Thanksgiving

The Holiday Meal: Thanksgiving!

Golden Brown Stuffed Turkey

The playlist: Multiple
The drink: Multiple

Thanksgiving wouldn't be thanksgiving without turkey and fixin's.  As the host for the festivities, I volunteered to make the turkey, stuffing and gravy.  As an extra, I decided to make some fresh bred to to with the meal too.  Guests volunteered to bring salads, sides, desserts and of course more booze.

The day before prep started by getting the turkey cleaned and brined as well as getting the bread together to rise over night.

Brined Turkey:

Turkey in Brine Bucket

15lb Turkey
2 Cups Salt
2 Cups Brown Sugar
Fresh Rosemary
Water
Food grade plastic container big enough for turkey

Dissolve the salt and the sugar in a bit of warm water.  Once dissolved, add cool water, cleaned, unfrozen turkey and fresh herbs into the food grade plastic container.   Make sure there is enough water to fully submerge the turkey.  Put it in the fridge and let it sit overnight.

The bread was a no-kneed variety with Kalamata Olives, Feta and oregano, but I'll get into that recipe and variations in another post since there's enough going on in this post already.

Robyn's Pecan Pie

The game day process started at about noon so that all of the various items could cycle through the oven in time to get the turkey cooking by 2:30.  First Robyn's Maple Pecan Pie, then the bread and finally the turkey.

The music was pumping in the house from the first dial of the oven, all coming from my various iPod playlists.  Drinking country, Retro dance mix, and a ton of hip-hop and pop favourites, including the now legendary Enrique Iglesias DDG remix which had earlier got us unceremoniously written up and booted from the Tunnel mountain campground (and by us, I mean only Neil).

Bread Stuffing:
1lb Sausage
3 stalks Celery
1 Onion
Poultry Seasoning to taste
Bread - Most of a regular loaf

Brown the sausage first and then add the onions and celery to the pan.  Season with poultry seasoning to taste and add to a bowl of bread pieces.  This is always a good time to use up the left over bread bums and miscellaneous buns left over in the freezer.  Since I always seem to run out of stuffing, I doubled this recipe.

Now its time to introduce the stuffing to the host bird.  Take the bird out of the fridge, empty out the brine solution and rinse the turkey.  Pat it dry including the cavity.
Cram the stuffing into the cavity and then close up the hole using the legs and the skin flap.

I covered the stuffed turkey with tinfoil and put it in the oven for 4 hours.

Then the guests started to arrive.  First in the door was Trid, with a bottle of rum and a vegetable dish in tow and I knew we were in for a good night.  We also mixed in a few beers and several bottles of wine to go along with the all night fire.

After eating too much main course, we then proceeded to eat too much dessert.  We polished off an entire cake for Steph's birthday! Happy Birthday Steph!

 With all the leftovers in the fridge, what's Honey Badger going to eat for the next week? Turkey.