This year for Thanksgiving Dallas and I decided to try to make our own Thanksgiving dinner. I’d made Thanksgiving dinner with Kelly and Jeff and Aunt Sue many times (2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006), but I never made the turkey before. We started out by brining the turkey overnight in a mixture of salt, broth, orange juice, and spices.
Jeannette used to make a pre-Thanksgiving feast when I lived in New York, so I asked her for some turkey guidance and she delivered! She sent us all kinds of tips, mostly from Cooks Illustrated.
We quickly learned that the big secret is….. BUTTER! Buttering the skin. Dallas also lifted the skin a little and shoved butter between the skin and the meat.
After the first check, this is what the turkey looked like.
We rotated it on all 4 sides to get even browning. Each time we rotated, we applied more butter.
And then one time we cut off some fresh sprigs of rosemary and stuck them in.
More butter!
Finished. Perfectly browned skin.
We stuffed the turkey with onions, carrots, celery, thyme and rosemary.
I made some gravy with the giblets.. another recipe from Jeannette. Dallas browned the bits in the pan so I could add them to the gravy. By the way, this gravy was kind of a pain and took a long time, but it was like the best gravy EVER.
Dallas then carved the turkey.
And we could see that it was cooked perfectly all the way through.
This was our whole Thanksgiving dinner.
I’ll have a few recipes to share in the upcoming weeks. As for the turkey? It was SO good. Very moist and flavorful. All in all, we agreed that this was one of our favorite meals we’ve ever cooked together. I know we won’t cook Thanksgiving dinner every year, but it’s nice to know that we can!
