My First Turkey

One of the things that Peter and I wanted to do over Christmas break was cook a turkey. We've always been fortunate to have Mom and Tyee cook the turkey for Thanksgiving, but we thought that we should probably learn how to do it. So today was our day. I'm much more appreciative of all that goes into making a Thanksgiving dinner!! Timing everything is quite the challenge, as I found out :) We decided to brine the turkey which is a process in itself - we had to brine it in our cooler because the turkey was so huge (we probably shouldn't have tried cooking a 25-pound turkey for our first attempt). Our brine was made of molasses, honey, kosher salt, 3 heads of garlic, thyme, sage, etc. It brined overnight in the cooler on the deck, and then we put it in the oven around 10:00 this morning. We thought it would take about 5 hours to cook. It turned out that it was done in about 2 1/2 hours (probably because we cooked it in the convection oven...). We had just returned from brunch at Longbottom, and the turkey was almost done! So we carved the white meat and put it in the fridge (3 hours before we were planning on eating... :) Even though the skin was dark, the meat was very, very moist and delicious (probably because the recipe called for 1 pound of butter to be rubbed under the skin). We discovered the dark meat wasn't quite done, so we put it back in the oven, and carved that a bit later. In the meantime, Peter started not feeling so well....probably because he ate some dark meat that wasn't all the way cooked....oops. Good thing we were just practicing and not inviting 20 people over for a Thanksgiving dinner. Tyee gave me his delicious recipe for his stuffing which turned out amazing. The funny thing is when it was about dinner time, I had already been tasting the food and was actually sick of the turkey that we all decided we didn't want to eat it for dinner! The girls had mashed potatoes and leftover mac and cheese and steak. I had ice cream, and Peter didn't eat. Conner ate a hamburger at a friend's house.... I'm looking forward to having a fully cooked meal ready for tomorrow when we get home from work :)