Saturday we celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving at our place with our friends. This is becoming our event that we do every year. And every year it gets bigger! We actually had 16 people total, and our apartment is not super large. Luckily, we had beautiful weather and were able to utilize our porch area as well as the kitchen/living/dining area.
Sunday was Thanksgiving leftovers followed by a wedding where we were also fed a LOT. I swear I gained 5 lbs over the weekend... but it was sort of worth it by a factor of deliciousness.
So I am going to share my stuffing recipe and turkey recipes. Unfortunately before I could take pictures of my turkey and stuffing they were DEVOURED by my guests (I have Nathan trained not to eat the snacks until I've taken pictures). Trust me, they looked and tasted delicious.
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| This is from a cookbook... but we can assume my turkey looked the same. |
I never thought that I liked stuffing growing up because it got a weird texture and flavor. Then I discovered that you can put sausage in stuffing and my world was blown. Now I love stuffing. Also, you can make this up the point you put it in the turkey the night before which is really nice.
Ingredients
1 lb sweet italian sausage removed from casings
2 stalks celery, chopped
2 onions chopped
4 cloves garlic crushed
1 tbsp olive oil
6 tbsp unsalted butter
2 tsp poultry seasoning
2 boxes cornbread stuffing mix
Directions
Brown the sausage in a large skillet. When cooked, remove the sausage with a slotted spoon and set aside, leave drippings in the pan. Add olive oil and butter to sausage drippings and heat. Add onion, celery, and garlic. Cook in drippings until onion is translucent.
Meanwhile, put your cornbread stuffing in a large bowl and add poultry seasoning. Add cooked sausage and vegetables with all drippings to the cornbread stuffing and mix. You can stuff your turkey (recommended) or add some stock and bake.
Turkey
Ingredients
1 turkey (mine was 19.5lb) In general, you should purchase a lb of turkey per person... more if you like to have lots of leftovers.
half stick of butter
salt and pepper
garlic powder
cheese cloth (cheese cloth bags that you can find around thanksgiving are the best!)
Directions
Mix salt, pepper, and garlic powder with butter. I didn't measure the seasonings, you just want to flavor the butter a little. You could use other seasonings if you want.
Remove the neck and giblets from the turkey cavities. Rinse the turkey off and pat dry with paper towels.
You're going to be buttering your turkey now. The key to having a delicious, crispy, moist, flavorful turkey is to butter over the skin AND under the skin. At the openings to the cavities you can kind of get your hand between the skin and meat and if you need to you can cut some small slits in the skin to get your hand through. Butter your turkey!
Fill your cheesecloth bag (made or bought) with stuffing. Shove it inside the main cavity. Fill a smaller bag with more stuffing. Shove it inside the neck cavity.
Side note: It is easier to stuff a turkey without the cheesecloth bag, but it is really, really difficult to get all of your stuffing out of the turkey. By putting your stuffing inside of a cheescloth bag you have the benefit of having it cook inside your turkey (which makes it and your turkey more delicious) without try to scoop it out of your turkey when it molten lava hot. Turkey grease will burn you.
Preheat your oven to 350. Place your turkey BREAST SIDE DOWN in your roasting pan. Don't have a roasting pan? Well you should invest because it makes life easier and better. Plus if you try to use a foil one when you are lifting your enormous turkey out of the oven later it will be flexible and you will burn yourself with drippings when they spill out onto your semi-protected arm.
Oh, breast side down. Why? It looks upside down you say. The white meat of the breast will dry out long before the dark meat between the leg and body is cooked. By turning it upside down, instead of the moisture from the breast dripping down into the stuffing, all the juice from the stuffing and the dark meat is flowing down into the breast meat and keeping it moist and making it delicous.
Tent your turkey with tinfoil and bake 20mins per lb until meat thermometer reads a little below 170 (meat will continue to cook while resting). Let your turkey rest 15 minutes before carving.
Remove your stuffing and serve in a bowl.
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