Now as someone with native descent, I know some native groups do not celebrate thanksgiving since it’s a holiday conceived by the colonists of the past. Canadian and American thanksgiving differs not only in dates but also the reason behind it, Google it yourself.
Most Cree in our territory celebrate the holiday anyway, perhaps it’s the influences of the churches (I won’t get into that either, but our communities have long since had been converted to a form of Christianity -Catholic-Protestant-Anglican), or perhaps like me, it’s just an excuse to cook a feast of goodies.
Whatever the reason is, I love to showcase what I can do. Cook a tasty turkey, make gravy from scratch, make a smorgasbord of side dishes and desserts. My whole family is happy on the day they see me put that turkey in the oven (I repeat this for Christmas Eve).
If I am going to show how thankful I am for this life, I might as well demonstrate it by cooking an awesome meal for the ones I love.
This year I decided to try out BBQ’ing my turkey. I found a recipe and instructions on how to BBQ a 12 pound turkey. I had bought a 22 pound turkey… O well I just have to cook it longer.
I created my own rub because I really didn’t care for the BBQ spices on my turkey. I did follow the brine recipe because it was an apple flavour base that I thought would be a nice compliment to my turkey. I Prepped my turkey in advance and put the rub, as well as a butter mixture with some of the rub I created to slide under the skin on the turkey breasts. Then I covered the whole bird with bacon. How fatty is that huh?!
On Monday morning, I woke up early, started my gas grill, took my fully decked out bird along with a few packets of hickory chips to smoke the bird. By midday, it looked promising. I started to baste the bird with apple juice according to the instructions. You could smell the smoky flavour in the air and I was pretty hopeful that yes, this is going to be one good meal.
By 4 pm however, it looked like it still needed some more cooking. So I transferred it to my oven for the next couple of hours. I took it out of the oven and I found the bottom of the bird looked doubtful. The breast was well done, the thighs looked okay. So I let the meat rest while I finished with prepping the rest of the meal.
As soon as I started to carve, the juices were flowing and I cringed as I saw the thighs needed more time. Thankfully this was a big turkey and the breasts were cooked to perfection. You know how the commercial goes when they carve into their turkey? All the juices flow out, showing a well done bird. That’s how it looked when I carved into my turkey breasts. So I plated the breasts parts and carved the dark meat into a baking platter along with the pan juices (I made homemade turkey broth so the juices were not necessary for the gravy), covered it and stuck it back into the oven.
The breast meat was enough for the guests I had invited for my feast. You could taste the apple hickory smoked flavour in the meat telling me, my gamble paid off. Everyone was full from it and I got to keep my dark meat for yummy leftover meals like turkey stew! Mwahahaha!
Despite the hiccup of the cooking time, which tells me that I either put in my turkey sooner in the oven if I am going to repeat this recipe with the same size turkey, or go smaller (which I’d rather not do because who doesn’t love leftover turkey meat huh?), this meal was a success!
Next year, I am tempted to try out deep frying my turkey OR better yet, smoke my turkey the Cree way, over the fire in the tepee! Well see...