Thanksgiven

I just re-read some blogs I wrote from my Thanksgivings spent in Taiwan. I was aware, even as it was happening, that that uniquely American feast became my favorite holiday in those years. It’s important to me to acknowledge that it has been used to whitewash the genocide against Native Americans, and hope that it can be a time of reflection as well as celebrating the harvest season, being with family, and giving thanks.

With the right editing, my first Australian Thanksgiving could have been an episode of a sitcom. I decided to more-or-less single-handedly plan, prepare, and host a feast for a dozenish people. Not a bad conceit. I explained the implications of the event to my roommates and made sure I had their consent. I ordered the turkey a month in advance. I inventoried the kitchen for the appropriate accouterments. I made a Facebook event and I promised an honest-to-god, traditional, with all the trimmings, American event. I had prepared in such a way as to foreshadow the coming conflict.

The week beforehand, the lower element in the oven broke. That’s some lazy writing. The repair person was scheduled to arrive before the fourth Thursday of the month, and friends offered their appliances as backups. But I fell in love with an alternative solution...

I took Wednesday off to shop and prepare. I substituted French’s Fried Onions with packets of Korean fried leeks; I finally found cranberry sauce located adorably in the foreign foods section; I feebly attempted to rig a super-sized basket onto my bike, finally gave up, and Ubered all the food home; I baked casseroles under the broil element using aluminum foil. The action was building and I was dealing with it. While this story, and especially this part, focuses on me, familiar faces popped in and out, offering help or prompting me to explain something about the holiday. Joy, who has become a bit of a recurring character in my life, was literally skydiving, repeatedly, over my neighborhood. And when I saw her purple striped parachute in the background of my day, over the purple jacaranda trees filled with rainbow lorikeets, I might have muttered something pithy about my struggles to an imagined audience. “Boy, rough job!”

The crisis, of course, was the turkey. Despite my best-laid plans, the Leisure Coast butcher helped them astray. Their poulterer had only frozen turkeys of the size required, as all the live ones were being fattened up to peak at Christmas. Totally reasonable, but also something they must have known a month earlier. This frozen beast had to begin thawing immediately.

When at home I unwrapped it, it was not exactly beautiful. Several pin feathers remained and one leg was dangling away from the body. The feathers were fairly easily pulled. The leg might not have been such a problem except they had failed to provide the butcher’s twine they’d promised. The reason you see birds tied up or with funny socks on their feet is because if they are far from the body, they burn. Luckily, one of my roommates seems not to know how to open a burlap sack properly, and the string holding it together was still whole.

As food items go, turkeys are on the large end of the scale. I had planned on having a fresh bird and dry brining it. Now I had just enough time to thaw it, so I’d have to wet brine it simultaneously or not at all. Finding a container that would both contain a turkey and enough water to submerge a turkey, but also fit in the refrigerator, is a bit of a Goldilocks situation. As I started into shelves of veggies and leftovers, Tetrising them in my mind, it occurred to me the spot with the most room in the fridge was also itself a watertight vessel. With the turkey thawing in the crisper drawer, I turned to other prep.

By then, Joy had finished at work and rejoined us here on the ground. Specifically, me in the kitchen as my sous-chef. Together we knocked out the half of the dishes which would be fine or better a day old. That night I had a nightmare about how to remove a 20 lb turkey from a crisper drawer completely full of salty, salmonella-y water.

On Thanksgiving day, I woke up early. I thought of my dad as I cleverly, I think, siphoned the brine into a bucket and neatly removed the turkey to be buttered, salted, and peppered. I chopped mushrooms, I mashed potatoes, and I did the twist. By the time guests started arriving, a bottle of wine was open, dishes were warm in the oven, an extra table was in the dining room, and the aroma of roasting turkey occasionally gusted into the kitchen.

As the hour approached, I showed my early guests to the patio. I lifted up the lid to the barbecue to reveal a sizzling, golden, and (it turned out) juicy turkey. The meat thermometer ticked just up to 165° F. I was almost giddy. Not everything was perfect — I screwed up the gravy such that my veggie alternative was far superior — but it was perfectly Thanksgiving. Roll credits.

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