{"id":2255,"date":"2012-12-27T03:00:06","date_gmt":"2012-12-27T11:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/?p=2255"},"modified":"2012-12-27T03:01:05","modified_gmt":"2012-12-27T11:01:05","slug":"delectable-december-michael-thomas-talks-turkeys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/delectable-december-michael-thomas-talks-turkeys\/","title":{"rendered":"Delectable December: Michael Thomas Talks Turkeys"},"content":{"rendered":"

My guest today is Michael Thomas. I was lucky enough to meet him when he submitted a fantastic Olympic story to my Going for Gold<\/strong> anthology from MLR Press earlier this year. Michael’s still writing and still cracking readers up with his wonderful sense of humor. Keep reading to see what I’m talking about. And as strange as this recipe sounds, I’ll give anything with kahlua a chance.
\n<\/em>
\nWhen I was twenty-three, a girl I knew from college had a spot open up in her 3-bedroom flat in the Western Addition. I figured a guy\u2019s gotta live somewhere, so I packed up a truck and ran off to San Francisco. We were all three roommates from someplace other than California, as were most of the people we knew, and when our First San Francisco Thanksgiving rolled around, we were all either too broke, too foreign, or too tied to our entry-level customer service jobs to go home. Besides, we reasoned, San Francisco is our home now\u2014we\u2019re here, we\u2019re queer, we might as well get used to it. We will have Thanksgiving here, one of us announced. Just us and our friends. There were only two rules that first year: No Drama and No Family Allowed.<\/p>\n

I volunteered to prepare the turkey. I was excited to be in charge of the star attraction, but didn\u2019t know the first thing about cooking one. All I knew was that you had to get up at the crack of dawn and slave over a hot turkey baster all day, then you got to be a big hero when you brought it to the table<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s easy,\u201d my new co-worker Anita assured me.<\/p>\n

\u201cEasy?\u201d I said. \u201cIt takes forever. And isn\u2019t there, like, a neck? It sounds elaborate.\u201d
\nShe shook her head and sipped her one millionth daily ounce of Mountain Dew. \u201cNo, see, what you do is\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

And she gave me her foolproof turkey recipe. And what do you know, she was right: we had a tiny, unreliable oven, and I didn\u2019t know how to cook much in those days, but together, that oven and I, we were able to pull off Anita\u2019s two-ingredient recipe (three ingredients, I guess, if you count the turkey), and what turned out to be our First Annual Friends Thanksgiving was a triumph! (Due, in no small part, to the fact that one of the two ingredients was Kahlua, at which we\u2019d been sipping in our coffee since about 8 a.m.)<\/p>\n

My job, of course, is \u201copen\u201d 24\/7\/365. There are thousands\u2014some estimates say tens of thousands\u2014of airplanes in the air at any given time, and they are not (alas) grounded so that their crews can run off and cook turkey dinners. In Kiss Me, Straight, Our Hero Todd spends a Thanksgiving, as I once did, at a Shanghai chicken joint with roller skating waitresses and a girl whose only job it is to keep your beer glass full; when my airline career and I were young and glamorous, I\u2019d often spend the actual holiday aloft, slinging plastic dishes of turkey and gravy in the aisle and then supping, perched over the galley trash can, on the leftover coach pasta, and we\u2019d celebrate Friends Thanksgiving the Saturday before or the Saturday after actual Thanksgiving. But celebrate it we did, and without fail.<\/p>\n

Some years it was just a few of us; other years friends invited friends who brought along friends and the gang of us ate on the floor. For weeks before, we\u2019d pass around the most recent Thanksgiving issue of Bon Appetit magazine, and then whip up side dishes and salads and get super creative with pie. There was always plenty (and I do mean plenty) of wine, one year to the rather heroic tune of three bottles per person. (The same year, come to that, that the boy I was crushing on turned to me\u2014after consuming his allotted three bottles of wine\u2014and disclosed in a whisper that he had hepatitis.) And\u2014if it ain\u2019t broke, don\u2019t fix it\u2014the turkey was my domain. I would eventually go on to brine them and spice them with chiles and stuff them with every combination of garlic and fruit imaginable, but for years, Anita\u2019s turkey was our much beloved Thanksgiving tradition. I consider Kahlua on Thanksgiving non-negotiable even still, after almost twenty years, and I haven\u2019t made Kahlua turkey in at least ten.<\/p>\n

As happens, our friends became our family; the No Drama rule was fervently embraced and strictly enforced, but the No Family rule faded into obscurity as we started collecting partners and in-laws and babies. Eventually, of course, some of us moved, to places like Panama and Colorado, and we no longer gather every year in each others\u2019 living rooms to eat turkey and guzzle wine and sing old camp songs during hilariously mis-named \u201ctalent\u201d shows, but Friends Thanksgiving lives on as my favorite holiday. Like Kiss Me, Straight, my life is a celebration of the joy and the power of friendship, and of the curative and unifying wonders of good food, and to me, these things will always taste like turkey.<\/p>\n

Anita\u2019s Can\u2019t-Miss Kahlua Turkey<\/p>\n

1 Turkey, prepped for roasting
\nEqual Parts Kahlua and Apricot Jam<\/p>\n

Whisk Kahlua and jam together and slather it all over the turkey, being sure to add plenty of Kahlua to your Thanksgiving morning coffee. Cook the turkey per package\/store\/Mark Bittman\u2019s How to Cook Everything\u2019s instructions. Brush every 30-45 minutes with Kahlua\/jam mixture. Tent the turkey with foil if its starts to brown too fast. Turkey is done when a meat thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the breast registers at least 165 degrees. Gravy made with the drippings from this turkey is sweet and delicious; when Tabasco is added, it is the Best Gravy Ever.<\/p>\n

Michael’s latest release is Kiss Me Straight:<\/p>\n

\"Kiss_Me_Straight_Cover.jpg\"Beijing, Tokyo, Sydney — these exciting cities are standard fare in the life of flight attendant Todd Eisenbraun, and he chases a romance with sexy-but-straight Josh through them all.<\/p>\n

Closer to home, a new neighbor in his San Francisco apartment building has a huge crush on Todd. His friends — Katie, a flight attendant-turned-small appliance repairwoman, and Marzipan Q. Thespian, a man-dangling local philanthropist — think Todd should at least give Chris a shot. Sure, he\u2019s overweight, but he\u2019s also handsome, a hilarious playwright, and a great cook … what\u2019s not to love?<\/p>\n

Todd and Chris become quick friends, but Todd\u2019s idea of the perfect man is skinny and straight, and Chris is decidedly neither. Josh may have a fianc\u00e9e and a teenaged son, but Todd just knows he\u2019s \u201cthe One.\u201d<\/p>\n

But if Josh is straight, the road to love is not; Todd is jostled by internalized homophobia, body image issues, exotic locales, the glamorous world of sewing machine repair, and a community theater musical salute to the life of Judy Garland before he arrives at the realization that he\u2019s been looking way too hard for something he may have already found.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My guest today is Michael Thomas. I was lucky enough to meet him when he submitted a fantastic Olympic story to my Going for Gold anthology from MLR Press earlier this year. Michael’s still writing and still cracking readers up with his wonderful sense of humor. Keep reading to see what I’m talking about. And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,63],"tags":[937,307,441,329,271,178,442],"class_list":["post-2255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-event","category-guest-posting","tag-delectable-december","tag-going-for-gold","tag-kiss-me-straight","tag-michael-p-thomas","tag-mlr-press","tag-recipe","tag-thanksgiving"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pzLgx-An","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2255\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}