encoded notions

You are probably asking yourself what Thanksgiving has to do with zombies. And no, I’m not talking about what your dinner guests become when the L-tryptophan from the turkey kicks in! The answer lies at the end of this story.

So after the big meal at my parents’ house, we were left with a turkey carcass that needed to be soupified. My dad and I had a differencing of opinion concerning how long the bones needed to be boiled.

He put the freshly de-meated bones into boiling water for about 2.5 hours and was going to take them out and let the stock do it’s thermal happy dance alone for awhile. I stepped in and said that he should continue to boil the bones to get all of the connective tissue to donate its natural thickening agents to the liquid. So what he did was to get a fresh pot of water and we transplanted the bones into that pot while he put the source pot of stock into the back of the station wagon outside (since it was below freezing outside).

Long after he went to bed, I continued to tend to the management of the boiling bones—taking a fork to the vertebrae and knocking them apart, moving stuff around, encouraging the bones to give up all of their sweet turkeyish goodness.

While I was playing around with the pot I was watching the Scifi channel. There was a movie playing called All Souls Day: Dia de los Muertos. Just about when I was having fun digging at the marrow in the bones was when I realized that this was a zombie movie and that some character had ripped out another character’s tongue.

Suddenly I felt a little bit like Hannibal Lecter at my stove.

The movie finished and then I put away my meaty toys and went to bed at 4am.