Roast Turkey — Big Deal!

So…what’s the big deal about turkey? I roasted one for Thanksgiving (the first in several years) and while it’s a pleasant tasting fowl — especially when it’s loaded down with herbs and copious amounts of a butter and Chardonnay baste — it simply isn’t worth the time and effort. I’ll take a roast duck or even a perfectly roast chicken any day.

The fowl in question was brined for 24 hours, then dried in the refrigerator for another day. It was then stuffed with herbs, onion and lemon, while the breast received a liberal internal coating (under the skin) of an herb butter. I covered the breast with a cloth soaked in a Chardonnay-butter mixture, and roasted on high heat for about one hour. Then I decreased the heat and roasted it for what seemed like several weeks. It was a 26 pound bird! We ended up with a nice tasting, relatively moist bird that was well flavored with the herbs.

But…for a tiny percentage of the effort I could have made any number of great dishes that would have fed 15 people in style!

8 Replies to “Roast Turkey — Big Deal!”

  1. Sorry, anything but turkey is un-American. There are few absolutes in the U.S. One is, it doesn’t matter if you like or dislike Turkey. You MUST consume it on Thanksgiving. And I should point out, cranberry sauce, although vile, must be consumed too!

  2. I will make sure not to invite you to my Thanksgiving, 2013 dinner, where the guests will be served salmon tartare, roast duck and molten chocolate cake.

    We started a revolution in this country more than 200 years ago to avoid doing “what must be done.”

  3. Turkey is boring and everybody knows this. Alabama must work on a turkey farm. Yeah….that’s right. She artificially inseminates hundreds of turkeys per day. With her nose! There you go! That’s the ticket! Of course, when confronted with the facts, she tries to confuse us by saying “A man never stands so tall as when he stoops to remove his pants leg from the bicycle chain”. I mean…have you ever? My word!

  4. So where do you purchase your turkey? Rumor has it there is a chicken/duck farm in your state. Would you kindly post its exact location? And do they raise turkeys?

  5. IANAC has some Amway detergent in his car trunk that he would like to sell you…but after that he is moving on from “product flow” into “management”.

    At any rate, I have recently discovered a nice “trick”: when flying: if you fold your coat and put it in the overhead bin, it will be less wrinkled than if you try to stuff it into that small pocket on the seat-back in front of you. Anyway, I thought it was a nice piece of advice.

    So I opened a fortune cookie the other day and it said “A little birdie is going to tell you a secret”. Nice. But, unfortunately, secrets that have since been imparted to me by large, terrifying birds hatched in the center of the Sun have since rendered that information irrelevant.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *