OyChicago blog

This is my second year as the Turkey Talk expert and I could not be more excited. I have to admit that after the glamour of last year’s Turkey Talk (I had solved all of last year’s frenzy of turkey troubles), I went through a period of withdrawal. I waited for more emails, I hoped for phone calls, I even prompted strangers in the grocery store to tell me their kitchen enigmas. I was ready, willing and able.

For those of you who do not know, here is the skinny. The very popular and informative www.Koshereye.com has teamed up with the folks at David Elliot Poultry Farms, myself and Avrum Wiseman to provide home cooks everywhere with Thanksgiving tips, recipes, advice and expert advice for solving your turkey troubles.

This is the zenith of the year for me. I love Thanksgiving and for most of my life, I have loved helping people prepare fabulous meals. I realized that the turkey presents challenges for most home cooks and I want to help you. Most folks only cook a whole turkey only once a year. The turkey is this large, slippery thing that is finicky to cook, hard to manage, and can somehow end up dry and undercooked all at the same time.

Thanksgiving, while not a Jewish holiday, is an important holiday for American Jews. It is the day when we can celebrate exactly the same as everyone else. We can jump in the car after dinner and visit friends, have the ballgame on in the background and eat much the same menu, with a few tweaks here and there, as any other American. This great country allows us to do all of that and to celebrate our Jewish holidays Jewishly, and I as a patriotic, American-Jew am going to have my turkey and eat it, too.

I hope that if you have turkey troubles, kitchen conundrums and other culinary enigmas, you will tune in to Koshereye and give us a shout out, check out my blog www.cheflauraskosher.com and have a wonderful and thankful Thanksgiving.