“It’s so easy to dream of the days gone by,
it’s so hard to think of the times to come.
But the grace to accept each moment as a gift,
is a gift that is given to some.”
— “Thanksgiving Eve,” by Bob Franke
On the fourth Wednesday in November there is a relaxing of shoulders and a sigh of relief as Norman Rockwell comes alive in homes across the nation. Thanksgiving is near. There’s a cozy fire in the wood stove. People think the best of each other. Time to get out the guitar and try to remember “Thanksgiving Eve,” substituting whatever chords might work. The bird will be just about thawed in the refrigerator and it will be a good one because turkey is a people magnet.
THE TURKEY
Here at Woodshed Kings we get those organic, free-range turkeys. You know, the ones raised with love and killed by conflicted hippies in earth shoes with the last sounds in a gobbler’s consciousness being the Grateful Dead singing “Brokedown Palace.”
Organics are more like your grandparents’ turkeys; fed what turkeys have evolved to eat with no antibiotics and they get to run around more. As a bonus you’re supporting family owned organic farmers. They cost about twice as much as the others but they’re a good investment because people are highly motivated to wring every calorie out of them. Figure one of them feeds eight or ten people at dinner. You send guests home with enough left-overs for another meal. On the day after Thanksgiving you pick the turkey then boil the bones and pick them for soup stock, mix up a big batch of soup that will be enough for a dozen more meals. Add some of the picked meat to the soup and freeze it. Use the rest of the meat in turkey/stuffing/cranberry sauce sandwiches over the next few days. If ingredients for the entire meal (not counting alcohol) from turkey to pie cost a hundred twenty dollars and you get 34 meals out of it, you’re looking at three dollars and change per meal. Plus you can roast the turkey skins with salt like potato chips.
MY GRANDPARENTS’ TURKEY
My grandmother would have become a Hare Krishna before she would have roasted her turkey unstuffed or with the breast down. It wasn’t done. Today a lot of people do it that way. Food bloggers go round and round about which is best. Stuffed turkey takes a little longer to prepare and cook, you have to time things so that the stuffing is done without drying out the meat, and it’s a little more work—if you call getting up every once and a while to baste it work. The smells and flavors are worth it. You want a sturdy roasting pan (good ones are cheap and they last forever), a stainless steel or Plexiglas turkey baster and a meat thermometer. Remember the temperature will rise a few degrees while the bird is resting after you take it out of the oven.
GRANDMA’S STUFFING
neck and giblets
6 cups water
1 onion peeled and chopped very fine
1 bag Pepperidge Farms stuffing*
4 links breakfast sausage, uncooked, peeled
Figure around 3/4 cups stuffing per pound of turkey. Stuffing is always the first thing we run out of. I usually use half-again of the last four ingredients, mix them with the giblets, put the excess in a buttered bread pan and bake that in the last hour and a half with the turkey. Baste them at the same time.
Start this an hour before you’re going to put the turkey in the oven. Remove neck and giblets from bird. If there’s any ice still in the body cavity rinse the cavity with cold water and pull out the ice. Put the bird back in the refrigerator. Put neck and giblets in the water, bring to a boil then simmer half an hour. While that’s happening chop the onion and pull the cases off the sausages. Take neck and giblets off the stove and spoon them onto a plate to cool. Save the water (!) from the giblets. Set it outside to cool enough to handle. Pick meat off the neck, chop it. Grate the giblets. When the water is cooled, but still warm, begin mixing everything in a large bowl, using your clean fingers. Add about four and a half cups of the warm giblet water slowly until it feels right. The objective is for the whole mess to be the consistency of moist oatmeal.The bread will absorb water so let it sit a few minutes then check consistency before you stuff the bird.
* Stuffing evolves as we all must. My grandmother used stale bread crumbs, Kennedy crackers (still available as Vermont Common Crackers from the Vermont Country Store) and Bell turkey seasoning. My grandfather had to have his stuffing just so, to the point that one year, when a relative did the cooking and made cornbread stuffing, Gramp got through it politely, went out next day, bought all the ingredients and, the following Sunday made the entire meal over again with his stuffing. With that dynamic, when my mother switched to Pepperidge Farm she didn’t tell him. He raved about how good it was and got really mad at her when she ‘fessed up. Great-grandmother used to put lard in her stuffing in addition to the sausage. Back in those days people just worked it off. My grandmother decided lard was over the top and eliminated it.
MISS RUDOLPH THE VOODOO LADY
Turkey stuffing it is my moment to launch into Richard Pryor’s “Little Feets” routine where he takes Mudbone to get healed by Miss Rudolph the Voodoo Lady. I’m not sure what year I started doing this but it seems to earn me a lot of counter space. By the time I get to the disappearing tarantula and, “I don’t care if she’s in Timbuktu, the …… got a turkey coming from me.” somehow I’ve got the kitchen pretty much to myself.
Stuff the neck (smaller) cavity first. Fold skin over stuffing then turn wings back at the wrist joints to hold the flap in place. Put breast side up in a buttered roasting pan then fill the larger body cavity with stuffing. Melt half a stick of butter and rub over the bird. Bake in 325 degree oven. Cooking time, stuffed or unstuffed, depends on weight and is printed on the bird wrapper. Baste every twenty minutes or so. It takes about an hour before enough juice comes out of the bird for easy basting so you may need to rub it again with some butter on the first baste.
One other thing my grandmother sometimes did was to mix a paste of half butter and half flour which she would daub onto the turkey in the last two hours of cooking. When she basted this it would turn into amazing, savory, melt-in-your-mouth crusty bits. For us ravenous kids, and my grandfather, too, it was part of Thanksgiving to distract grandma from her basting so we could get a pinch of that.
At some point the guests arrive, including dogs who are sure Nirvana will smell like Thanksgiving. Reinforcements appear in the kitchen. Things get busy. By some miracle, organized by my wife, mashed potatoes, gravy, squash, salad, rolls and hot cranberry sauce all land on the table at the same time as the turkey. It’s a singular gathering without stress and where the only controversy will be whether we should take a walk before pumpkin pie or after. And at the end of the day, whether people come to our place or we go there to theirs, whether we have the pie first or the walk, whether it’s this stuffing or that, breast side up or down, there is a lot to be thankful for when we look around the table and realize we belong.
Dick Callahan is a Juneau writer. In April 2016, he won first place in the Alaska Press Club Awards for best outdoors or sports column in the state.
