Cooking makes my mood soar, but not if it’s turkey dinner. I prefer meals where I can do a short flight each evening for a couple of days beforehand. Then on the day-of, gently ascend, spend a few hours at cruising altitude, perform a loop or two, enjoy an inflight drink, and land it gently. The time I roasted turkey, I couldn’t find my helicopter setting and deputized two passengers to avoid splatting on the runway. Failure. 

Unlike my mother. She’d begin the flight to turkey dinner at dark o’clock. After a gradual ascent, she’d pull back the throttle to rise into the clouds and begin more intense winging. She flipped into helicopter mode shortly before mealtime and dropped thousands of feet vertically to set all the elements of the meal on the table. She knew this mode - as a farmwife, cooking involved no aerobatics or cocktails, just uncomplicated commuter flights brought down with precision three times a day.

I love a turkey dinner though, so on a whim on Thanksgiving, I make the call - one turkey dinner, dark meat only, take-out. I was relieved my local diner wasn’t sold out.  

The packaging screamed "no climate crisis” — plastic, paper, then plastic again. I decanted onto a plate from the cupboard. It was my parents’ wedding china and for 60 years, turkey was all it held, coming out as it did just on special occasions. Now they’re my everyday plates. As I loaded up, I noted no Brussels sprouts which troubled me. I was consoled by carrots, mushrooms, and roasted yellow pepper, the latter two deviations from the traditional, no doubt the result of the diner’s Greek ownership.  

While pouring a glass of red, I sampled a mushroom as an amuse-bouche. My teeth slid through its skin, squirting its earthiness into my mouth. The Greeks may be on to something. I sampled the elements on the plate, crunching a carrot stick that had been kissed by a frypan. Potatoes, that could affix wallpaper to a wall, and the stuffing, which could be from a box, were saved by church-supper-worthy gravy.  

I pierced a shard of drumstick and nestled some cranberry beside it on the back of the fork with my knife, just as I was taught. Sure, I missed grabbing the end of the leg bone, navigating around the tendons, and gnawing the cartilage. (And where the hell was the skin?) But the flavour was there! You could line a turkey up beside a Cornish hen, a chicken, and a duck, and make the correct conclusion — while other flavours are fleeting, turkey meets the challenge to sustain you until the next holiday. 

If the mushroom was the opening act, I bookended the meal with the pepper. The skin was blistered and pulled away from the flesh lying below which had just the right degree of softness. Sometimes things that shouldn’t be there, in fact should. Looking forward to future turkey dinners with mushrooms and peppers. Maybe tomorrow!

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