Stuff It Up!, AKA, Getting the Turkey Ready

As I always say...it ain't Thanksgiving if you don't have your hand up a turkey's butt at some point!!!!

I was up late last night making our stuffing and preparing the turkey. Which reminds me...how many of you still stuff your turkey? It's something I've always done, and never really thought to do otherwise. Nowadays, I hear people fretting about salmonella, etc. from ingesting stuffing cooked inside a bird. All I can say is: I've eaten stuffing from inside a turkey for 30-plus years now, and I've never ailed from it in the least. Take from that what you will.

Anyways, for those who only know the Stove Top variety, here's what I do to make my stuffing and prepare my turkey (i.e., give it the best chance to cook well; turkeys have a nasty habit of drying out while cooking).

Keep in mind that our bird this year was 21 pounds, and the stuffing filled it pretty much to capacity, so this is a pretty large stuffing recipe. However, it's also fairly forgiving; you can fudge lots of the ingredients if you're worried about having too much!

I like to use wheat/whole grain bread for the stuffing. It just tastes so much better when you do! Our family often participates in Bountiful Baskets, a grocery coop that gives you good-quality, cheap produce, as well as some other items, like the yummy nine-grain bread shown below. It's very versatile bread, good for sandwiches, French toast, and (as it turns out) stuffing!

(Note: I only used two loaves from the picture above, not all three). The bread is pretty soft, so it was time to crisp it up by dicing it and putting it in a warm oven for a while...

...then letting it sit on the counter for the rest of the day to dry out!


In the evening, I got out the rest of the ingredients for the stuffing, pictured below:

1 lb bulk sausage, preferably sage-flavored
2 c chopped red onion
2 c chopped celery
2 tbsp minced garlic
2 tbsp dried thyme
2 tsp dried sage
1 Granny Smith apple, diced
1/2 c dried cranberries
salt & pepper to taste
1 - 2 tbsp vegetable oil (not pictured)
2 c chicken broth

First on the agenda was to brown the sausage in a deep pot:

While the sausage was cooking, it was time to chop up all the vegetables, then add them to the cooked crumbled sausage along with a little vegetable oil and the seasonings:

The apple and cranberries followed shortly after that:

By now, as you can imagine, our house was smelling very good.

At last it was time to add the bread (not all at once, but handfuls at a time, stirring frequently until it all blended together and started to "melt" together with the other ingredients).

 Adding the chicken broth (little by little) at this stage helps reduce the bread and moisten it. By the end of all the stirring, I got a beautiful "mess" of stuffing inside my pot!

At this point, I had to let the stuffing cool for at least an hour, so it would be easier to handle (and so it wouldn't adversely affect the bird).

But then it was time to shove the stuffing into the turkey. As you can see, handling a large dead turkey may not be for the squeamish. Heck, it's not my favorite thing in the world to do either. But the way it tastes when it's all done...mmm! It's worth the effort!

This can sometimes require some brute force, and often requires the use of your hands (another reason to let the stuffing cool a little bit!) I was barely able to fit it all in the lower body cavity; I managed to get a little bit into the neck cavity, but not much--this was a particularly "fat" bird! Here's what it looked like, post-stuffing:

A big worry for many cooks is overheating your turkey. If that happens, the meat often ends up quite dry and loses a lot of taste. There are many methods to keep your turkey meat moist and flavorful; here's the method that I use, and it usually works pretty well for me:

First, I cut little slits in the outer layer of skin in several spots along the turkey breast (keeping the breast meat moist is crucial, since that's where all the white meat comes from, and white meat has the tendency to dry out the fastest).

Then, I take a small pat of butter (use real butter for Thanksgiving dinner everyone, there are no substitutes!), and slide the pat into the slit in the skin you just cut, tucking it in nice and tight. Repeat that step with all the remaining slits.

Another yummy tip is to sprinkle some sage or poultry seasoning into the skin slits along with the butter; when the butter melts, it not only moistens the skin, it carries the flavor throughout the meat.

So here's what our bird looked like this morning, as I set it into the roaster pan to cook!

Oops. I forgot to take a picture of the finished turkey. Well, I think the results were above average. The white meat was a little dry, because I accidentally cooked the turkey a little long. Incidentally, you've probably noticed the little white button inside this turkey. Supposedly, it "pops up" when the turkey's done. I can tell you that thing doesn't always work very well! This particular button never popped up, but when I took a reading with my meat thermometer, it read 170 degrees! This is actually a little higher than the 165 degrees recommended for optimal results. So lesson learned: time your cooking carefully judging by the weight of the turkey; don't use the heat button to judge your results!

However, I only "missed the mark" by a little; it was still a pretty tasty bird! The dark meat (which I prefer to white meat anyway) was sublime; it just fell apart on my fork! So I'm willing to overlook a bit of (slightly) dry breast meat. What's more, we have tons for leftovers! Here's our great feast below:

(Grandma Barrett made all the pies this year, except the chocolate banana cream pie in the lower-left; I made that one! It was a hit with the kids.)

And here are the people that made all the work worthwhile:

Celeste and Aurora look just a bit hungry, don't you think? Not in the picture are our friends the Perry's (Brad, Amber, and their son Kent), who also brought lots of food along and were great company.

It was truly a day to celebrate; Nate's dad Glenn is recovering wonderfully from his surgery and it was nice to see him so healthy & happy. We had a wonderful Thanksgiving; we have much to be thankful for.