For the past 12 years or so, it has been my responsibility to cook the turkey for my family's Thanksgiving dinner. Believe it or not, even with my mom being the accomplished cook that she is, she has never cooked a Thanksgiving turkey! Until they passed away in 1996, one of my grandmothers always cooked the turkey. So, for the first Thanksgiving without them, my mom declared we would not have turkey. I balked at this, so she said, "Well, you cook it, then." So I did.
I went online and found Martha Stewart's recipe for roasting a turkey, and bought a turkey from the grocery store. I followed her instructions and got a 12 lb turkey. Sounds reasonable, right? Well, apparently since my family is small (only 4 of us at dinner that year), we usually got a turkey breast instead of the whole turkey! Consequently, we had turkey leftovers, casseroles, and soups for weeks after Thanksgiving! The turkey was fabulous, though...juicy and tasty, so I was nominated as "turkey chef" for the remainder of my days. And, believe it or not, all of them have been pretty good. There have been a few fiascos of course...one year we almost had "Thanksgiving Chicken" instead, but all in all I've been pretty proud of my turkey-roasting skills. I actually look forward to cooking the turkey each year. Since '96, I think I've only missed a couple of years...traveling one year, and my first Thanksgiving here in Annapolis that I spent all by myself and ate chicken fingers.
This year, I'll be flying into SC late Wednesday night, and back on Saturday. Since I can't take leftovers on the plane and my parents can't eat that many leftovers, we decided to forgo cooking dinner. Instead, we're going to spend the day in Charleston and have our Thanksgiving meal at Magnolia's. Not too shabby, eh? The culinary snob in me is certainly looking forward to that meal! They do have turkey on the menu for Thanksgiving, but I doubt I'll be ordering it.
While I'm ridiculously excited about eating at Magnolia's, part of me is a little sad that I won't get to cook the turkey this year. I was reading all the Home magazines with info about cooking turkeys, Thanksgiving meals, etc...and I got nostalgic and a little sad. I thought about how much I'd miss the basting process, the turkey sandwiches afterwards, having turkey tetrazzini in the freezer for rushed pre-rehearsal meals during the crazy Christmas singing season, the turkey noodle soup...and I decided that I'm going to cook my own Thanksgiving meal the weekend before Thanksgiving! It's the only time I have time to cook, and even then it will be a bit pushed with running, a singing gig and opera to attend that evening. I will perservere, though! I may end up having the meal by myself...which sounds sad but really isn't since it's not actually on Thanksgiving, and my whole point of cooking the turkey is for the leftovers. My roommate will be in Paris (very jealous!), but perhaps I can find some other friends in town to join me. If nothing else, I'm sure Marcello the kitten will be quite happy to sit at the table with me and snack on some turkey!
To document the process, I'll try to take some pictures and post them here for your enjoyment!
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