I spent twelve years working retail, during that time I started to dread Thanksgiving more with every passing year. Thankfully, I have been out of “the biz” for a few years now and every year I look forward to the holidays a bit more. This year it seems I have completely blocked all the pushing and shoving and those extra special customers who seem to have lost any sense of how to treat others. In fact I even went shopping the day after Thanksgiving. Granted it was just one store, but hey, I got myself back out there again.
This year, I was excited to be hosting my family for the first time. Also a bit nervous because we generally don’t like the taste of store bought turkey. We usually have wild turkey, but that wasn’t going to be an option this year. I went to the co-op and picked up a free range bird and hoped for the best.
The day before I did a salt rub with kosher salt and a mix of herbs and pepper that I bashed together. Then I put it back in the fridge in a big roasting bag. The next morning I took it out of the bag and rinsed off the salt. I made an herb mustard butter with scallions, sage, and thyme. That went under the skin and all over the outside of the bird.
Then I surrounded the bird with our family’s favorite dressing. It’s made with a loaf of wheat bread, torn into bits, a chopped onion, a couple of ribs of chopped celery, pepper, poultry seasoning, some rubbed sage, and a couple cups of chicken stock.
The texture of the turkey was great. I think most of those store bought turkeys out there are a bit mushy and kind of wet. I’m sure that is the fault of the brine that the processors inject into it to make it moist, but I find that texture unpleasant. I don’t want to eat wet turkey. This turkey had a texture more like a wild bird. I hesitate to say it was stringy, at the risk of putting someone off the idea of going with a free range bird, but the meat held together differently, more like an actual turkey. There was no mush, it had a nice bite to it, and the flavor was great. It was enhanced by the herb butter rather than the herb butter being the stand out flavor.
The dressing was great too. The meal was rounded out with cranberry sauce, “pinky” salad, spinach salad, mashed potatoes, gravy, rolls, sweet potato and parsnip gratin, and finished with ground cherry pie, pumpkin pecan pie, and homemade ice cream.
Oh, and potato chips because Lulu thought a proper Thanksgiving feast should include potato chips.
Who was I to argue?
Tags: dressing, Thanksgiving, turkey
