Thanksgiving Turkey and Stuffing

Well, I survived cooking my first Thanksgiving Turkey! Wohoo! With help of my Granny and the Conder family, I was able to pull this off.

First off, it takes about four days to properly thaw a frozen turkey. So, I bought a fresh one… Which begs the question, why not just buy fresh in the first place? Well it’s about double the price in case you were wondering. Still, my 22lb turkey was $45 so not too bad.

Ok backing to cooking. I wanted to go all out and actually stuff my turkey, so it takes about 5hrs to cook in a convection oven. Of course before you start on the turkey, you’ll need to make the stuffing.

For the stuffing, you’ll need:
3 packs of cornbread mix
7 eggs
2 cups of milk
12 slices of toasted bread
1 stalk of chopped celery
2 cups of chopped onion
4 cans of chicken broth
2 sticks of butter
Lots of dried sage

Mix eggs, milk and cornbread mix.

All mixed up.

Now bake the cornbread (don’t forget to spray the pan with Pam!) and I toasted the bread at the same time.

While the cornbread is baking, chop up your celery and onion.

Now, sauté in a pan with a stick of butter. The recipe didn’t call for it but I added 3 cloves of minced garlic.

Sauté until slightly softened.

Dice up the toasted bread.

Now mix cut up bread and crumbled cornbread. We crumbled the corn bread with our hands and mixed everything in the turkey baster because you need to something that big to get everything mixed.

Now add the sautéed vegetables.

Add 4 beaten eggs.

Add 4 cans of chicken broth.

Add 1 stick of melted butter.

Add tons of sage. Probably 5-6 tablespoons or to taste.

Now mix it all up. Set aside because now its turkey time!

Oven should already be preheated to 350 degrees.

For the turkey, you’ll need:

A turkey, duh!
Oven bags- you don’t have to use this but it really helps keep the turkey moist and makes cleaning up a breeze.
1 stick of butter
Some extra celery and onion chopped up
Dried parsley and thyme
2 tablespoons of flour

Now you will need to rinse the turkey and remove the neck and the bag of guts inside. I almost missed the bag of guts! They will be in a little plastic bag… I couldn’t find them but Mr. Conder came over and was like no they are in there and pulled them out. Totally avoided disaster. Would have had melted plastic in my turkey. So lesson learned, the guts are in there… So look until you find them.

Now time to rub your turkey down in butter, parsley and thyme. I used my hands to do this… It gets messy.

Pull the skin away from the meat. Now, just slide the butter and herbs all around using your hands. Messy, messy but totally worth it.

Flour the bag. This is very important or the bag will blow up!

In the bottom of the bag add some celery and onion slices.

Now, turkey goes into the floured bag with the celery and onion on the bottom.

Stuff that bird!!

I had extra stuffing left over, so I put it in a baking pan and cooked for an hour and 20min. I left it in the fridge until the turkey had about an hour to go so everything would be timed correctly.

Now close up the bag. Rinse out the turkey baster that you previously mixed the stuffing in, and place bagged turkey in baster. I put the baster on a cookie sheet for extra support. If you have a heavy bird, you will definitely need this!

Make slits in the bag.

Pop it in the oven with the meat thermometer. Since my turkey was stuffed and so big it took about 5hours and 15min to cook at 350 degrees. I didn’t need to do anything to the turkey during that time.

When the turkey is ready, the meatiest part of the beast will read 165degrees on the meat thermometer.

Now can you believe after all that hard work I forgot to take a picture of the finished bird!! This is what it looked like after I carved the roast beast.