Turkey Roasting time!

I’m blessed with enough friends and family that I’ve been a guest at someone’s home for Thanksgiving dinner for the past several years.  On those rare occasions when I want to make a turkey dinner, I’ve always gone the easy way and just made a turkey breast roast in the Crock Pot.  So, I’ve never cooked a whole turkey, nor have I ever really had a desire to do so.  I really hate touching raw meat and I hate eating meat off the bone, so this wasn’t something on my bucket list…. or so I thought.

My husband also really enjoys cooking and Thanksgiving is one of his favorite holidays.  He loves making (and eating) the turkey.  It makes me happy to hear him talk fondly of Thanksgiving dinners past filled with family and food.  I look forward to many, many Thanksgivings to come with our family and friends.

All this got me to thinking, though. I will gladly turn the responsibility of preparing turkeys over to him for as long as he wants it (because it’s icky!), but secretly I guess I just wanted the satisfaction of knowing that I could do it, even though I just choose not to.  So I challenged myself to cook a whole turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.  In fact, I made a whole Thanksgiving dinner.

I did solicit some advice, via Facebook, and posed the question, “To stuff or not to stuff the bird?”.  The responses were wide ranging with tips on how to prepare the bird.  I received suggestions for brining, massaging, stuffing, covering, and rotating the turkey.  My favorite was “The only thing you should stuff is yourself”!  So I took all the advice, did a little research on my own, and then called my mom and my husband, who each had advice of their own.

So here, memorialized in this blog, is a record that I can, in fact, cook a whole turkey!

This is what I started out with in the morning:

My Thanksgiving dinner plan included turkey, stuffing, glazed carrots, garlic mashed potatoes, green beans and walnuts with a lemon vinaigrette, and crescent rolls.

My turkey was 15.41 pounds and had been thawing in the refrigerator for about three days.

I did everything I could do ahead of time to possibly delay this moment as long as possible, I chopped up the veggies, herbs and spices, prepared the roasting pan, and made a nice work space on my counter, but the moment I had been dreading the most was finally here.  I had to take the turkey out of the packaging and wash it.

I rinsed the turkey in cold water and took out all the nasty parts that were stuffed inside.  Blech!  I can’t even tell you how many times I washed my hands throughout this process. Really.  I lost count.

I decided to pick and choose from among all the tips and advice that I received and in the end I loosely followed the Martha Stewart guide to roasting a turkey.  I also decided to not stuff the turkey, for several reasons, but mostly because i didn’t want to add to the cooking time or deal with two different dishes of stuffing.

I filled the turkey with onion, celery, carrot, shallot, garlic, and and some herbs that I tied up in a small bit of cheesecloth.  More carrot and celery went into the roasting pan to help flavor the juices.

Rub with butter, salt, and pepper.  Then, I closed up the neck skin with toothpicks, but mine didn’t look as pretty as Martha’s.  I also had flimsy flat toothpicks and broke about a dozen trying to shove them through the skin.  Ewwwww, so gross!  I’m more than happy to let my hubby handle this from now on!

I covered the turkey with a cheesecloth that had been soaking in wine and melted butter.

 

Into the oven it goes! I left it alone in the oven at 425 degrees for the first 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes, I lowered the oven temperature to 350 degrees and basted the turkey with the butter-wine mixture.  I continued to baste every 30 minutes.

After two hours of roasting and basting, I removed the cheesecloth and basted liberally with the wine and butter.  Mmmm, it was starting to smell delicious!

While the turkey continued to cook, I prepared my stuffing. I followed the package directions, but also added pecans, apples, water chestnuts, and oysters!  I prepared the carrots and crescent rolls so they would be ready to go in the oven as soon as the turkey came out.

I also cooked the mashed potatoes and green beans, using  this fabulous recipe, which is one of my favorites.

The turkey cooked for about another two hours and I continued to baste it regularly.

Finally it was done!