How I Accidentally Became the Thanksgiving Turkey Person

I have been responsible for the Thanksgiving turkey in my family for basically my entire adult life.

And it was an accident.

I was a brand-new newlywed when somebody decided I should be responsible for cooking the turkey for our extended family Thanksgiving.

And when I say extended family, I mean extended family.

This wasn't six people gathered around a dining room table with matching napkins. There were so many people that tables had to be made out of plywood and sawhorses just so everybody had somewhere to sit.

And somebody looked at newlywed me and thought:

Yep. She should be in charge of the turkey.

Excellent decision-making all around.

I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

So I did what any completely unqualified person in the early days of the internet would do.

I started searching.

This was back when finding exactly what you needed online wasn't quite as effortless as it is now. There weren't seventeen thousand cooking videos showing you precisely what your turkey should look like at every stage. You couldn't pull your phone out of your pocket and ask it why the breast was getting too brown while the thighs weren't done.

But THANK GOD the internet existed.

Eventually, I found a turkey recipe from America's most famously particular homemaker, long before she was hanging out with Snoop.

You know the one. 😂

And the recipe involved butter.

A lot of butter.

It also involved wine.

A lot of wine.

At that point, I figured we were probably headed in the right direction.

So I went for it.

I followed the recipe, put the turkey in the oven and hoped I wasn't about to ruin the centerpiece of Thanksgiving dinner for an entire herd of relatives sitting around plywood tables.

And somehow...

It was amazing.

Not “well, at least the new wife didn't ruin Thanksgiving” good.

It was legitimately the best turkey.

Everybody loved it.

I was feeling pretty pleased with myself right up until I discovered one of life's great injustices:

If you do something really well, people will make you do it forever.

I was informed that I would now be responsible for the Thanksgiving turkey from that day forward.

Whomp whomp.

And they meant it.

The Recipe That Never Left

Years passed.

Thanksgiving changed locations. People came and went. Families grew. Life changed in about a thousand different ways.

But every Thanksgiving, there was the turkey.

My turkey.

And all these years later, I still use literally the same recipe.

Lots of butter. Lots of wine.

Because apparently we got it right the first time, and I see absolutely no reason to interfere with success.

It became one of those things you don't really think about anymore.

Of course I make the turkey.

Of course I use that recipe.

Of course there is butter and wine involved.

That's just Thanksgiving.

And I think that's one of the funny things about family traditions. Most of them probably don't begin with somebody solemnly announcing, “From this day forward, this shall be our tradition.”

They just happen.

You make something one year.

Everybody loves it.

So you make it again.

Then again.

Eventually nobody remembers exactly when it started, but God help the person who suggests doing it differently.

And Then Life Got Weird

The part I couldn't possibly have known at that first Thanksgiving was where my life was eventually headed.

I didn't know that someday I would be a farmer.

I definitely didn't know that I'd eventually build a business around raising food for other families.

And I REALLY didn't know that someday, every fall, I'd walk outside and find myself surrounded by Thanksgiving turkeys.

Yet here we are.

Now October means there are turkeys wandering around a paddock outside my house.

I feed them. I check on them. I watch them grow from relatively reasonable-sized birds into enormous creatures who seem to get noticeably bigger every time I look at them.

And eventually, they'll leave this farm and become the centerpiece of Thanksgiving dinners all over Kentucky.

There's something wonderfully strange about that when I think back to where this started.

Once upon a time, I was a nervous newlywed desperately searching the internet because someone had handed me a raw turkey and an unreasonable amount of responsibility.

Now I'm the person raising the turkey.

Life has a sense of humor.

More Than a Turkey

The longer I do this, the more I realize that raising food for people isn't really just about the food.

Obviously the turkey matters. I want to raise it well. I want it to taste incredible. I want someone to pull it out of the oven on Thanksgiving and be ridiculously pleased with themselves.

But what happens around that turkey matters more.

It's the table that somehow needs three more chairs than it did last year.

It's the dishes that only come out once a year.

It's somebody making the same side dish they've made for the last twenty Thanksgivings because changing it would cause a small family uprising.

It's kids running around while everyone is trying to cook.

It's leftovers packed into mismatched containers.

It's turkey sandwiches the next day.

It's the stories everyone has already heard 47 times but somehow tells again anyway.

And sometimes it's a couple sheets of plywood balanced on sawhorses because there are simply too many people to fit around a normal table.

That's Thanksgiving.

And somewhere in all of that is the turkey.

Maybe one of the birds I'm feeding this morning ends up on a table where somebody tries a new recipe this year.

Maybe everybody loves it.

Maybe they make it again next year.

And the year after that.

Maybe twenty years from now, someone in that family will still be making it because that's just how we make the Thanksgiving turkey.

They might not even remember exactly how the tradition started.

I do.

Mine started with a brand-new newlywed, a giant family Thanksgiving, the early internet, a terrifying amount of responsibility and a recipe involving enough butter and wine that I decided it was worth taking the risk.

All these years later, I'm still making that turkey.

Except now, I'm raising them too.

And I think that's pretty damn cool.