpy.
(11) Now place your toes on the edge of the pan facing you and ease it into the oven. If you can lift it onto a rack, more power to you, but probably you’ll have to settle for leaving the pan on the bottom of the oven. Sometimes you have to compromise for greatness.
(12) Leave the turkey to cook about 13 minutes per pound (12 if you didn’t manage to get a lot of vegetables in there). Every 20 minutes baste the turkey in its own juices and any butter you were able to unwrap using only your teeth. You can hold the baster between the toes of one foot while pressing the pump with the other. Alternatively you can place the entire pump in your mouth and pump with your tongue and cheeks.
(13) When time is up, grip a meat thermometer between your toes and, making sure not to touch the bird directly, check that the inner thigh is at least 165 degrees. Don’t take remove the bird from the oven until it reaches that temperature inside the thigh (away from the bone).
(14) Open the oven door and, with mitts on your feet, hook the lip of the pan with your toes to ease it out of the oven. Once it’s sitting on the oven door about a third of the way off, perform step (10) in reverse to get the pan out of the oven and onto the floor. Let the turkey sit for 15 minutes while your guests to sit down at the table.
(15) Gripping the sides of the pan with your still mitted feet, elevate it 6 inches to a foot off the ground and wobble on your back towards the dining room. Even if it means some extra wobbling, try to find a path without any doors in the way.
(16) Wobble triumphantly into the dining room. Your guests will probably be stunned. If so, you should break the silence with a clever pun like “all hands on deck for the S.S. Delicious Turkey… because I didn’t use them. My hands I mean.”
If you succeeded, you must be one hell of a chef (and probably a pretty good gymnast). Congratulations and happy Thanksgiving from the folks at Put It All on Red. I for one think you deserve a big hand!
Just in case it flew under the radar, that was another hand pun.
I want to begin this press conference by telling the public that I’m sorry. Every year, it’s our goal to bring American citizens a fun, entertaining, and safe Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. And today, we failed at one of those goals. Some – my lawyer, for example, in the conversation we had five minutes ago – would say we failed at all three of these goals. But in my defense, who could have predicted that the parade would go so horribly wrong?
I knew opening the parade with a Hunger Games-themed float might be controversial. The subject matter of the series is admittedly not the most heart-warming. But I loved the idea of the image of Katniss Everdeen shooting a flaming arrow to light a torch of hope and warmth that would lead the parade. Maybe it was slightly out-of-taste to have “tributes” from all five boroughs on the float with her, but the six of them singing “Where Is Love?” from Oliver! really could have been a heart-warming image. I truly believe that.
I will fully admit, however, that no matter how much cheaper it was, we should not have filled the Snoopy balloon just behind that float with highly flammable hydrogen gas.
In light of what happened next, many are criticizing parade organizers for not having proper safety procedures planned. I would like to state, for the record, that we did have emergency protocols in place, in case a balloon deflated or otherwise malfunctioned. We simply did not foresee the instantaneous immolation of the much-loved Snoopy balloon as it careened out of control, shedding blazing bits of material that forced crew members to run for cover.
As an aside: I would like to take a moment to thank the parade’s audio manager for cutting the by-then screaming children’s mics and playing the song “Flash Beagle” instead. It was a stroke of genius for which I cannot possibly thank him enough.
I’d like to preface what happened next by noting that I did not, in fact, approve of the third float in the parade. While I respect PETA’s mission, I felt today was neither the time nor the place to try to induce guilt over the consumption of turkey. The parade’s board of trustees, however, overruled me. So I really couldn’t have done anything to stop the burning, deflated shell of Snoopy from falling upon a large, turkey-filled cage sporting a sign reading, “Give turkeys something to be thankful for!” Nor could I have stopped the well-intentioned but ill-advised decision of one of the float’s crew members to let the turkeys out. Let’s all just be grateful that most of the flaming birds were already too far gone to flee toward the hysterical crowds.
I guess I’d just like to conclude by pointing out that parades always make traffic a nightmare, so the time it took for first-responders to arrive on the scene was actually impressively short. Oh, and whatever PETA says, that fireman’s decision to unleash the full power of the hose upon that poor, suffering turkey was about the most humane thing he could have done.
Oh, but I now recognize that having the Kids Bop float sing full, uncensored versions of Jason Derulo’s “Talk Dirty” was extremely inappropriate. I’m a man who takes responsibility for his mistakes, and that one’s on me.
When I was a kid we never wasted a scrap of food from the holidays. For dessert we would have shards of chocolate bunny from Spring until December 24 and then we’d have stale fruitcakes and spoiled eggnog til Easter. And we never used the stove the entire summer; we just heated our food over extra fireworks from the 4th of July.
Now I didn’t pay $9.99 for a single use giant orange candleholder. I held my tongue when Tara threw out 7 seeds that fell on the floor so I could only roast 91 of them. Then I let it slide when you guys got rid of 0.79 pounds of perfectly good pumpkin meat because you insisted on carving out eyes and a mouth. I hope you realize you’re not fooling anybody; real faces don’t have orange ridges or woody stems.
But I absolutely refuse to throw out the remaining 9.05 pounds because you kids are afraid of a little mold. Cheese has mold. You want to stop eating cheese in this house? As for the wax, I’m pretty sure it’s nontoxic. If you’re worried, it’s okay with me if you pick it out, as long as you put back any bits of pumpkin that stick to it. We all want dessert and we all love pumpkin pie and really I don’t see why this should be any more complicated than that.
Anyway, the discussion’s over because your grandparents are going to be here in 30 minutes and we still gotta get this thing into the oven. The good news is we don’t need the cuisinart because the texture’s about right already. Sam, try to make sure the pumpkin doesn’t collapse before you get it into the crust. And Tara, go upstairs and say goodbye to your parakeet because I’m not buying a damn turkey.
PUT IT ALL ON RED 