Turkey is so Yuck!

This year we did not celebrate Thanksgiving due to a death in the family. However, I did help my niece roast some chickens for lunch on that day. We made all the trimmings, had a quiet little lunch and went back to our own homes. The whole process took about two hours.

As we were finishing up, I started thinking about past Thanksgivings and how my sister (who's now out of the country on vacation) labored over the fat bird that is well known as the main dish on this holiday. She always makes rice, potatoes, gravy, veggies and bread with the turkey. Throughout the years, I've tried eating turkey that has been prepared in many different ways. From tandoori style to being stuffed with various nuts and garlic, turkey never disappoints at being completely tasteless.

This is probably the only bird in the entire world that refuses to get infused with any of the flavors that you put in it. Even if you put the most flavorful spices in it like cloves, it's still pretty tasteless. You have to dress it with a gazillion things to make it even the least bit appetizing. I can never seem to understand how people can eat it!

There are a few different reasons why turkey can never taste as great as let's say chicken. The first one is because its such a fat bird. There's no way possible to marinate it with anything that will go deep enough into the white meat to actually stay. Then you have those funny television programs that suggest you stuff it with a duck! Why would anyone want to put a different species of bird into a turkey is beyond me. Sounds and looks ridiculous.

The other reason why turkey doesn't absorb flavor is because unlike chicken, its meat is pretty dense. Have you ever seen turkey salami versus regular salami? It has no holes in it - no place for the spices to sit and marinate. It's just smooth, round, tasteless meat.

My final reason for why you can't flavor a turkey well has to do with the mind of the turkey. It's simply a stubborn bird. Come around Thanksgiving, it probably laughs at us thinking "Ha! You think I look fat and juicy, wait until you carve me up! I WILL have my revenge!"

Perhaps I haven't tried every method of cooking turkey out there. To be honest, after the many years of tasteless turkey, I don't know if I want to try it anymore. Even the original pilgrims did not eat turkey. They roasted geese and shared with their Native American neighbors. It's the later colonists that got lazy and decided to settle for the tasteless turkey which was probably easier to catch than geese.

Happy Thanksgiving Day anyways, hope you filled up with the trimmings at least.