Well today I have been trying to get all the things done on my list before tomorrow. Mainly cleaning, some cooking too. Yet again I have waited till the last minute. I’ve had all week to do this stuff and here it is 7:42pm and I’m not even halfway through the list. I’m still not doing anything now, Blog posting wasn’t on my list, yet here I am. Wes posted this Procrastinators Chart yesterday, I think it suits me. I think I work better under pressure. Oh, well I guess this stuff can wait till morning. I gotta get up early and cook my bird. Happy Thanksgiving.
By the way, this is the recipe I’ll be using. Courtesy of Elise and Simply Recipes.
# 1 turkey, approx. 15 lbs.*
# Juice of a lemon
# Salt and pepper
# Olive oil or melted butter
# 1/2 yellow onion, peeled and quartered
# Tops and bottoms of a bunch of celery
# 2 carrots
# Parsley
# Sprigs of fresh rosemary, thyme
Directions:
1 To start, if the turkey has been refrigerated, bring it to room temperature before cooking. Keep it in its plastic wrapping until you are ready to cook it. While in the refrigerator, and or while you are bringing it to room temp, have the bird resting in a pan, so that if the plastic covering leaks for any reason, you are confining the juices to the pan. If you get a frozen turkey, you will need to defrost it in the refrigerator for several days first. Allow approximately 5 hours of defrosting for every pound. So, if you have a 15 pound turkey, it will take about 75 hours to defrost it in the refrigerator, or around 3 days.
Handle a raw turkey with the same amount of caution as when you handle raw chicken – use a separate cutting board and utensils to avoid contaminating other foods. Wash you hands with soap before touching anything else in the kitchen. Use paper towels to clean up.
Remove the neck and giblets (heart, gizzard, liver). Use the heart and gizzard for making stock for the stuffing. The neck can be cooked along side the turkey or saved for turkey soup.
Note that if your turkey comes with a plastic piece holding the legs together, check the instructions on the turkey’s package. Most likely you do not need to remove those plastic ties for cooking (unless you plan to cook your turkey at a very high temperature). If you remove the plastic ties, you will need to use kitchen string to tie the legs together.
2 Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
3 Wash out the turkey with water. Pull out any remaining feather stubs in the turkey skin. Pat the turkey dry with paper towels. Lather the inside of the cavity with the juice of half a lemon. Take a small handful of salt and rub all over the inside of the turkey.
4 In this method of cooking a turkey, we don’t make the stuffing in the turkey because doing so adds too much to the cooking time. For flavor, put in inside the turkey a half a yellow onion, peeled and quartered, a bunch of parsley, a couple of carrots, and some tops and bottoms of celery. You may need to cap the body cavity with some aluminum foil so that the stuffing doesn’t easily fall out. Close up the turkey cavity with either string (not nylon string!) or metal skewers. Make sure that the turkey’s legs are tied together, held close to the body, and tie a string around the turkey body to hold the wings in close.
The neck cavity can be stuffed with parsley and tied closed with thin skewers and string.
5 Rub either melted butter or olive oil all over the outside of the turkey. Sprinkle salt generously all over the outside of the turkey (or have had it soaking in salt-water brine before starting this process). Sprinkle pepper over the turkey.
6 Place turkey BREAST DOWN on the bottom of a rack over a sturdy roasting pan big enough to catch all the drippings. This is the main difference between the way mom makes turkey and everyone else. Cooking the turkey breast down means the skin over the breast will not get so brown. However, all of the juices from the cooking turkey will fall down into the breast while cooking. And the resulting bird will have the most succulent turkey breast imaginable.
Add several sprigs of fresh (if possible) thyme and rosemary to the outside of the turkey.
7 Chop up the turkey giblets (gizzard, heart, liver). Put into a small saucepan, cover with water, add salt. Bring to simmer for an hour or so to help make stock for the stuffing (see stuffing recipe).
8 Put the turkey in the oven. Check the cooking directions on the turkey packaging. Gourmet turkeys often don’t take as long to cook. With the turkeys mom gets, she recommends cooking time of about 15 minutes for every pound. For the 15 lb turkey, start the cooking at 400 F for the first 1/2 hour. Then reduce the heat to 350 F for the next 2 hours. Then reduce the heat further to 225 F for the next hour to hour and a half.
If you want the breast to be browned as well, you can turn over the bird for the last 15-20 minutes of cooking, at an oven temp of 300°F. (Oven must be at least 250°F for browning to occur.) Note that if you do this, you will have a higher risk of overcooking the turkey breast. We never worry about browning the breast.
Start taking temperature readings with a meat thermometer, inserted deep into the thickest part of the turkey breast and thigh, a half hour before the turkey should be done. The dark meat in the thigh should be about 175 F. The white meat in the breast should be 160 F to 165 F. If you don’t have a meat thermometer, spear the breast with a knife. The turkey juices should be clear, not pink.
9 Once you remove the turkey from the oven, let it rest for 15-20 minutes. Turn the turkey breast side up to carve it.
