Tag: turkey

Cooking the Turkey for Thanksgiving

October 17, 2024             

It was the Friday before Thanksgiving weekend, and we had no plans or turkey to look forward to. We used to close the cottage this weekend, including a turkey dinner, but the weather forecast was unfavorable this year, so we decided to close the cottage a week earlier. So we were at home with no plans or turkey.

I love turkey and the atmosphere that comes with celebrating Thanksgiving. Preparing meals from leftovers is also a pleasure. To cook a turkey is not new to me; I had cooked a couple of turkeys over the past years, so I told Kathy I’d roast one. Since she has done it many times before with the family and knows the amount of work that comes with it, she said, “Go ahead and do the entire dinner.” I understood her feelings, especially doing it for only two people. My thoughts focused on roasting the turkey, ignoring side dishes then. And that is how the weekend started.

The first challenge was looking for turkey sales. I found the stores sold it not by exact weight as they used to but for a fixed price in a weight range. For example, turkeys were between three to five kilograms, five to seven kilograms, and so on. I did not think much of it, but Kathy thought it was a trick; if you bought one at the upper weight limit, you paid less per kilogram than if you bought it at the lower weight limit. I said no problem and found one at the upper weight limit. I purchased 6.3 kilograms, or close to fourteen pounds, for CAN$ 22 or US$16.

It was a frozen one, cheaper than fresh turkey, that was twice as expensive, and we never buy butterball turkeys. The frozen turkey led me to the next challenge: thaw it in less than two days. According to the cookbooks I read, the rule of thumb was that one needs one day, or twenty-four hours, to thaw four pounds of turkey in the fridge. I did not have three days, so I went to the cold-water method of thawing the frozen turkey, which would take seven hours, according to the cookbooks. I put the turkey in the sink for four hours and then in the fridge for two nights, which did the thawing trick.

On Sunday, I pulled out the neck from inside the bird and looked at cookbooks for the next steps. It was not rocket science; I had to quarter an apple, a lemon, and an onion and put them into the belly of the bird. Then, I brushed the outside with melted butter before placing the dish into the oven.

I felt happy with my progress until I realized some side dishes would also be desirable. Kathy came with me to the store, and we picked up some potatoes, green beans, carrots, and parsnips. She decided she was going to fix the vegetables. But we needed dressing and gravy; both were available at the store in ready-made form. I believe in easy cooking and was going to buy them until Kathy put them back and strongly expressed that those items were way too expensive and she could fix both for a fraction of their cost. And that was that.

With both of us working in the kitchen, we took a moment to reflect that our family lives in the States and cannot join us for dinner when we have six kilograms of meat. But, of course, US Thanksgiving will come soon, at the end of November, and we usually join one of them for the celebration.

Then we considered who of our friends would be in a similar situation and dropped them a short note asking if they were alone for Thanksgiving and that they should consider joining us for dinner. It turned out that they were either traveling or were out of town visiting family; at any rate, it was short notice, and we did not expect positive responses.

In three hours, I took the golden-brown bird out of the oven and opened a bottle of bubbly.

It was a great, chaotic weekend deciding to cook a turkey on the fly. But it felt good to end the summer and start the fall, symbolically, with this dinner; the weather turned cool and windy. With the cottage closed, we will now concentrate on the garden at home: covering the outdoor furniture, clipping back the bushes, raking up the leaves, and cutting the grass again. The fulcrum for this change-over was the Thanksgiving dinner.

Mixing of the Races?

August 17, 2022

Viktor Orban, the far-right Hungarian Prime Minister, said “We, Hungarians, are not a mixed race…and we do not want to become a mixed race”, in a speech in Romania, in July 2022. I thought his idea was pathetic nonsense. But wait. Let’s examine what his consequential statement means.

The Huns occupied Hungary over a thousand years ago. Since that time, and also because Hungary is the crossroads between Asia and the west, hordes from the east have invaded and trampled on its land many times. As well, the Germans and Russians occupied it recently. No question that intermarriage has happened, witnessed by the names in Hungary and words borrowed from the Turkish, French, German people, and others. Hungarian people today have a rich ancestry of people from many countries. There are Polish, German, and Hun names in my ancestry, among others, but we called ourselves Hungarian. So what does Orban talk about when he says that Hungarians are not a mixed race?

In the same speech, Orban also said “countries where European and non-Europeans mingle were no longer nations”. Aha! Now you say that Orban is OK with the mixing of European people but not others. Who could these others be? He meant African migrants who came to Europe over the past ten years. And, of course, Africans are Arabs and Blacks and many are Moslems. They have different skin colors and religions. He is against these people coming into Europe: there can be no other interpretation of his comments.

The reaction to his comments was swift both in Hungary and in Europe: he was called racist and his statement was out of the Nazi playbook on racial purity.

We can identify race as humans with similar and distinctive physical characteristics, such as skin color or hair texture. But race has no specific identifiers in the human genome. There is only one race: “homo sapiens”. Altho race is a social construct, it has developed connotations for social exclusion, discrimination, and violence towards certain social groups. We often express it in a social hierarchy with white-skinned people with privilege over darker-skinned people.

Unfortunately for Orban, the trend does not support his thesis: the trend is toward increasing interracial marriages. Partially, it is because of migration patterns, people move from Africa to northern locations. It is also because of increased educational levels; with higher education, there is less prejudice. Sometimes it results from the lack of available partners. For example, many men perish in wars, and the incarceration rate among blacks in the US is high.

In Canada, five percent of marriages were interracial, according to the 2011 census. The rate was ten percent in the city of Vancouver. In the US, over eight percent of marriages are interracial, while ten percent of marriages were interracial in 2015. In Honolulu, forty-two percent of marriages are interracial, while in Las Vegas it is thirty percent and in Santa Barbara, CA, it is thirty percent.

There are many people with mixed-race parentage. Just think of President Obama or our own Governor General Mary Simon. My older brother married a Chinese woman from Hong Kong. Peter and Angela had lived in Hong Kong and Toronto. The family accepted and got along well with Peter’s wife. I enjoyed the diversity Peter brought into the family. You may know some people, in your family or outside, who married someone of another race. So what the hell is Orban talking about? The future is already here; interracial marriage is now.