Best Turkey EVER!!!!!

As I wrote about in a previous post, we don't eat hardly any meat. But we do eat a little bit of meat in the winter. By a little, I mean like one meal / week and only a little bit at that meal. And we do our best to eat meat from animals that were treated well while alive. We measure the "winter" in which we eat meat as starting on Thanksgiving and ending on Easter.

So, tomorrow, we will be making turkey.

And while working on a cooking television show years ago, I learned the absolute best way to cook a turkey. Here it is (ingredients and needed supplies in bold):

1. Cut up a large apple and a large onion into diced pieces. Mix them together along with 2 cloves worth of minced garlic. Stuff the inside of the turkey with half of the onion, apple, and garlic mix along with 2-3 sprigs of Rosemary.
2. Put the turkey in the pan with the white meat side down. Put a cup or two of water in the pan. Cover the whole bird with olive oil and then lots of salt and pepper. Take the remaining apples, onion, and garlic and put in all over the top. A bunch of it will fall in the water. That's great.
3. Cover the whole thing with aluminum foil but make sure the aluminum foil doesn't actually touch the turkey.
4. Cook the whole thing for however long the instructions say to cook that much bird for. Every 45-60 minutes, pull it out and basque it and put it back in.
5. When you only have 30-45 minutes left, pull the whole bird out and flip it over. Put it back in and let it cook without the aluminum foil. After the cooking time is complete, pull it out. Do not cut into it for 15-30 minutes or the moisture will escape. But once that time has passed, carve it up and serve! I guarantee it will be the best turkey you have ever eaten.

But, of course, Thanksgiving is still Thanksgiving without the turkey. For example, there are plenty of people who are vegetarian all year round who enjoy a wonderful holiday. But Thanksgiving isn't Thanksgiving without Thanks. So, here's to all of us giving some. In that spirit, here and here are links to two previous posts on gratitude. I hope you find them helpful :)