Thanksgiving: The Turducken episode - Day 1

This year I decided that in addition to the usual full menu I would tackle a Turducken. The turducken has been getting a bit more attention lately so you have probably heard of it but in case you haven't it is a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken. As I gather, the turducken stems from a fairly long European tradition of multiple bird/beast roasts for elaborate feasts. The ultimate ones I've heard of include a suckling pig, stuffed with a goose, stuffed with a duck, stuffed with a chicken, stuffed with a cornish hen, stuffed with a quail stuffed with foie gras. I contemplated adding the cornish hen and/or quail and foie gras but as I was standing in the grocery store staring at the quail I decided it was too small to debone. Sure, it could be done, but that time was better spent playing with the kids.
    In the States the turkey/duck/chicken combination seams to have started in Louisiana. This is no surprise as Creole cooking is strongly shaped by the French chefs that came to the area. There are a few companies that make these turducken and will ship it to you frozen or you can pick up a frozen one at the grocery store in some places (in Houston try the new HEB on I-10 near Gessner).
    There are some drawbacks to purchasing a prepared turducken. As I gather from comments and  reviews I've found online and in Cook's Illustrated, the layers don't remain properly distributed and only the breast meat is used for the interior birds. Not to mention you miss out on the fun of deboning three birds for one meal.
    So I decided to debone my own birds and make three different stuffings. I started with a 20 pound turkey, a 6 pound duck and a 5 pound chicken. I've deboned many chickens at this point and that helped a lot. I've never deboned a turkey or a duck and if anyone is planning on doing a turducken from scratch I highly recommend doing a few chickens first. Speed is important because you don't want your birds out on the counter for too long. It took me just over 20 minutes to do the turkey. I didn't count on it being so difficult to handle but the weight was an issue and I wasn't strong enough to press the wings and thighs out of joint so I had to cut through them. Otherwise it went well.
    The duck surprised me because although I've cooked whole duck I never had much occasion to notice the flexibility of the bones. They are quite different from chickens in that respect and the duck lays rather flat. APart from that, the duck is fairly similar. It took 15 minutes to debone the duck and I plan to remove the skin before I start layering the birds.
    The chicken was done in 8 minutes. That may seem relatively fast but I remember watching my chef in culinary school debone a chicken in about a minute and a half, slowing down to show us what we were supposed to do.
    With the birds deboned and the stock simmering I'm off to make the desserts...