Turkey: Take I

Apparently Tiffany and I are the only couple to ever make a practice Thanksgiving turkey.

"That sounds like something Nana would do," my brother said when I told him.

Actually, no.

When I told my grandmother, she cackled and said cooking a turkey "is the easiest thing ever."

"Just put it in the oven!"

Thanksgiving, as I've written before (here and here), is my all-time favorite holiday. This is the first year I've spent it away from my family, which is sad, but also the first year Tiffany and I get to host some of her family, which is awesome.

Because we can't provide some of the most basic things for our guests--like a table big enough to sit around or enough chairs in which to sit--we want to make sure the food they're eating off their laps is top quality. Practice turkeys, as they say, make perfect turkeys. Or something like that.

But it turns out cooking a turkey is just like cooking a chicken, which we do all the time, and except for accidentally leaving our paper-wrapped giblets in the cavity (good news, they did not catch fire!), we did just fine.

What we do need is a better knife. As Tiffany tried to saw through a drumstick and wing so we could serve the friends we'd invited over for our experiment, she lost her grip, flinging little bits of skin and dark meat in my direction.

"Hold still," she said, picking one such bit off my forehead.

"Ew," I said.

In any case, now we know what we're doing. What we don't know is what to do with all the left-over practice turkey we have, a week in advance of the left-over real turkey.