I'm thankful my mom taught me how to cook an entire Thanksgiving meal from scratch, and over the years I've volunteered to "do Thanksgiving" time and time again simply to gain experience.
And yet somehow I've been living, and cooking, with certain misconceptions about the meaty center of the Thanksgiving meal - the turkey.
Come Thanksgiving everybody trots out their favorite turkey related trivia, claiming you should rinse the bird before cooking it, and that white meat is healthier than dark and all that L-tryptophan makes them sleepy.
And then the budding animal expert begins talking about how turkeys can't fly, love to gobble and are so stupid they sometimes drown in the rain.
But this Thanksgiving you'll know better, and you can tell those sitting around your table that they've been chowing down on a plate full of LIES!
Most of the time turkeys don't fly much or very far but one day he came outside to feed them and one was on the roof of the barn. He didn't think much of it. The next day he comes outside and there are 3 turkeys on the roof. Next day there's ten. It kept getting more and more crowded on the roof until one morning he goes outside and almost every turkey was perched on the barn's roof and as he watched them the barn collapsed killing most of the birds. True story.
He hates turkeys and refuses to eat them because he ate them all the time while living at his childhood home. He also says they are very dumb. For entertainment he would draw a line on the ground with a piece of chalk. Then he'd take a turkey and place it's beak on the chalk line and then he'd walk away. The turkey would stay there, beak to chalk, sometimes for half an hour. Then it would shake it's head and walk off.