Talkin' Turkey

Thanksgiving has always been a time to gather with friends and/or family, and spend the day enjoying their company while eating more food than you would normally consume in a week's time. But the gathering has always been a location that I travel to. A destination. We've never had Thanksgiving in our home- not in the traditional sense, at least.

When I left the nest many many years ago, I moved into an apartment, and continued to live in apartments right up until I bought this home in the woods. These various multi-family living spaces all shared a number of similarities over the years, one of which was the accursed electric stove. I cannot say enough in condemnation of the electric stove. It is a working of great evil upon this earth, and may yet someday prove to be the downfall of the civilization of man! Have you ever tried to cook rice on one of these beasts??? AARGHH!! Ahem... for those of you who would like to take a moment to defend the electric stove, telling me of the great technological advances in recent years and the spiffy new "rice" setting that the latest models undoubtedly come equipped with... let me give you a platform upon which to speak. But first, before you begin, let me put my fingers in my ears and say: LA LA LALALA LA LA LA LA! FOO FOO FOO FOO FOO FOO FOO!! ICANTHEARYOU!! NYAH!!! NYAH!!!!

Are you finished? Good. Now, to move on to the point of this entry.

Moving into this house gave me access at long last to a gas powered stove, and for the first time I've been able to cook properly since I moved out of my parent's house. But my years of inferior cooking surfaces left me feeling unsure of myself and my food preparation abilites. A bit inadequate. It has been a long and hard road of recovery, but I finally felt that this was the year. The year that I would stuff a turkey into the oven and attempt to feed family members a glorious meal without accidentally killing them.

Step One: Finding test subjects. I gave a call to all of our immediate family members (because they are the most blindly trusting and ultimately forgiving), and invited them to join Staci and me for a sumptuous feast. Staci's parents and brother were available *and* willing to sign all the accident waiver forms, so I was in business! For the record, my own parents and brother had already committed to Turkey at another locale. It's not like they knew of some sort of inherent dangers from personal experience and opted out. I am not a bad cook, even if I don't win any culinary awards.

Step Two: Building the menu. It seems that there are a great many ways to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner, from suspiciously simple to freakishly complex. Luckily for me, our local supermarket chain had published a delightful little brochure on the "perfect turkey dinner" in "three hours or less." This turned out to be more of a guideline than an actual instruction manual, since a closer inspection of the side dishes revealed a frightening level of experimentation that we were ultimately unwilling to engage in. So I turned to my old friend, the internet. If you have never gone to the internet to search for recipes, I highly recommend you take a day or two to peruse the series of tubes marked "food". They say that the largest source of traffic on the net is porn, and if that's true then food must come in at a close second. I sifted through hundreds of recipes on multiple websites before finally selecting some interesting looking stuffing (I suppose it's called "dressing" when you cook it outside the turkey as I ultimately did), and sweet potato recipes that didn't involve painfully complicated instructions. These combined with a salad, my mother's mashed potato recipe, the turkey (obviously), and enough chips/dips/veggies/rolls to make an Atkins dieter weep, and we were good to go!

Step Three: Shopping. Have you ever shopped for a Thanksgiving dinner? UGH. 'Nuff said. I will elaborate only to tell you that disaster was barely averted in the purchase of the turkey itself. The internet, for some ungodly reason, informed me that the proper size of a turkey was roughly a pound per person - a pound and a half if you want leftovers. This ratio was confirmed on several websites (evil websites run by Thanksgiving saboteurs, apparently). A quick calculation and the addition of a mythical sixth dinner guest to accommodate for the eating capacity of Staci's brother and father (and maybe me too... ^_^) led me to the estimate of eight or nine pounds being about right. Staci's mother set me straight, by indicating that an eight pound turkey might feed five very small, anorexic people who had just eaten a large lunch. But for a group like us (perhaps the polar opposite of small and anorexic), a turkey would most certainly need to be twice that size. She was ultimately right on the money - disaster averted!

Step Four: Preparing the meal. I now understand why this is only done once a year. For those of you who do it again on Christmas... what are you, crazy??? Let me just say that three hours was an aggressive estimate. From start to finish was closer to four hours, and I don't think I stopped moving the entire time. On top of that, Staci's brother jumped in for a great deal of that time to assist me. The poor foolish boy would ask me if I needed help, and would instantly find himself doing one of of the many menial and back breaking chores. Peeling, chopping, de-boning. I felt a tad guilty sticking him with the grunt work, but he's young and resilient so he recovers faster than me! Without his assistance, the prep time might of gained another hour, or perhaps I would have just crumpled into a lifeless ball in the center of the kitchen about halfway through. As it was, the preparation went off pretty much without a hitch. We'll discuss the "pretty much" qualifier in the next section.

Step Five: EATING!! It was delish. A couple of hiccups did ultimately surface. Firstly, I burned the dressing. Following timed directions is a mistake in Thanksgiving prep when you've never tested your oven for such things before (or even when you have - I've been told that turkeys never cook the same way twice, and I believe it.) Fortunately it turned out that the dressing was good *even though* it was burned. I can't wait to try it again under optimal conditions - it'll probably knock our socks off. The second hiccup was a surprisingly bland sweet potato recipe. Ah well, what can you do but toss it out and try another one next year. The final hiccup was that the turkey didn't quite cook through to the center. This turned out to be at least partially due to the fact that I didn't remove the bag of "giblets" from the turkey. I thought that a turkey only had one body cavity, see? So when I pulled all the junk out of one side, I thought I was done. Laugh if you like, but patting down a 16 pound carcass with oil and spices is disturbing enough, and reaching inside of it was doubly so. I didn't examine it more than I had to... or thought I had to. The turkey was tasty anyways, so no harm done. In the end, there was more than enough to eat for everyone, and we ate almost to bursting. Just as our forefathers intended.

Step Six: Resting. Four hours of cooking followed by an hour of eating is almost as grueling as a hike of the same length through the woods! I was incredibly exhausted, but also happy and deeply satisfied both physically and mentally. The dinner was a roaring success! So at the fruitful end of my quest to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner, you might ask the telling question: Would I ever do it again? I answer with a resounding yes... of course I would... er... probably.

...Eventually.

Ask me again in October.