Tap’s American readers are doubtless checking the site today out of a sense of duty and responsibility (thank you), in between the brining and basting of turkey for our annual celebration of giving smallpox to the Native Americans Thanksgiving.
The big day is tomorrow, and it is on that day that that around 70 homes will catch fire, and many dozens of people will be seriously injured in misguided attempts to deep-fry their turkeys, a recent fad that involves hurling a wet, recently frozen 12-kilo bird into a cauldron of boiling oil and running for your life. More sane individuals will do what grandma did and bake their turkeys, rendering the bird dry as plaster and utterly devoid of flavor. Hence: gravy!
Most other nations lack this holiday, as they have nothing to be thankful for (and if any of you do have stuff to be thankful for, like oil, tell us so we can take it away). For most people tomorrow is just Thursday. You have our pity.
Happy thanksgiving, people. And thanks for a wonderfully cynical post, Steerpike. Being vegetarian I can only laugh at the deepfry or bake dillema here.
I usually ignore Thanksgiving if at all possible. I was once part of an attempt to ?broil? a turkey in a charcoal grill at a vacation house in Hawaii. It sort of burned black on the outside and stayed raw on the inside. We ended up cutting it up and baking the chunks in the small oven in the kitchen. Not sure if we ever actually ate any though. There were a lot of empty rum bottles laying around the next morning though.
Oh yeah, Happy Thanksgiving.
Don’t mention gravy!!! At the beginning of the year I decided that I would cut a bunch of fat from my diet. It worked, and I can see the results. But gravy and sauces (I’m great at making both) went the way of the dodo. Tomorrow I have dinner with friends. Will the gravy call me to its side? Will I have the willpower to resist? I believe that “Resistance is futile”. What harm can one day of indulgence do?
As for the deep-fried turkey, I had never heard of such a thing before moving south 13 years ago. Had it at someone’s house. This never-much-cared-for-turkey woman fell in love. The tenderest, the moistest. And thankfully, there was no fire.
Happy high-fat day to all. We have much to be thankful for. Another year when we didn’t get blowed-up. Or conquered by aliens. Or burned to a crisp by our exploding turkey vats full of oil.
The only thing I ever hear about this holiday is that there are turkeys involved.
You warmed the cockles of my cynical heart, Steerpike. This year, I’m going back to my “roots” and baking my turkey in a heat-resistant plastic bag. It’s always moist and lovely that way… of course, I have a friend that did this one year and her turkey was crazy dry. Thank the heavens for gravy.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
Meho said:
” Steerpike. Being vegetarian ”
Makes two of us.
(for a perfect nutritional living Eat veggies)
My family doesn’t eat turkey on Thanksgiving, to be fully honest; my Dad’s parents emigrated from Syria way back in the 1910s and he’s absorbed his mother’s kickass chefery. So on Thanksgiving we generally get the whole family together and eat stuffed grape leaves, kibbe, koosa, eggplant/yogurt sauce, many olives, and other (considerably more delicious than turkey) foods. He does use ground turkey instead of the traditional lamb, though, and we do have pumpkin pie, so it’s basically the same Thanksgiving the pioneers had.
Being vegetarian is doubtless a much more healthy lifestyle, but animals are too delicious for me to pass up. Besides, I do so many unhealthy things to myself that simply switching to veggies only wouldn’t make that much difference.
Igor: in addition to turkey, many families also shove a mixture of bread, vegetables, and spices up the turkey’s ass and bake it all together; the resulting substance is called “stuffing” on account of it was stuffed up the turkey. There is also the aforementioned pumpkin pie, which I think we can all agree is truly first in the pie world.
The yam, or sweet potato, is also a common dish on Thanksgivings, as is green bean casserole, which is… well, you really don’t want to know what it is. Trust me.
It’s the day we express our self-gratitude for taking over this land from the Natives, killing most of them and putting the rest on reservations, inventing the internet and nuclear weapons, bombing the crap out of countries containing people who look different from us, and voraciously consuming 25% of the world’s resources while making up something like 4% of the world’s population. Many of us also watch football on this day – American football, that is, not “soccer,” which is for the rest of the world. If soccer was any good we’d have bombed you and taken it already. In OUR football, beefy dudes strap on 40lb of armor and bump into each other for three hours, then a winner is declared. So, rugby, basically. 🙂
Thanks Steerpike. I just knew there was a bigger to-be-thankful-for picture than the myopic one I was seeing. ;>)
Rugby and american football are pretty different, though. They only look similar, but the rules are vastly different. People over here used to call american football rugby for years but since NFL became a staple in our cable TV agenda, people have progressed and started realising the two were different. The bigger problem that I see, when it comes to misnaming and misunderstanding sports, is that you guys keep referring to that lovely charade of beefy men pretending to fight each other as wrestling. It must be very confusing for an honst American when they occassionally cast a glance at olympic games or something and see that for the rest of the world wrestling is a “sport” where two guys are trying to have sex with each other and the referee is spoiling their fun by hitting the floor with his hand every time it looks they might be getting it on.
As for vegetarianism: it’s not just hat its healthier for a person, it’s also healthier for the planet, but then again, like everything else, it’s amatter of personal choice. I also like how animals taste but I know I don’t need to eat them so I don’t.
Don’t forget the inestimable “tofurkey”–duck stuffed inside something stuffed inside turkey. ‘They’ swear it’s good.
Hi Sorcha. Welcome to TR (at least I don’t remember seeing your name before). I think you mean the Turducken. Chicken in duck in turkey. Tofurkey is tofu in the shape of a turkey, or something such. If you want tofu, if you like tofu, why bother shaping it like something it ain’t? Thankfully ;>), we can leave this discussion for now as I’m all turkeyed out. By the way, if I am ever lucky enough to meet “they” face-to-face, they will have some explaining to do!
“If you want tofu, if you like tofu”
Take it from a vegetarian: we don’t LIKE tofu, we just eat it because we choose to. So, shaping it like a turkey is a bit like shaping a dildo as Lex Steele’s penis – a bit pathetic but a bit fun as well.
Aw crap, Meho. I hate tofu, but my daughter is a vegetarian, so I come across it from time to time (not TOO often, as she lives 900 miles away). Now, each time I see tofu I am going to have a very ungastronomic image in my mind. Thanks for that.
We can always count on Meho for penises!
How many’s he got?
I’m guessing just the one, but his eloquence regarding it and his thoughts on tofu penises are pretty revolutionary.
It’s not how many penises you have, it’s how you use them!!!