Tribune reporter, a novice cook, tackles Thanksgiving dinner -- giblets and everything

By Christy Karras
The Salt Lake Tribune

Instructor Diane Sheya, left, gives Christy Karras some tips on carving the first turkey that Karras has ever cooked. (Rick Egan/The Salt Lake Tribune)

As a kid, I used to think to myself: When I'm grown up and can eat whatever I want, I'll have Lucky Charms for breakfast every day and macaroni and cheese every night.

When I grew to adulthood, many of my friends started -- egads! -- cooking. They had somehow learned to like vegetables. They owned utensils and spices and roasting pans.

Not me.

I eat sugary cold cereal and cheesy pasta from a box. Most of the time, cooking means grabbing something out of the freezer, nuking it for five minutes, and voilˆ! Dinner is ready. No fuss, no bother. No problem.

But there are problems. As I've grown up, I've become envious of my friends' home-cooked meals. I've discovered that all that salt in processed food makes me retain water. If I had kids, I would never feed them what I eat. Even my bachelor boyfriend knows how to at least mix some fresh meat and vegetables into his canned spaghetti sauce.

I wanted to learn to cook, but I had no idea where to start. I had never used my oven. I own three spices: salt, pepper and cinnamon. I have no big, sharp knives. All the home chefs I know proudly display their cooking-related injuries, but I have no desire to chop off the end of a finger.

Cookbooks weren't enough help. Even the most basic assumed I knew whether coriander is a spice or a vegetable, or what size to cut something into when told to chop.

So this year, The Salt Lake Tribune's food writer, Kathy Stephenson, found a professional cook and charged her with showing me how to produce a traditional Thanksgiving dinner.

Ivy House Herbs owner Diane Sheya teaches cooking classes at Red Butte Garden and organizes private wine-tasting and cooking events. Her specialty is cooking with fresh herbs. Diane and I arranged to meet a few days before the big one to grocery shop and look over my kitchen.

When Diane got to my 1940s-era apartment, she seemed to think the tiny oven was funny. We had to measure it to make sure the turkey wasn't too big to fit. I showed her my cupboards, full of boxed dry pasta, cereal and pre-packaged snacks. I had no flour, oil or fresh vegetables on hand, which amazed Diane.

We headed for the grocery store, and she gave me tips on what to buy. We bought a frozen turkey on a Monday to give it plenty of time to thaw by Thursday.

"Always thaw your turkey in the refrigerator," Diane warned, as visions of salmonella danced in my head.

The pumpkin pie: On previous Thanksgivings, I was always happy to show up just in time to eat. I'm a believer in the "one cooks; the other cleans" philosophy, and for me, it was always "You cook; I'll clean."

This time to have dinner ready by 5, we started at 11 a.m. Because we needed the oven for the turkey, we decided to cook the pumpkin pie first. We weren't trying to come up with a spectacular gourmet dinner, so Diane used the recipe on the pie filling can. It's not bad, she said.

And to make things easier, we used frozen pie crust. I know this is anathema to some people, but again, this is me we're dealing with.

My first task was to break an egg. The chefs' secret: Hit the egg on a flat surface first, rather than on the side of the bowl, and then stick a finger in and peel away the shell. That way, the membrane inside your eggs remains mostly intact, holding everything mostly together until you dump it in the bowl, and you won't get shells in your mix. Of course, I still had to pick one out.

When we went to measure sugar for the mix, we discovered that I have no "dry" measuring cups. Apparently, there is a difference between measuring wet stuff and dry stuff; with dry stuff you have to be more accurate. "Cooking is an art. Baking is a science," Diane said.

The turkey: Diane brought a guide to make sure we cook the turkey for the right amount of time for its 9 pounds. She immediately plucked out the pop-up thermometer that came in the bird. It's better to check various parts of the bird with a quick-read thermometer you stick in every now and then.
But first, we had to prepare the bird.

I had heard of giblets, but they were just something I knew I didn't want to know anything more about. Well, that and "giblets" is a mighty funny word. What I didn't know was the giblets' complex journey: They start out in the bird, of course (still not sure exactly where), then get taken out by someone whose job I wouldn't want at the turkey plant. Then they are stuffed back into the turkey before it gets frozen.

After the cook thaws out the turkey, he or she -- in this case, me -- has to reach in and get them all back out again. The turkey was still cold when I plunged my hand into its . . . er . . . posterior and fished around in the remaining ice crystals to get the giblets out of there. We set those bits aside as Diane pointed out the heart, the purplish liver, the lumpy gizzard. After cleaning the area (food poisoning would really be a drag on Thanksgiving) went to work on the stuffing.

The stuffing: The great thing about stuffing is that you can put pretty much whatever you want into it -- dried fruit, nuts, almost any vegetable. "It's just one of those hodgepodge things," Diane said.

We went for a mix of sweet and savory, with dried apricots as well as the usual celery and onions and used day-old sourdough bread. We used fresh herbs picked that day from Diane's garden.

Since we had to cut up the herbs and veggies, this was my first lesson with the knife. Diane knows about my phobia, so we started with a basic lesson. It's important, she said, to get a good, well-balanced knife that you feel comfortable using, so try holding several at the store before buying. And spend as much as you can afford.

"You get what you pay for," Diane said.

When holding the knife, she demonstrated, your hand should be forward right up to the heel (the little bulge on the handle before you reach the blade), with thumb on the side or top. Use the curved blade to rock and slide the knife back and forth as you cut, pushing food under the blade with the other hand.

We sautéed the giblets and added them to our stuffing. (Does this mean I've eaten stuffing with giblets in it before? Gross!) We threw in the chopped vegetables and simmered the mixture for a while, making sure the stuffing wasn't too mushy or dry.

Then we stuffed the turkey, stuck our fingers up under the skin to rub in butter and fresh herbs and sewed it up with a darning needle and culinary thread. (I asked if I could use regular yarn. "Probably not a good idea," Diane said.) Before we put the turkey in the oven, we added some onions and water in the bottom of the pan to help flavor the gravy later.

The gravy, etc.: Avoiding unnecessary complications on my first try, we made basic mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce from a can. Not so with the sweet potatoes (we actually used yams, but everyone calls them sweet potatoes anyway).

For this, we used my favorite appliance: the microwave. We nuked the yams for a few minutes, peeled them, then sliced them and alternated those with green apple slices. On top of this went a sauce made of brown sugar and butter. Then we stuck it back in the microwave for another few minutes.

Gravy never much appealed to me: Why would you pour animal fat onto some perfectly good potatoes? But our turkey was young and svelte, and our gravy must have been the lowest-fat version ever created. We added some red wine, which gave a surprising richness to the flavor, and by the time we were done, it tasted more like some gourmet sauce than anemic coagulated sludge.

The most effective method of carving the turkey doesn't look much like you see it in the movies. You pull the legs and wings away from the body and chop them off at the joint with your big knife. Then you carve all the meat off each side of the breast at once. You are left with a carcass that, Diane said, you can use for soup. I'll take her word for it.

By the time we were done, we had used most of my dishes and some of Diane's, and we had to find extra chairs to seat everyone at the card table in my kitchen. But we had assembled, if I say so myself, a glorious example of down-home American cooking. I fed six people and had leftover turkey, which I put in my fridge.

Before leaving, Diane asked me if I thought this would be the start of a career as a home cook. I'm definitely more motivated, and I know a little more about how I need to improve. I might even buy myself a good knife. Who knows? -- I may actually cook dinner for my family at Christmas. And this time, they can do the cleaning.