I’m going to give you my Turkey tips just in time for Thanksgiving planning.
If you have just so much going on and you have no help, there’s nothing wrong with cooking the Turkey the day before? And I know that this sounds sacrilegious, (What? The whole house needs to smell like Turkey!), but if you cook the Turkey the day before, then you cut it all up, get all the pieces that you want, put it in pan, and put a little of the natural juice on the top of it, you can re-heat the next day. No harm, no foul – except for that picture-perfect dinner table photo of the patriarch carving. (Who does that anyway?)
You can then take all the bones and the carcass from the Turkey, plus the un-wanted parts and make stock in the crock pot on Turkey day. No one would even know that you didn’t cook the Turkey right then, and then it smells up the house and you now have some beautiful Turkey stock for later.
But what about the gravy?
This past year, I did something I’ve never done. Two days before Thanksgiving I went and bought a couple of turkey necks, backs, some gizzards and hearts. I bought some wings, essentially I bought all the parts that nobody wants. And I put it all in the oven on a cookie sheet and browned them.
I cooked it in the for maybe an hour at 400 degrees, and then I took it out, got all the good flavor from the brown bits off the bottom of the pan, gathered my turkey parts and put that in a crock pot to make stock and cooked that all day. I turned that finished stock into my broth for gravy. Oh my gosh, what a tip! And then I had a ton of gravy. I actually gave some to a friend because they were having to bring gravy to a party and they were going to buy canned, a travesty! So, I made all this delicious gravy for everybody. Talk about being a Hero!
I’m going to cook my turkey the day before again this year. I actually can enjoy Thanksgiving a little more because all I have to do is a few side dishes. I will make my potatoes the day before with another ingenious recipe I have. I will warm the Turkey and there you have it.
Imagine me Thanksgiving morning, lounging on the couch, with a fire in the fireplace, drinking coffee with Baileys, watching Christmas Vacation, surrounded by all the Black Friday ads and Mick saying, “Aren’t you ever going to get dressed?” Ahhh, the good life.
To sum it up it’s okay to make the Turkey day before. It tastes just as good with the natural juices on it that you didn’t use for the gravy. And you just basically kiss it with some heat to warm it up. It’s moist. People love it, and they don’t know. And your house smells like Turkey because you have the stock going. So, that’s how I do Thanksgiving.
I’ll try not to burn the rolls.