Surviving My First Turkey Dinner: An Internal Clash of the Cults

A wise friend, Peter Drost, once remarked: "Families are like cults." His thesis was this: You grow up within your family cult and all of the strange idiosyncratic things they do seem normal to you. You only begin to see the 'weirdness' when you bring in an outside party - i.e., a significant other - who begins to point out all of the things that seem very 'strange'. Of course, this works both ways. This overall process becomes more acute when you marry the significant other and begin to create your own blended cult. (Some may wonder where Jason fit in all of this below, but that will have to be the subject of another post.)

My Mom is a great cook. She has always made great family dinners. I can't recall a single instance where the roast didn't meet her expectations or, heaven forbid, eat a dry turkey. She has done this for many years with varying degrees of help from immediate family members. Because she has survived these feasts, and now has grown children who can take on the baton, she no longer worries about the headaches and hassles. She just gets to eat wonderful meals.

This Easter, I invited some of my family to dinner. I still don't have enough places for everyone to sit so I only had my parents and my sister and her family. In total we were 7 adults and 2 very quick moving kids. I busily shopped in the days leading up to the event. On Friday, I busily cleaned the house and tidied many things that hadn't yet been dealt with since we moved in. On Saturday (the day of the dinner), I finished any remaining cleaning, final trip to the grocery store for items not yet purchased, and prepared the turkey and fixings (potatoes and veggies). Fortunately, my sister volunteered to make her stuffing and dessert, so that was a huge relief. But, I wondered how long should I cook the turkey??

I did what any over-educated woman does, particularly when her husband is a computer scientist, I looked on-line and over-thought the whole affair. I searched various websites and noted that each one had a different length of time posted to cook my 12 pound turkey. Moreover, there were multiple ways of preparing the bird (tenting vs not, shallow pan vs slightly deeper roaster, etc.). In my family cult, my Mom would put in her bird sometime in the morning and forget about it until it was time to carve. I figured I would do this, but...

The web 'experts' stated a 12 pound bird should only require 3.5 to 4 hours to cook, and slightly less if you don't pre-stuff the bird. I even learned that given the new turkey breeds (they are bred to have more white meat than dark) require less cooking time than the 'old' breeds. Cooking times also vary based on size of pan, whether the bird is covered in foil or not, etc. The danger throughout all of this: the dreaded dry turkey!

Wanting to eat dinner at 6PM would dictate a 2PM start. I compromised at 1:30. While the turkey turned out extremely juicy, and had attained the recommended internal thermometer reading of 185 degrees F, it looked anemic. This is because, I combined my Mom's approach of covering the bird but didn't include my Mom's 'insert in morning and ignore until ready'. I worried that if I removed the foil too early, the bird would dry out. I was bringing in my family cult and my new computer savvy cult (i.e. the Jason influence). After a bit of broiling, the skin obtained a nice golden colour. I nonetheless caused myself infinite grief and stress over something so minor. But the reality is, I wanted to "succeed" in producing a smoothly run operation similar to that provided by my Mom for countless years, and has been provided by my sister in the past.

In the end, the dinner was great and fun was had by all (at least that's what they tell me).

I did introduce something from Jason's cult - butternut squash. While available in Winnipeg, I had never eaten butternut squash before meeting Jason and experiencing a big family dinner at his Mom's. From that moment on, butternut squash became one of my all-time favourites with any fowl feast.

The butternut squash verdict by the Driedger-cult household: "it will never replace turnip for me". NOTE: In the Driedger-cult household, turnip has never (to my recollection) been served with fowl - only with roasts of beef or pork, so I don't fully understand the response.