Dark Mystery

Living alone – more specifically, cooking alone – naturally leads to attending lots of senior lunches and church suppers.  This past week, they’ve all been turkey dinners, of course.

n      United Methodists, usual plastic gloves on volunteer buffet servers, white meat, the squash had nutmeg in it, cranberries were the superior kind, ground up with orange peel.

n      Senior Center, white meat, trouble cutting it up with those plastic knives, one old guy brought his own knife.

n      JCC, white meat,  no pumpkin pie, apple strudel instead.

n      Trinity Reform Church, platters to pass (does the Health Bureau approve that?), and those platters included dark meat!  They roasted whole turkeys!

So here’s something I’ve been wondering about a long time – what do they do with the dark meat?  Every big association luncheon you attend serves the same thing, right?  Breast of chicken with some sort of sauce (and sometimes stuffed with something), with rice to which something has been done, and chunks of yuppie veggies.

So what about the dark meat? I realize they’re breeding turkeys and chickens these days for big white meat (my mother, who was from Boston, reprimanded us if we ever called it breast meat).  But those birds must walk around, so wouldn’t you think there’d be drumsticks involved?  Or maybe they don’t walk around these days.

Wild turkeys do, at any rate.  This one showed up at the window right in front of my desk last spring..