How to make the perfect Thanksgiving turkey

In my family the Thanksgiving holiday means togetherness, accompanied by a giant family meal prepared by yours truly. There’s a ritual that I use to get the turkey just right, but I’ll get to that in a minute. If I’m serving a big family meal for the holiday it means several things. Dirty pots and dishes. House cleaning. Three birthdays in two weeks. The beginning of the Christmas holiday, which means figuring out what the perfect gift is. (May I please have a helping of stress please?) Shopping and money. (Those two things come together, so make that a double helping.) And let’s not forget family. With my family, every holiday is memorable. (Order of stress to go please.) Add all of those things together and you’ve got a typical Thanksgiving in our house.

Turkey. It’s pretty standard stuff and yet somehow every year I have a problem. I’m no gourmet cook. I didn’t learn anything about cooking from my Mom when I was young. (This might actually be a good thing since she has started a fire boiling water.) I remember making my first big Thanksgiving dinner twenty years ago as clearly as if it was yesterday. I did everything according to the directions. Yet, on Thanksgiving morning the turkey was still partially frozen. I called my Dad, which is who I call whenever anything goes wrong to this day. He came over and spent hours sitting with me getting the turkey taken care of and trying to teach me how to make one. Who knew you had to pull a bag of gross stuff out of the turkey’s butt?! Dinner turned out fine. Dad didn’t know it then, but a ritual had been born.

Every year now I call my Dad on Thanksgiving morning at about 6am and tell him I need his help with the turkey. Once in a while I actually do. Sometimes I do. Okay, I usually do. My turkeys are still usually not thawed enough. Sometimes they have feathers in them. Frequently the turkey I’ve picked up has no popper. One year they had extra bones we couldn’t figure out where they came from. One year my baster broke. Another year I couldn’t fit the damned bird into the oven.

After the turkey is underway we chat for a bit and he heads home. Then I finish cleaning while hubby peels the potatoes and gets the veggies going. A couple of hours later Dad comes back and he helps me make the mashed potatoes. Ten pounds of potatoes are heavy for a delicate flower such as myself you know. Seriously, my Dad makes the best mashed potatoes ever. It’s now about 2 pm and hubby or Dad carve the turkey and we can finally eat.

It’s well known that turkey makes you sleepy, but except for my sister in law there’s no nodding off at my house on Thanksgiving. There’s always something crazy going on. For years the first thing that we did after placing the food on the table was to let it get cold. Why ? Because we were waiting for the brother that’s always late. (We finally stopped waiting for him about 2 years ago.) On to the actual meal. Odds are good that I might be spotted crying at some point during the course of the meal. It isn’t unusual for someone to somehow start a HUGE argument with my Mom. We’ve usually got someone that’s had too much to drink. We’ve had a vehicle stolen. Well actually it wasn’t stolen, it was accidentally repossessed. We’ve had a food fight (started by my Mom, I might add). If you think this sounds interesting, wait until you see what happens when I invite a friend to join us. It actually gets worse, because since more people are there things get louder and of course you have to add the embarrassment factor!

It’s hard to believe that this will be the twentieth anniversary of cooking my first Thanksgiving dinner. If there had been a Turkey TalkLine back then, or if there was and I knew about it, I might not have called my Dad and started a ritual. No matter what happens, I’m sure this year will be interesting.

So. You wanted to know how to make the perfect Thanksgiving turkey? I don’t know. Mine dinners have never been perfect, but they are always memorable. Just like a perfect meal should be.

This post was written for Parent Bloggers Network as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by Butterball.

Filed Under: Family • House and home

Tags: holidays, thanksgiving