Pieces of Turkey

For Thanksgiving this year, I hit a milestone. I roasted a turkey for the first time, and everything turned out really well. Unlike last year, the only blood involved was that in the turkey. Last year I decided to try my hand at making pies, and I even decided to make the crust from scratch for two of the three pies. I used my food processor to make the crust, and as I was pulling the dough out, I sliced my hand on the food processor blade. Then to add insult to injury, everyone raved about the crust I used with the cherry pie, and of course, that pie was made with Marie Callender's crust. I learned my lesson: rather than give my blood (literally), sweat, and tears to a homemade crust, from now on, I'm going to leave that to Marie C. Now that Thanksgiving is over, I know that the turkey turned out fine, but I was pretty worried about it. Wednesday night I tossed and turned. All night long I had vivid dreams (incidentally, none were about turkey or Thanksgiving), and I woke up several times to see what time it was. And what was it that had me so stressed out? Truth be told, I wasn't nervous as much as I was scared. I was afraid of the body cavity. Growing up, I never spent much time in the kitchen, and I never watched my mom prepare a turkey. Most Thanksgiving mornings my dad took me and my siblings on a hike so that we wouldn't be underfoot and in the way. I did watch my mother-in-law prepare a turkey once. Unfortunately, all I could remember was that there were several things I needed to pull out of the turkey and that pins and string were somehow involved.

Of course I made several phone calls to my mom this past week and she gave me lots of help. Watching the first part of Pieces of April as I sliced apples for the pie Wednesday night also gave me some confidence since I was pretty sure that my oven would work, and I wasn't going to use a stuffing mix. But in the end, it was my husband and the turkey bag instructions that got me through this rite of passage. Unlike me, Dan had watched his mom prepare the turkey year after year. So together we cleaned out the turkey, stuffed it, and put it in a bag. The bag was wonderful. Our eighteen pound turkey was finished roasting in two and a half hours instead of four. And everything tasted fine. Some of the stuffing came out looking a little chocolate-y, but my sister and I discreetly disposed of it. So far, no one has complained of food poisoning. And that is the true mark of success in my mind.