Random Turkey Dinner

As one of my badminton captains, Charlie, said, “Cambodian people eat everything!”

Now you would think that after Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas dinner, time-consuming turkey dinners would be the last thing on people’s minds. We usually have turkey dinners twice in our family, once on Thanksgiving and then again on Christmas. That's all I need for my turkey fix for the rest of the year.

Sometime earlier in January, my aunt won a frozen stuffed turkey from school or something. And since there wasn't a holiday, we just held a turkey dinner on a random weekend.

My grandma, uncle, cousin and dad came over to Toronto to visit some relatives (who will be heading back to Cambodia later) this weekend. Being the only ones who knew how to cook a turkey dinner, my dad and I were in charge of making the turkey dinner.

The turkey was in the oven before I arrived, since it took over 4 hours to bake. My dad took out the stuffing an hour and a half and threw it back in before everything was ready to eat. My uncle bought two hams, in case people weren’t a fan of turkey, so I made a honey mustard glaze.


Our family usually makes mashed potatoes with some radioactive-yellow chicken bake with butter, milk and cheese. My uncle didn’t have any of that kind of chicken bake but did have the Chinese one, so a bit of that was added to the pot with butter, milk, minced garlic and green onions.


There was plenty of salad – so much so, that we split the salad into two large salad bowls. One salad bowl was turned into caesar salad, whilst the other one was left plain for people to dress their own (there was Italian and ranch dressing). We had garlic bread and two different gravies as well (homemade turkey gravy and brown canned gravy).

And to round out the meal, curry crab was made. Yeah… I have no clue. The dungeness crab was stir fried with onions, garlic, the guts, curry powder and a slurry of potato starch and some cooking liquid from the potatoes to thicken the sauce.


If you thought that was weird, imagine our lunch we just had. Stewed beef soup, which I found too sweet, and a plate of lok lak was made.

My dad’s bowl consisted of rice, curry crab, turkey, ham and stuffing at one point. There was mashed potato, ham, lok lak and some of the beef chunks from the stewed beef soup. It’s very random, but that’s my dad – a true Cambodian.

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