I don't know a way to get dark meat without doing a whole bird.
TJ's had a prepackaged (maybe precooked, I forget) braised turkey leg thing available one year and it was delicious. I have sometimes found turkey legs available just in the meat department, and smoked turkey legs pretty reliably. I bet you could ask the butcher counter for turkey legs earlyish in November, although the price/lb would probably not be as low as for a whole bird.
Some years we don't do turkey at all, sometimes we do a whole turkey and I get a ton of leftovers (my parents are mostly vegetarian but they are getting a little more permissive lately), I think last year my dad actvely wanted turkey so we did a turkey breast. One year I made a turkey soup with stuffing dumplings and that was really good although it somehow seems like more of a leftovers-after-Thanksgiving meal than day of. One year back in the day when my DH was not yet my DH and his family went out to eat on Thanksgiving and did not invite me I just made a whole meal basically for myself although he was happy to have leftovers.
Haven't done a full on whole family meal since my mother's 75th birthday and even then I don't think my sister came. Maybe we will Zoom this year, now that everyone is used to doing that.
Oh, sorry about the meds, Nora, that is unfortunate!
I've talked my family into doing duck instead of turkey this year (I can get them from a local small farm even!) so at least if we have to cancel the medium-sized gathering I can put the extra ducks in the freezer instead of being stuck with a whole preordered turkey.
The good (?) thing about starting work at 6 means that I'm done now.
Mmm, duck.
We did heritage turkeys a couple times, which are more expensive, typically smaller, and truly delicious. I don't have my local hookup for that any more...oh, wait, maybe I should check if the order online pickup at the farm ad hoc CSA has turkeys...
I'm done for the day also. And the texting group has no texting and the QC stuff I do is all on hold because the tracking documents are not tracking things correctly. WAH!
Thanks for the ideas, Nora & -t, I'll have to start looking/asking around.
I've never heard of heritage turkeys; I'll have to see what my CSA comes up with next month.
Oh, that sucks about the anxiety meds!
Our current Thanksgiving plan involves a very small group of us who are all being very careful. We are lucky that in Los Angeles the testing sites are giving results within 24 hours. So the plan is for everyone that is attending to get a test on Tuesday and then essentially quarantine. We will all get results on Wednesday and then have Thanksgiving on Thursday. Everyone attending will have had a negative test result within 24 hours of the dinner, on top of them being trusted careful folks, and they will be quarantined between taking the test and coming to dinner. It's not perfect, but I think it is a fairly robust plan.
Pretty darn near perfect, ND. If I could have that kind of set-up, I'd consider the family Thanksgiving. But they're not doing anything like that.
Yeah, there is a testing site about 5 minutes from my home and we get results the next day. I've been testing every other week, and Pix is testing on the alternate weeks, so between the two of us we are never farther out that 7 days on a test. I've also had a worksite that is operating under the filming rules for Covid, so we need to be tested once a week on that site to be able to enter. I think I've had around a dozen tests at this point.
