Turkey has never been one of my favorite foods, but I appreciate traditions and understand the importance of having a big roasted bird on the table at Thanksgiving.
That might be easier said than done this year. There seems to be a shortage of good turkeys across the country right about the time we are gearing up for the holidays.
Turkeys are apparently part of our “supply chain” problem. It’s hard to find workers for turkey farms and poultry processing plants.
Even if somebody manages to raise a turkey and get it plucked, cleaned, frozen and all that, there are not enough truck drivers to get the birds delivered to supermarkets.
This latest supply chain dilemma had escaped my attention until Regina had me drive her around to stores in Shreveport last week in search of a perfect holiday turkey. We came home empty handed.
That bothers her more than it does me. My mother always fixed a plump turkey for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but she would roast a chicken, or a hen as she called it, for my dad and me.
Regina has followed that pattern for years. There is always a turkey at our house for show and for people who might like it, but I get chicken with giblet gravy.
Show turkeys have to be so enormous that they barely fit in the oven. Stores where we shopped for them had a few scrawny birds but none that would be very impressive on the table at Thanksgiving.
We do cornbread dressing for holidays and some other side dishes like mashed potatoes, ambrosia, candied sweet potatoes and broccoli and rice casserole.
That stuff alone is a good meal even if there continues to be a shortage of fat turkeys or even chickens.
We might miss the giblet gravy made with pan drippings from the chicken, but mashed potatoes are good with plain butter, and we can put cranberry sauce on the dressing.
I still like the old fashioned congealed cranberry sauce that comes in a can. You open both ends of the can, shake the sauce out onto a plate, and it shimmies all through the meal.
But Regina’s cranberry salad has been growing on me, so I have my dressing with both the canned sauce and the salad.
She makes it with fresh cranberries, whipped cream, pecans and marshmallows, and our granddaughters and others in the family love it with dressing or just by itself.
The first Thanksgiving after Regina and I married 20 years ago, her ex-husband contacted her to ask for the cranberry salad recipe.
She sent it to him, but he said it was too complicated for him and asked if she could just make him some. She sent cranberry salad with her daughter to share with him on holidays for years after that.
One of the problems with my mother and later Regina doing a big turkey at Thanksgiving and Christmas just to impress folks is that the turkey keeps hanging around after the holiday meal.
Nobody likes to waste food, so they tried to camouflage leftover turkey by putting it in soup, chili, pasta, casseroles, pot pies, salads, and other things.
Even when every scrap of meat had been stripped from the carcass of a holiday turkey, there were times when they boiled the bird’s picked over bones to make broth for gumbo.
My hope every holiday was that we would not run out of giblet gravy and cornbread dressing before we finished off all the leftover turkey.
And that there would still be some sweet potato pie for dessert after choking down a creative new turkey dish.
The shortage in supermarkets this year of big turkeys is causing some stress, but I was delighted when we had to settle for one that looked like a frozen pigeon. It won’t hang around so long.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES