Roast Turkey, with stuffing

Roast Turkey is one of my favorite meals of all time.  There is such a feeling of abundance about it!  Even during hard times as a child, on Thanksgiving, we were allowed to eat as much as we wanted.  And let me tell you...we did!  I always purchase a BIG turkey, because I love having lots of leftovers.  Sliced cold turkey, tucked between toasted bread, a little mayonnaise, and a sprinkling of salt and pepper.  Yum!  (My husband adds some of my leftover cold mashed potatoes to his sandwich, which he swears tastes delicious...but eew!  Really, I’m glad he’s so happy, but yuck.  Ruining a perfectly good turkey sandwich with cold congealed mashed potatoes?) This year we are celebrating Thanksgiving early because my boy David is coming by on the sixth on his way back from visiting his friend in Toronto.  Emily, sadly won’t be here.  She’s at University in the States and the Thanksgiving is in November there.  Will, obviously will be eating.  As will I and Don, however, Don did have a hard time controlling his mirth when I came back to the car from the butcher shop clutching an order form for a 22 lb Free Range, Organic Turkey.
“22 pounds!” he kept saying.  “You ordered a 22 pound turkey?” I don’t know why he was so surprised.  I always order a turkey around that size.  “There are only going to be four of us,” he said, which was a fact I was well aware of, but hearing it out loud filled me with a sort of wistful longing for my daughter to magically arrive home with a hungry friend or two in tow.  “David’s going to be here,” I said, chin stuck out slightly.  “And John might come too.” But even as I say the part about John coming, I know he won’t.  He hasn’t been coming up as much as he used to, I don’t know why, but I miss him, feel like time is slipping through our hands.  “Besides,” I said with a little more conviction than I felt.  “I want to have lots of leftovers!” “Well, you will have that,” Don said smiling at me affectionatly.  And then I didn’t talk anymore because he was backing up and he is a...ahem… distractable driver. 

Roast Turkey with Stuffing

If you can afford it buy a free range organic turkey.  If you can’t, don’t worry about it.  Being able to buy a turkey at all is a splendid thing!  If your store carries fresh turkeys I recommend that over frozen.  I find fresh turkeys tend to be juicier than frozen.  If you have a regular sized oven I would warn you against buying anything over 23 lbs.  I once told the butcher, “Give me the biggest turkey you got!” I ended up with a 25 pounder, and it wouldn’t fit in my roasting pan, so I had to race out to the store and buy one of those flimsy disposable roasting pans.  Two of them actually because they were so flimsy I was worried that the turkey would just bust right through it and end up rolling around on the kitchen floor!  And then, after all of that...the darn thing wouldn’t fit in my oven!  It was an odd shaped bird and it’s frame was too tall, so I had to saw the thing in two, overlap the two halves, with the stuffing tucked underneath.  It tasted well enough, but just didn’t feel the same.  So from then on, I never would let my enthusiasm run away with me.  My turkeys are now always between 20-23 lbs.

-heat oven to 325 degrees. * regular bake, not convection.
-Grease your roasting pan lightly with whatever oil you have handy.  This is important so when it comes time to remove the turkey to the chopping board it doesn’t stick to the sides. 
-Wash turkey throughly in the sink.  Inside and out. Then dry.  It’s important to tip it up on it’s end so that you don’t have a little pond of water trapped inside.
-place the neck, heart and gizzard in a pot of water to simmer.  This will be your stock for your gravy
-Throw a bay leaf and around 7-8 shakes of dried sage, rosemary, thyme into the water. Or chop and use the fresh stuff.
-Add one or two chicken bullion cubes to the water, and a glug or two of white wine.
-place pan with turkey in the fridge and start the stuffing

Meg’s Delicious One-Of-A-Kind Turkey Stuffing

Ingredients:sour dough bread, french bread, whole wheat bread, celery, butter, bacon, apple,( sausage, if you like) onion, frozen orange juice concentrate, paprika, rosemary, thyme, sage, onion powder, salt, pepper (and lemon pepper if you have it lying around.)

- cut or tear into a huge cooking pot or bowl, 10-12 cups of bread.

- Peel and dice one large onion.(Using my super onion dicing trick found in my beef stroganoff recipe)
-wash and chop half a bunch of celery, starting at the top, leaves and all.
-peel and dice one apple (green is nice, but really, use whatever is lying around in your fridge.)
-Fry 6 slices of bacon in a LARGE pan until brown, remove from pan
-Fry 4-6 (depending on size) sausages until brown, remove from pan
-pour out around half the bacon and sausage greasy, discard. 
-Fry the onions, celery and apple in leftover grease and 2/3 cup of butter until onions turn sort of opeque.
- dump around 1/3 of the broken/cut bread into the onion/ celery/ apple, add salt, pepper, rosemary, thyme, sage, paprika, to taste. 

- chop the sausage and bacon and add to bread mixture
-toss well. 
-Add two rounded tablespoons of the frozen orange juice concentrate to the mixture in pan

Make sure you scoot the bread mixture to the side so you can drop the frozen juice on to the hot part of the pan so it can melt.  Stir as it melts so that the flavor gets mixed equally.  Now I know the idea of frozen orange juice in stuffing sounds weird, but trust me, it adds that special zing.  You can’t really taste it, but you miss it if it’s not there!

- now pour the contents of the pan into the large pot holding the rest of the bread bits and mix well. 
-Taste the seasoning one last time, add more if it needs it.
-Take the turkey out of the fridge and stuff.

First stuff the top part where the head and neck used to be.  Then fold the flap of skin over the stuffing and tip up on it’s head and stuff the rest of the bird. 

-slip some cooking string, or a piece of white thread underneath the turkey’s back and tie the wings so they are tucked close to the turkey’s body
-Then pop the stuffed turkey, chest up into the oven.

Let me re-phrase that.  If you bought a huge honking turkey like me, it is unlikely that you will jauntily “pop” that sucker into the oven.  More than likely you will stagger that baby over to the oven and pray you don’t get a hernia when you bend over to heave it in.

Now...Very Important! Many cookbooks say you are suppose to cook a stuffed turkey that is over 16 lbs for anywhere from 18-23 minutes per pound.  With my big gigantic turkeys I find it’s more reasonable to give it 15 minutes per pound.  But even then, depending on the turkey, that amount can be too much.  What I do is when we are around an hour from the supposed end time, I take the turkey leg in my hand (wearing the pot holder of course!) Twist the leg gently.  Using no more pressure than around half of what you would use opening a new jar of catsup.  It the drumstick bone rotates easily in your hand take the turkey out immediately!  Because it is done and if you don’t take it out, that sucker will be dry as dust.  It can happily sit on the counter while you finish up the gravy, and last minute vegetables. 

Another Very Very Important Tip: After the turkey has been in the oven for around a hour you are going to want to take a stick of butter out of the fridge and run it all over the turkey’s breast, legs and wings.  Try to repeat this every half hour or so.  By around the 4th basting, there should be enough juice in the bottom of the roasting pan that you can stop using the butter and take a turkey baster, suck up the juice from the bottom and squirt it all over, really drench that turkey.  There’s no such thing as basting a turkey too much!  Also, don’t bother removing the turkey from the oven every time you want to baste it.  Just slide the rack out, baste it, slide it back in and shut the oven door.  There’s no need to race around checking the clock and doing it every half hour on the hour.  Just use that as sort of a frame work and basically baste it when ever you are passing the oven.  I aim for every half hour, and I doubt I’ve ever actually managed to do it.  Don’t worry if one or two bastings slip your mind, my turkey is always nice and juicy!

The Last Very Important Tip: You must remove all the stuffing from the turkey before you store it in the fridge!  What I do is scoop it all out into a large serving bowl so it’s easily accessible and people can come back for 4th and 5ths.  That way you won’t forget and by accident put the partially stuffed bird into the fridge and poison your family!

(I’ll tell you how to make gravy next time.  And don’t throw out those bones, because in my mind, turkey bones make the very best soup!)

Posted by Meg Tilly on Monday, October 01, 2007 in Recipes

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