For Thanksgiving, my husband and I cooked our first turkey. As someone who is terrible at cooking, this is a big deal.
If you recall, I won a turkey last week at the base Turkey Trot. Winning something so useful was nice. Most people that have followed my blog for a while know I’m not a cook. I can cook very simple and easy things. My standard meal is meat, potatoes and vegetable. Cooking an entire turkey terrified me but life is full of challenges.
Before beginning the process, we both agreed if we hated the meal or something went wrong then we were going to the diner no questions asked.
So with a plan and a backup plan in mind we began.
The Turkey started like this:
After sitting in the freezer for a week and then dethawing for three days, it was ready.
Step one: Take Out the Giblets (Please mind post race glamour hair)
Step Two: Stuff the Turkey. We decided to use a recipe with champagne and apples. A few weeks ago my friend recommended it over traditional stuffing, and it came out perfectly. We were surprised with how simple but fancy it was. Recipe here.
Step three: Add Bacon and beer?
I’m not sure if I saw more memes or recipes about a turkey wrapped in bacon, but we decided to try it out. We just used this simple recipe. (Maybe I just spend too much time on the internet). It didn’t look incredibly difficult, and we just made a patchwork quilt of bacon on the turkey.
It came out well; I was honestly quite surprised. I thought the bacon might burn, or that the turkey would not cook right, but nothing went wrong.
All finished
We also decided to cook stuffing. We used a bag of premade stuffing, added the butter and few onions and cooked it on the stove.
We also had canned cranberries (why my husband likes that I’ll never know…)
Since sweet potatoes are in season, we decided to make those too. Nevermind these look like 5-pound weights. I forgot to take a photo but they just looked like regular potatoes.
I’m proud of how everything turned out. To be honest, I don’t know if I would have done much differently. I wish we added more bacon to the turkey to cover the side but that is not a big deal. Nothing was inedible, and we both enjoyed cooking it. I’m sure as we cook more turkeys we will learn how to cook them better and with different styles but I enjoyed it! I would definitely recommend any of the recipes we used because they were simple. The bacon on top of the turkey looks a lot more complicated than it was.
Keep in mind I’m no foodie. Yes, I blog and try to eat relatively healthy but I’m no chef.
Questions for you:
How was your Thanksgiving?
Have you ever cooked a turkey before?