Friday, November 27, 2009

Cooking the heritage turkey

Like many other families around the country, we enjoyed quite a feast yesterday. It’s actually the first time Jim and I have cooked the entire Thanksgiving dinner; we usually go to someone else’s house and take a dish or two. This year we puttered in the kitchen throughout the day, making stewed tomatoes, green bean casserole, beet risotto, cloverleaf rolls, cushaw pie and, of course, turkey. We prepared a Bourbon Red heritage breed turkey.

Rachel from St. Asaph farm was kind of enough to send us heritage turkey preparation information and a recipe she found at http://www.localharvest.org/. I started with the turkey by rubbing it with salt and pepper the day before and letting it sit in the refrigerator. Then yesterday, we did everything it suggested—rubbed it with a rosemary maple butter mixture between the skin and flesh and in the cavity, made a giblet broth to put in the bottom of the pan, stuffed the bird with apples then cooked for a couple of hours at 425F. The moist flesh fell from the bone and we enjoyed it immensely.

Check out the Local Harvest website for producers near you where you can purchase locally raised foods even through the winter months. Your taste buds will thank you for the effort.

1 comment:

  1. Your turkey sounds delish! We baked ours upside-down, and the white meat was so moist. We rubbed ours with salt and granulated garlic and squirted lemon juice inside and out. The stuffings were made from the giblets which Mombo cooked the day before and from a half pint of fresh oysters (Susan's favorite). One kind goes in the neck cavity and the other inside the bird.

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