Friday I wanted to try to write some posts but I ended up spending most of the day brining a turkey. The bird had been a bargain and a bit of an impulse buy. On Thursday we went to visit friends who hosted and cooked most of the meal. But in the grocery store on Monday, the thought of 20 pounds of turkey for 3 dollars was too good not to put in the shopping cart. So I found myself on Friday wondering what to do with the massive bird that had been defrosting in the refrigerator all week.
Sitting down at my desk in the kitchen, I decided to try local blogging couple Troy and Gay’s recipezaar.com. Scrolling through the turkey recipe selection, “Good Eats” Roast Turkey, one that Gay had posted appealed to me, especially with its high number of reviews (18) as well as a high star ranking (4.5/5). From reading Andrew Grumet and Enoch Choi, I’d heard of Alton Brown, also a blogger. Looks like Gay put this turkey recipe in her cookbook for their celebration yesterday.
Next year if we brine a turkey I will head to the hardware store and buy a big bucket. That was one detail that would have benefitted from foresight. Instead I ended up trying to use a spare plastic bag, one that I used to like to use for cooking the turkey. When I tried to rotate the turkey in the brining, the bag burst open….
But the brine was simple and worth the effort. I followed the recipe but made a few substitutions, adding a little powdered ginger since we didn’t have the candied kind, using mostly water with a little broth and a few ounces of white wine leftover in the fridge. Oh, I just realized I forgot to add the peppercorns! But I did put the apple, onion, water, cinnamon stick and rosemary aromatics inside the bird to roast it. No sage in the house though but we still have rosemary growing in the garden.
The turkey tasted juicy and flavorful. It was probably one of the better birds I have done. The white meat was moist and even after a day of refrigeration it’s still yummy. As I wrote this, the carcass was simmering on the stove for soup.
Thanks, Troy and Gay! I think I’ll be brining the turkey again next year. With a bucket! Although Glenn Reynold’s rosemary-crusted bird sounds tempting. And Betsy Devine’s Killer brownies and biscuit-crust vegetable pot pie.
What do brining and blogging have in common? Blogging encouraged me to try brining. And as I’ve been preparing a turkey for cooking and doing other holiday preparations this week, I’ve been marinating some posts in my mind. I hope to have some time to catch up…and I hope that what I write is tastier for the time it’s spent incubating….but in the meantime, when I haven’t been at the computer these past couple days, we’ve been having a lot of fun as our little family of five, staying at home, carving turkey and being together….
