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closeScoop du Jour: Complicated family formula equals Thanksgiving
George Le Masurier
Scoop du Jour
Next week, we celebrate Thanksgiving, a day when all Americans pause from their daily routines of trying to figure out if the pilots up front are asleep and where our health care coverage could have possibly gone.
Instead, they’ll take a moment to acknowledge their good fortune. We do this by eating non-stop through six football games and Aunt Gertrude’s incessant blathering.
It’s a wonderful time to surround yourself with family, which can also lead to the heart-stopping realization that you belong to a really bad gene pool.
And, speaking of heart attacks, it’s a good idea to keep the emergency numbers handy, because medical experts agree: consuming a Schwartzeneggar-sized butterball turkey will send all kinds of as-yet unnamed chemicals cruising through your arteries and landing in unnatural places (this is what happened to Michael Jackson’s face).
That’s why it’s critical to take care in preparing the turkey, a chore I particularly love, because I stay in the living room while it’s going on.
This is especially important because, if you accidentally wander anywhere near the kitchen, you might be asked to stick your hand up the turkey’s rectum and feel around in its gooey insides until you find a bunch of loose organs.
No wonder it’s dead.
The purpose of this disgusting job is to pull out the neck, giblets and glands — which collectively look like the Star Wars bar scene — and plop them into a pot of boiling water before they suddenly spring to life as an alien life form and feast on your family.
But my question is this: How did the turkey swallow all that stuff in the first place?
Once the turkey is prepared, you have to figure out how long to cook it. We Americans have been honing the cooking-time formula ever since the Pilgrims ran the Mayflower up on a rock somewhere in Massachusetts about 1620.
The formula goes like this: You multiply the weight of the bird in pounds times the number of people coming to dinner, divide by the combined pre-feast weight of all your guests and add the number of ounces of gin already consumed by Uncle Lenny.
If that doesn’t work out to the exact time you want to serve it, you should tell one guest to go home or count on Uncle Lenny not making it to the table.
Once the turkey’s in the oven, it’s a good time to gather everyone together and remember some famous Thanksgiving dinner moments and facts, such as:
Last year’s Thanksgiving Invitation eating contest in New York City was won by a 106-pound woman who gobbled up a 10-pound turkey, four pounds of mashed potatoes, three pounds of cranberry sauce, 2 1/2 pounds of beans and a pumpkin pie in 15 minutes.
The thing under a turkey’s beak is the wattle and the thing above its beak is the snood.
A facialist from the Big Apple mixes up turkey fat, oatmeal and egg yolks to moisturize clients’ skin. For oily skin, she uses a Cranberry Sauce Mask.
You will need to run 20 miles to burn off the calories of a typical Thanksgiving dinner.
By the time you finish telling these stories, the turkey should be done.
Do not let Uncle Lenny try to carve it.