Thanksgiving Menu
Roasted Turkey (see below as well as 11/19/05 entry)
Cornbread Dressing
Cranberry Sauce
Turkey Gravy
Sweet Potato Souffle
Cauliflower
Pole Beans
Collards
Pearl Onions 'N Mushrooms
Pecan Pie
Pumpkin Pie
Tea/Coffee/Wine/Water
Don't mean to rush anyone with their dinner plans, but it's time to prepare the grocery list. Writing out the menu helps me organize. Over the course of the next week, I'll be posting recipes. Hope y'all will share your menus.
Addition:
Basics of Slow Roast method of cooking large cuts of meat.
See Adele Davis's book, Let's Cook It Right, for explicit instructions. The key to the oven temp setting AFTER the initial hour at 300 degrees is based on the desired internal temperature of the meat when it is completely cooked.
Prepare meat/turkey by rinsing, removing innards, sprinkling desired seasonings, and/or rubbing with oil. (FYI-I don't season mine.) Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Place bird, breast-side down, on a rack in a large roasting pan. Roast turkey one hour at 300 degrees. Then turn oven temperature down to 190 degrees. Do not open the oven door! Roast turkey one hour per pound of weight. Remove from the oven at the end of the hours of cooking and the meat should just fall off the bone. I wear yellow kitchen gloves when I pull the meat off in chunks and arrange the legs, wings, breast, etc on the family platter in preparation for buffet-style serving.
And, yes, I have roasted a 24 lber this way!
My mom is roasting the turkey for us this year, as we'll be eating dinner with my extended family. For the past nineteen years, and for 1983, 1984, and 1985, Steve and I roasted the turkey and put together the entire meal for us, friends, and the children as they came along. For six years in a row while we lived in North Carolina my in-laws traveled from FL to spend Thanksgiving with us. Usually we had other military families far from home with us on that day.
ReplyDeleteMy super turkey-tip is this:
On Thanksgiving Eve before you head off to bed take your frozen turkey out of the freezer, put it in a roasting pan or disposable aluminum pan, cover with roaster lid or aluminum foil, and bake in your oven at 275 all night long. After 12 hours of slow cooking the turkey falls off the bone and your pan is full of drippings. And best of all, there's no nasty defrosting involved!
Dana, I may consider doing this tonite (if the poundage and time needed works out - I need to go check :P ).
ReplyDeleteWhat about stuffing? I think I've read before that it's not really a good idea to cook stuffing inside the bird anyway, but I wanted to check with you. Alternatively, do you have a stuffing/dressing recipe that doesn't require ingredients I don't currently have (cornbread, biscuits, any amount of broth - except canned - I've used up my other stuff)? I found a decent recipe last year, but I don't know what happened to it. :P
Oh, and I don't cover the turkey?
Thanks!