Delectable December: Michael Thomas Talks Turkeys
My guest today is Michael Thomas. I was lucky enough to meet him when he submitted a fantastic Olympic story to my Going for Gold anthology from MLR Press earlier this year. Michael’s still writing and still cracking readers up with his wonderful sense of humor. Keep reading to see what I’m talking about. And as strange as this recipe sounds, I’ll give anything with kahlua a chance.
When I was twenty-three, a girl I knew from college had a spot open up in her 3-bedroom flat in the Western Addition. I figured a guy’s gotta live somewhere, so I packed up a truck and ran off to San Francisco. We were all three roommates from someplace other than California, as were most of the people we knew, and when our First San Francisco Thanksgiving rolled around, we were all either too broke, too foreign, or too tied to our entry-level customer service jobs to go home. Besides, we reasoned, San Francisco is our home now—we’re here, we’re queer, we might as well get used to it. We will have Thanksgiving here, one of us announced. Just us and our friends. There were only two rules that first year: No Drama and No Family Allowed.
I volunteered to prepare the turkey. I was excited to be in charge of the star attraction, but didn’t know the first thing about cooking one. All I knew was that you had to get up at the crack of dawn and slave over a hot turkey baster all day, then you got to be a big hero when you brought it to the table
“It’s easy,” my new co-worker Anita assured me.
“Easy?” I said. “It takes forever. And isn’t there, like, a neck? It sounds elaborate.”
She shook her head and sipped her one millionth daily ounce of Mountain Dew. “No, see, what you do is…”
And she gave me her foolproof turkey recipe. And what do you know, she was right: we had a tiny, unreliable oven, and I didn’t know how to cook much in those days, but together, that oven and I, we were able to pull off Anita’s two-ingredient recipe (three ingredients, I guess, if you count the turkey), and what turned out to be our First Annual Friends Thanksgiving was a triumph! (Due, in no small part, to the fact that one of the two ingredients was Kahlua, at which we’d been sipping in our coffee since about 8 a.m.)
My job, of course, is “open” 24/7/365. There are thousands—some estimates say tens of thousands—of airplanes in the air at any given time, and they are not (alas) grounded so that their crews can run off and cook turkey dinners. In Kiss Me, Straight, Our Hero Todd spends a Thanksgiving, as I once did, at a Shanghai chicken joint with roller skating waitresses and a girl whose only job it is to keep your beer glass full; when my airline career and I were young and glamorous, I’d often spend the actual holiday aloft, slinging plastic dishes of turkey and gravy in the aisle and then supping, perched over the galley trash can, on the leftover coach pasta, and we’d celebrate Friends Thanksgiving the Saturday before or the Saturday after actual Thanksgiving. But celebrate it we did, and without fail.
Some years it was just a few of us; other years friends invited friends who brought along friends and the gang of us ate on the floor. For weeks before, we’d pass around the most recent Thanksgiving issue of Bon Appetit magazine, and then whip up side dishes and salads and get super creative with pie. There was always plenty (and I do mean plenty) of wine, one year to the rather heroic tune of three bottles per person. (The same year, come to that, that the boy I was crushing on turned to me—after consuming his allotted three bottles of wine—and disclosed in a whisper that he had hepatitis.) And—if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it—the turkey was my domain. I would eventually go on to brine them and spice them with chiles and stuff them with every combination of garlic and fruit imaginable, but for years, Anita’s turkey was our much beloved Thanksgiving tradition. I consider Kahlua on Thanksgiving non-negotiable even still, after almost twenty years, and I haven’t made Kahlua turkey in at least ten.
As happens, our friends became our family; the No Drama rule was fervently embraced and strictly enforced, but the No Family rule faded into obscurity as we started collecting partners and in-laws and babies. Eventually, of course, some of us moved, to places like Panama and Colorado, and we no longer gather every year in each others’ living rooms to eat turkey and guzzle wine and sing old camp songs during hilariously mis-named “talent” shows, but Friends Thanksgiving lives on as my favorite holiday. Like Kiss Me, Straight, my life is a celebration of the joy and the power of friendship, and of the curative and unifying wonders of good food, and to me, these things will always taste like turkey.
Anita’s Can’t-Miss Kahlua Turkey
1 Turkey, prepped for roasting
Equal Parts Kahlua and Apricot Jam
Whisk Kahlua and jam together and slather it all over the turkey, being sure to add plenty of Kahlua to your Thanksgiving morning coffee. Cook the turkey per package/store/Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything’s instructions. Brush every 30-45 minutes with Kahlua/jam mixture. Tent the turkey with foil if its starts to brown too fast. Turkey is done when a meat thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the breast registers at least 165 degrees. Gravy made with the drippings from this turkey is sweet and delicious; when Tabasco is added, it is the Best Gravy Ever.
Michael’s latest release is Kiss Me Straight:
Beijing, Tokyo, Sydney — these exciting cities are standard fare in the life of flight attendant Todd Eisenbraun, and he chases a romance with sexy-but-straight Josh through them all.
Closer to home, a new neighbor in his San Francisco apartment building has a huge crush on Todd. His friends — Katie, a flight attendant-turned-small appliance repairwoman, and Marzipan Q. Thespian, a man-dangling local philanthropist — think Todd should at least give Chris a shot. Sure, he’s overweight, but he’s also handsome, a hilarious playwright, and a great cook … what’s not to love?
Todd and Chris become quick friends, but Todd’s idea of the perfect man is skinny and straight, and Chris is decidedly neither. Josh may have a fiancée and a teenaged son, but Todd just knows he’s “the One.”
But if Josh is straight, the road to love is not; Todd is jostled by internalized homophobia, body image issues, exotic locales, the glamorous world of sewing machine repair, and a community theater musical salute to the life of Judy Garland before he arrives at the realization that he’s been looking way too hard for something he may have already found.
3 Responses to “Delectable December: Michael Thomas Talks Turkeys”
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I absolutely HATE cooking a turkey…they’re so temperamental, and most of the time I overcook it and it ends up dry. I may have to try this recipe…although this year at Thanksgiving I smartened up a little. I hired a friend to fry my turkey, cajun style…it was awesome. 😀
Kahlua and apricot jam…sounds unorthodox, but God knows I love both! Will have to try it.
Love your description of Friends Thanksgiving–you guys must have had the most unstressful T-Day of anyone you knew! I’m going to have to try that recipe, it certainly sounds different! Loved your blurb for Kiss Me Straight–it sounds like a lot of fun!