by Jeremy Bloom

Created on: November 20, 2008

"I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character...the turkey is, in comparison, a much more respectable bird, and withal a true native original of America." - Ben Franklin

You've got a choice. You can do Thanksgiving at Uncle George's again this year - chow down with all the bickering relatives until you're stuffed enough to burst, then watch them all nod off over the football games. Fun.

Or, you can follow the lead of our Pilgrim forbears. They were on their own, a long way from home. They didn't really have a clue what they were doing. But they made the best of it, and at the end of the year they celebrated their independence - and survival - with a feast. Cranberries, and venison, and corn, and apples, and pumpkins - and turkey.

Turkey is easy, right? You just open the pack of cold cuts, pull out a handful, slap it between two slices of bread with a little mayo and lettuce, and you're ready to roll. Problem is, cold cuts don't cut it for Thanksgiving. No problem - you've always had the feeling that you could be a master chef. So you roll a twenty-pound bird through the checkout line and lug it back home (suddenly realizing just how heavy twenty pounds can be). And there it sits on the kitchen counter. Now what do you do?

Your first turkey could be a piece of cake, or it could be a total disaster. So we thought we'd seek out some professional help - Eric Trites, chief cook and pheasant plucker at the Hermitage Inn in Wilmington, Vermont. The Hermitage is a resort that specializes in the fare the pilgrim fathers (and mothers) laid on their tables: pheasants, wild turkeys, ducks, gamecocks, deer. And Trites figures he's cooked around five hundred turkeys over the past ten years.

"But not wild turkeys, not this year," he explains. "We had a little trouble with some foxes." As we talk, the CIA graduate (that's the Culinary Institute of America, for those of you who aren't gastronomically inclined) is washing and gutting a brace of pheasants and gamecocks, a fairly messy process.

"The good news for you is you don't have to do this," he adds with a laugh, rinsing some bits of bird from his fingers. "Your Butterball turkey, whatever, is fine. The only guts you'll have to look at are the giblets, and they usually put them inside the bird in a plastic bag."

Which leads to a little piece of advice on one of the primo errors, which victimizes even veterans of many Thanksgiving food-fests: "Before you start

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