I have never been a fan of oven roasted turkey. It is about the most boring meat imaginable and I am not a picky eater. My family never had it when I was growing up. We had mail order steaks but I am not a huge steak fan either. They are still better than oven roasted turkey though. I do appreciate a good stuffing and sides but most of them aren’t that good either.
I will take any holiday I can but Thanksgiving is my least favorite one because it usually combines gluttony with mediocre cooking and that isn’t a good combination. You wouldn’t catch me dead being at a store on Black Friday either.
I don’t care one way or the other about the day itself or the food. Having moved to the other side of the country from my family 25 years ago, I haven’t had a family Thanksgiving since I’ve been here. I like turkey well enough and I think a honey baked ham is scrumptious. Green beans are delightful, or would be if people didn’t insist on making that retched casserole out of them. Ditto corn. Ideally it should remain on its cob but loose kernels are good too. That’s it. Most forms of potatoes are good; I don’t really care for cranberry but it doesn’t disgust me. Pie in general doesn’t appeal to me but I can choke down a few bites if the host is really paying attention to whether or not I’m eating it. That last part is really the sticking point for me. If it’s a make your own plate and take what you want, we’re all good. I don’t want to be served and have to risk offending the cook by declining most of what they offer me.
I have always tried to turn my family to non-traditional T-giving food, but to no success. Turkey, cranberry, stuffing, Pumpkin/Pecan pie, none of them appeal to me.
For me T-giving is a big veggie day. Sweet taters, green bean casserole, taters and gravy, scalloped corn, creamed spinach.
Of course we don’t do Thanksgiving in the UK but we are famed for doing something very similar as a regular Sunday treat (and Christmas Lunch is basically the same anyway)
Personally, I like it in general even though turkey is a fairly uninteresting meat but is far from a favourite and I can easily live without it.
My wife loves roast dinners and all the trimmings but my kids are utterly opposed. They’d rather have a curry than a roast or christmas dinner. They tolerate it and focus mainly on the roast potatoes, the sausage meat stuffing and dark turkey meat.
Like a lot here, I’m not fond of of turkey but the rest of it – except the sweet potatoes/yams – I like fine. My sister-in-law was* ovo-lacto so we’d have a Tofurkey for her. I’d have a couple slices of that instead.
She passed at age 65 two years ago, a case of eat right, exercise, die anyway.
I’m a fan of Thanksgiving food - especially stuffing and gravy.
I was meh about the turkey until we started buying our turkey from a local farm. Such great turkey! It’s amazing and everyone raves about it. It costs like $145 for a 20 lb bird, but it’s worth it for once a year.
I was also meh about cranberry sauce until I got a friends recipe that uses cranberries, tart cherries, shallots and wine. Really really good.
A lot of people who don’t like turkey and cranberry sauce have only had frozen supermarket turkey that’s cooked into shoe leather, and that crap cranberry sauce out of a can. Some people, of course, just don’t like the flavors. We always buy a Mary’s fresh free range bird, and my wife makes a cranberry sauce from fresh cranberries cooked with orange juice and Grand Marnier. It’s delicious.
I detest football, but do often wish family was here.
I like it all except that green bean mushroom casserole glop. We do T-day at my mom’s and as she is getting on, we don’t try to cook. And, her house is small and 100 miles away from me. So I just order it from Whole Foods. It’s pretty good.
I loathe Thanksgiving and turkey equally. It wasn’t always like that At one time, we used to visit relatives in NYC, who put on a divine Martha Stewart-worthy dinner and the next day we would go sightseeing, see a show, visit a museum…Forward many years, relatives died, retired, got sick or disabled, and so we had to go to my mother’s house for Thanksgiving, where we would all sit in glum silence staring into each others faces (it was a very sad, dysfunctional family)… Even later, it was down to a disabled brother and mother getting dementia, I had to buy, prep, cook the f’ing Thanksgiving for them, and do the same thing the NEXT DAY for US. Because husband wanted our own. I took mom and brother out to eat on The Big Day, so I was down to one Big Fat Jolly Meal…So today, we have a grown daughter, and we told her if she wants to go to a ‘Friendsgiving’ or go out of town, to go ahead. I am SO DONE with Thanksgiving, it means nothing but sadness and work for me. I miss my relatives. If husband wants a turkey, I said I will stick one in the oven for him, but me, I’m having Chinese food. Last year it was nice and we cooked steak on the grill!
I like, but don’t love, turkey. My husband loathes it, however. So every year I buy a rack of lamb at Costco and roast it with a crispy coating of Dijon mustard, rosemary, and bread crumbs. Garlic potato gratin and fresh string beans with shallots are the usual accompaniments.
But we both love pumpkin pie, so I think I’ll make one this year.
I don’t like turkey, and I don’t like most of the other side dishes like mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans/green bean casserole, etc.
But, I could probably eat Stovetop Stuffing, cranberry sauce and rolls with a shovel if it were allowed.
A couple years ago I bought myself some awesome kids’ breakfast cereals for Thanksgiving and had those instead. Like Coco Pebbles and Fruit Loops. mm mmmm mmmm. It was fun, but I got over it and can handle regular dinner again. My mom has finally stopped trying so hard for the Thanksgiving meal since no one comes over or eats, so it’s less stressful and smaller, so I’m able to enjoy it more.
Well…not really. Muscle fiber is dense, and most of the fat is in the skin. The only thing under the breast is the cavity, so I’m not sure what sort of juices would be flowing to the breast meat. IME, the best way to keep the breast from drying out is to saturate some cheesecloth or an old white cotton dish towel with oil or butter and put it on the breast, adding more as needed later on. This helps keep the breast from cooking too quickly while the dark meat is getting done. There are other tricks out there, as well.
Brined turkey, oyster stuffing (not cooked in the bird), green bean casserole, refrigerator crescent rolls, homemade giblet gravy, (mashed potatoes optional).
Mr. Celtic Knot will eat the cranberry sauce on the bread like it’s jelly. I let him have all of it.
Mincemeat pie with eggnog ice cream. Spiced apple cider.
Unfortunately, we don’t get to eat this on Thursday, because Mr. Celtic Knot works retail, and his store is open on Thanksgiving. (Corporate hasn’t figured out that the store loses money when it is open outside of regular hours in our tiny, rural town.) At least this year we both have Wednesday off.
I am so glad that no one in my family ever insisted on watching football on Thanksgiving. A few people did want to put on the Macy’s parade, but we only got a few channels when I was a kid, and it was actually the best thing on, unless one channel happened to run an “all-American” type movie, like Young Lincoln, Yankee Doodle Dandy, or The Music Man.
You want a juicy turkey? Use a cooking bag. One Thanksgiving we had turkey soup. The meat fell off the bone and cooked in all that fatty juice. This was the one and only year there was no left over turkey, people kept going back getting scoops of turkey to put on their stuffing. Not recommended for your traditional holiday bird.