NAPERVILLE, Ill. Workers at Butterball’s turkey-tips hot line are used to oddball situations:

• The woman who cleaned out her turkey with a scrub brush and asked if that was OK to do. (You don’t need to do that.)

• People who thaw a turkey in the bathtub while washing their kids. (Don’t do that, either.)

When I was a child, we would pile into the family Chevy on Thanksgiving Day for the drive from our house in Philadelphia to my grandparents’ one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. In her tiny kitchen, Grandma Minnie would somehow produce a perfect, sit-down Thanksgiving dinner for 20. I inherited her china, but not her confidence in the kitchen.

Deep-frying. Wood-smoking. Sous vide (the French vacuum-packing technique). The mind-numbing number of suggestions for mining flavor from the typically unforgiving Thanksgiving bird have proliferated in recent years. This year, leave them all behind.

Enter the “Hall of Armenian Issue with Documents” at the military museum in Istanbul, and you get a very different picture of what many historians view as the first genocide of the 20th century.

An official says a van stacked with beehives has crashed into a truck, killing one person and causing the bees to swarm and attack five injured crash victims and their rescuers.

An Istanbul court says it has acquitted a Turkish author of charges of insulting Islam in his latest book.

By IBRAHIM USTA
Associated Press Writer

The G-20 economic summit in London was the most important meeting on President Barack Obama’s European itinerary. His most important national visit took him to Turkey. Turkey bestrides continents. It connects Europe and Asia, East and West. It shares borders with the Balkans, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and some of the more restive republics of the former Soviet Union. It has seen its share of war, and initiated its share, too. Early Christianity flourished in the lands that became Turkey. Today, the country is almost exclusively Muslim. Tourists staying in posh resorts hear the muezzin’s call. Yet while so-called religious parties have made electoral gains, Turkey remains secular. Istanbul is closer in ambience to Paris than to Kandahar. Turkey maintains ties with Israel—ties that have come under stress but ties nevertheless.

We have reached the season of the year when we must peer deep into our souls and ask ourselves a question of great magnitude: What do we do with the leftover turkey? My answer is simple: Eat it. I’m perfectly happy to graze at the open refrigerator door and pick off whatever I need. Or better yet, make one of those Thanksgiving dinner sandwiches that Dagwood might concoct if using Thanksgiving ingredients.