My First Turkey

 Our church has a Thanksgiving dinner early in November each year. I've known that the church buys turkeys and people cook them and haven't really given it a second thought. This year the week before the dinner it was announced that they still needed people to cook turkeys. I sat there and thought about who would likely cook turkeys. I realized that most of the kitchen team is in their 80s and probably getting tired of cooking turkeys. It didn't take me long to realize that it was me, in fact, who was in the age category that needed to cook a turkey! That moment when I realized that, in fact, I am the middle aged woman with older children and a kitchen big enough to accommodate a 22lb turkey.

And so I approached the people I needed to talk to and asked if they still needed someone to cook a turkey. In fact, they did and they were delighted that I would be willing. I did not admit that had never cooked a turkey before. 

I went over to the church kitchen and retrieved one of five over 20lb turkeys from the freezer and brought it home to thaw for the week. 

At this point I'm figuring this is a pretty smart move on my part. I don't have to decided what to take for this Thanksgiving dinner and the turkey I cook will be one of five so no one will know who cooked the turkey they are eating. 

I also needed to figure out how I was going to bake this turkey given that we have church Sunday morning and the meal is at 5:00 Sunday afternoon. I decided to get an electric roaster. I figured an electric roaster will come in handy when I cook full holiday dinners and need oven space. 

Sunday morning I put the turkey in the roaster, turned it on and went to church. We came home and the house smelled like Thanksgiving and the meat temperature was correct. Success!

Jeremy made me look really good. He carved the turkey and arranged it neatly in the dish. It happened that my dish of turkey was placed first as people walked through the line so by the time we got our food, it was gone. 

Next time I'll find a recipe and dress it up a little bit. This bake was just for confidence! I sent my sister the picture of a big turkey taking up my whole refrigerator and her response was "Wow, you are really grown up now!"