If I have to eat Turkey, can it be this part?

 

            

Happy Thanksgiving to you all! This year I’m thankful, again, for so many things, but one big one is that yesterday, thanks to my commitment to the Nanowrimo challenge here in November, I managed to finish the first draft of Abracadabra: A Max Marchino Mystery.  True, it’s the most messed up first draft I’ve ever written.  It’s a mystery, and I was fairly positive no less than five times during the writing who the guilty party would be. I was wrong every time.  But the good news is that I didn’t make any changes along the way so now, during the second draft work, I get to make sure I have all my literary ducks in a row.  That should be fun.  Oh, and for more funsies, I also changed the names of half the characters at least once. I put all my trust in the find and change feature on Windows.

            Yeah.  So that’s sure to be fun.

            Anywhoo, I’m not here to bemoan my rough draft woes. It’s Thanksgiving which means it’s time for another tale from my younger years.  Or, as some people like to call it: stories that make it clear why Sarah is the way she is.

            We in America take a moment to pause in November to give thanks for the blessings we’ve been given.  And for football.  And for shopping.  And yes, we also stuff ourselves with way more food than anyone needs.  But mostly that thankful for blessings part.

            I'd like to pause in all this thankfulness to lodge one tiny little complaint:

            Turkey is gross. Why do we have to make turkey and pretend to like it?

            Oh come on. Turkey, 364 days a year, is the meat you eat when you're not supposed to eat meat.  It's the healthy option when your cholesterol is out of whack.  It's the preferred selection when you're trying to lose weight.  Turkey, to put it bluntly, blows.  Especially the white meat.

            Who decided white meat was so great?  I remember sitting in a restaurant with my one of my Tantes (that's a German word that means "aunt" and it's the word my family has always used for the sister or sister-in-law of the grandparent.) and she ordered a chicken dinner, but was very specific that she only wanted white meat. And all I could think was...WHY?  

            The white meat of any fowl is, without exception, dry, tasteless, and pointless.  There's a reason boneless, skinless chicken breast is the choice of dieters everywhere.  It's zero on the taste scale.  In order to make white meat of a turkey or a chicken taste good, you have to inject it with stuff, rub it with stuff, and stuff it with...stuff.

            You know who doesn't have to do that?  People who eat dark meat.

            How do I know dark meat is better?  Because God didn't put all the much dark meat on a bird.  God, well, the one I worship anyway, has always been sort of a 'you don't want too much of a good thing' sort of deity.  (And before you get all up in arms, my Christian friends, I'm not talking about the general plan of salvation or Jesus. I'm talking about dark meat on birds.  Calm yourselves.)  Need money?  Sure, but not too much. Need a house? Okay, but not too big. Need dark meat for Thanksgiving?

        Oh yeah, God said, but only two legs.  Maybe some on the wing, but a turkey wing is going to be such a big, bony affair, no one's going to bother with it.  

        Now, my favorite part of a chicken is the thigh. But do turkeys have thighs?  Nope. So, on a turkey,  the only source of delicious, moist, flavorful dark meat that doesn't turn into a knot of rope in your mouth while you're trying to chew it are the two legs.

        That might be enough for a normal family with a couple kids and a bunch of grown ups who all want the white meat.  (I don't know who they think they're fooling.  Sure, eat the white turkey meat.  But when you dump 8 gallons of gravy on it so you can choke it down, guess what?  The scale isn't going to give you credit for eating white meat.)  But my family was a little different.

        Thanksgivings for me growing up almost always included at least one of my mom's brothers, if not both, their wives, my grandparents, and my seven cousins.  When you throw in my brother, that's nine kids.  Nine kids begging for dark meat.  Nine kids and two legs.

        Jesus could have made it work, but my mother and my aunts? Not a chance.

        one other thing: In order to save time and space on the table, my mom and aunts ALWAYS made the turkey the night before thanksgiving, then cut it up and served it on a plate, with white and dark meats segregated into little piles on the platter.  And here's how we got served.

        the adults: Who took white meat.

        The babies and wee little kids the adults had to serve: who took dark meat.

        My older cousins who walked faster than I did from the kids' table to the main table: Where they got dark meat.

        My brother and younger cousins who, unrestrained by the parental admonition: "You're old enough to know better" would run to the big table where they got, yes, you guessed it, dark meat.

        And that left good old Sarah.  Sarah, who lived under threat of losing TV privileges if she embarrassed her parents in front of the family. Sarah, who was, by nature, not as loud or forceful as the rest of the cousins.  And Sarah, who, by the time she got to the table, wound up having to eat white meat because all the dark meat was gone.

        But, before you feel sorry for that little girl, ponder this: I might not have been as loud, or as forceful, or as amusing or smart or pretty or talented as the rest of the bunch.  But I was lightyears ahead of my cousins in one area:  Creative problem solving.  Given enough information and time, I can solve the crap out of any problem (except for most of my own LOL) in a way that few others have thought of.

        These days I use my power for writing.  But when I was a kid, before I got serious about entertaining people with the written word, I used my powers to solve my little kid problems in creative ways.  

      Which is how, the year I turned nine, the turkey NECK became my favorite part of the Thanksgiving bird. I remember that first neck even now, all these decades later. We were at my aunt's house.  She'd made the bird the night before, and was finishing up the carving. The next step in the process for her was to make the gravy out of the drippings in the roasting pan.  I peered over the edge of the pan and saw a long, sort of tube-shaped meat-covered thing in the pan.  My nine year old brain couldn't process what I was looking at, so I asked the adults.

        "Oh that's the neck," my aunt said.  "Go ahead you can have that."

        I don't know if you know what a cooked turkey neck looks like, but I will tell you that eating that first neck was an amazing, eye-opening moment in my culinary life.  the meat on the neck takes work to get at and there's literally only one way to do it: you much gnaw on it. There's no polite way to eat the meat off a turkey neck.  It's all knotted and twisted around the neckbones.  But it is the loveliest, tenderest, most flavorful part of that stupid bird.

        So there I stood in my aunt's kitchen, gnawing on the thing and ripping the juicy strips of dark meat away from those tiny bones.  And then at dinner, I didn't have the sad face. I told the adults, "I do'nt need any turkey. I ate the neck!"

        Admittedly, that first year everyone laughed at me and my parents scolded me later for being weird and embarrassing them.  (I'm going to take this moment to point out that my childhood foibles, while embarrassing, couldn't hold a candle to what my brother was going to put them through in his teen years.  But that's another blog for another day.)  Every year after that, however, the neck made its way to the platter of carved meat and then on to my plate. And yes, my cousins mocked me for looking like a dork while eating neck meat. Please. My entire life was a string of one group or another making fun of me. At least with the neck meat I was getting something good out of it.

        Even now, I'm an old lady, and I still request that I get the neck, and only the neck. Let the kids or the adults with taste buds have the legs. I'll take the neck every time.

        Of course, if we could, as a collective mind, give up the notion that turkey is the meat for Thanksgiving, and maybe we switch it out with a nice rack of lamb or a big pork shoulder roast, that would be great.  But until then, as long as I'm forced to eat turkey, it's going to be the neck. 

        

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!