Learning to Like Turkey

Folk singer Janis Ian wrote a post about a conversation between her and her wife. She attached an article about the worst leftover turkey ideas.  

It reminded me that I honestly never really liked turkey or sweet potatoes, the staples of Thanksgiving dinners. The other staple of Thanksgiving is pumpkin pie, which I did enjoy with a healthy portion of whipped cream. I mean, who doesn’t like pumpkin pie?

Since I didn’t like turkey, I REALLY didn’t like leftovers on the next day or days after the holiday.

Over the more than seventy years I’ve been on the planet, my tastes have surely changed. My wife has found a way to roast sweet potatoes and mix it with onions that I can more than tolerate. I actually like it. A lot. Don’t get me doing on yams, as I can never figure out the difference.

I loved most of the other things on the menu of the holiday feast. My mom’s czarnina, which I have learned to make myself even if it does involve heading to a farm when they are slaughtering ducks. My grandma’s homemade kielbasa. The huge ham. Even the string bean casseroles, the mashed potatoes, the stuffing, the gravy, and everything else that was on the table where the entire extended family sat. Yes, there was an adult table and a kids table.

But turkey? Not really. I ate it, of course. It was a polite thing to do, but I didn’t relish it. First thing I went for was the kielbasa and the ham. If I wanted second helpings, it was the kielbasa and ham. Now that I think about it, leftovers of ham or kielbasa never existed in our house. But turkey? Always leftovers of that. 

My mom would try to get us to make turkey sandwiches. She’d reheat it in the oven. She tried it in soup. Again I would eat it, but no matter in what form it was presented, I just didn’t like it. 

Until last year.

My wife didn’t want to cook much for Thanksgiving, much less defrost and bake a bird big enough to feed her kids, my kids and their kids. 

Enter BBQ Productions, a restaurant in our area. We’ve eaten at the place a few times and liked it. We found out they offered entire family meals for Thanksgiving. They also offered smoked turkey. We ordered it. The entire family, except the vegetarian member, liked it. I liked it. I even asked for seconds. It was the first time I liked turkey. 

I still like ham and kielbasa more. I miss my mom’s czarnina, and my grandma’s desserts, especially her kołaczki.

This year we will order the smoked turkey again. I think it will become part of a new tradition. And the leftovers will be good.

If there are any.

Remember when no one had problems getting vaccinated?

The other day, I heard a report on CNN about the search of a workable, viable, safe vaccine for the coronavirus. Pfizer announced  they had one and that their early data showed a 90 percent effective rate. 

That’s good news. The stock market agreed with the Dow Jones soaring 1000 points. 

Other companies are doing research for a vaccine. According to some sources, as many as 179 vaccines are in some stage of development.

A vaccine can’t come soon enough. In the United States, the seven day rolling average is over 130000 new cases and 1045 deaths.

Something about the CNN report struck me. The reporter said, “This is the largest scientific research project in history.” I think that is a little overblown. Large, yes. Important and necessary, definitely. In history? I don’t think the guy ever heard of the March of Dimes and Jonas Salk’s development of the polio vaccine. 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had polio. A popular entertainer of the time, Eddie Cantor, said Americans should start sending a dime to the White House. They did. Eventually, thousands of letters and envelopes started arriving at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Over two million dimes. 

I remember the March of Dimes collection cards. I filled one myself, completed with the Liberty silver coins with Roosevelt’s image on them.

Polio scared the shit out of people. If the President could get it, anybody could. I remember people boiling their sheets and doing whatever else the experts might recommend to prevent the spread of it.

When Jonas Salk developed the first vaccine in 1954, parents sent their kids off to school to get the shot. I remember the lines in the hall of the school I attended. In 1961, Albert Sabin developed an oral vaccine, and once again, parents sent their kids off to school, this time to get a small sugar cube.

Over time, hundreds of millions of children world wide received polio vaccine to the point where it is basically eradicated from the globe.

Interesting fact about Sabin’s vaccine is that he refused to patent his vaccine. He didn’t make any money off of it. He wanted it to be as widely available as possible for everyone who needed it, which was every damn child on the planet. Think Pfizer or any of the other developers will do anything close to that?

I read recently, too, that 50 percent of Americans won’t take the vaccine if one becomes available for coronavirus. Vaccines work. It’s why polio no longer is a threat. Neither are measles, smallpox, and a whole slew of other diseases.

People wholeheartedly got behind the March of Dimes and had their kids vaccinated. They did the same thing when vaccines for other childhood diseases were developed. I don’t know why people feel different about it now. There should be lines like this.