Pre - Thanksgiving Dinner

Today, I decided to cook a Thanksgiving dinner in advance of our Thanksgiving Day meal with Mark, Caroline, Estlin and Gawain.

I just finished cleaning up after spending most of the day cooking. The menu consisted of a 13 pound fresh turkey from the Stone Farm in Orwell (next town to Shoreham), VT. I ordered it several days ago from Dick Mazza's market here in Colchester. The menu was very traditional:

Turkey
Gravy
Mashed Potato
Rutabaga (Turnip)
Butternut Squash
Stuffing
Orange-Cranberry Relish

I had never cooked a full Thanksgiving dinner before and I must say this one was extraordinary!

For the gravy and stock for the stuffing, I boiled down 3 pounds of turkey wings last week simmering for three hours with onion, parsley, celery and assorted spices. After draining the stock, and removing the bones, the meat and any remaining juices along with some more onion and celery and spices became the base of a turkey soup with baby pastina macaroni.

The stuffing was a mixture of sweet pork Italian sausage and ground turkey fried out with equal parts chopped onion and celery with fresh parsley and sage as seasonings. This was all mixed with a cup of chopped dried apricot and baked for 1.5 hours at the the end of roasting the turkey.

I placed a mixture of chopped onion, celery, fresh rosemary, fresh sage and an apple loosely in the turkey cavity and cooked the bird for 45 minutes at 450 degrees, then covered the breast (which cooks faster) with aluminum foil while cooking for about 4 hours at 330 degrees, removing the foil for the last 30 minutes. This fresh turkey was out of this world, succulent, sweet, tender and....well it's my favorite meal!

Carol is ill with a fever so she had only a small supper, but do we have leftovers!!!

I prepared another dish of stuffing which we'll have at Mark's and I'm also bringing Mama Stamberg's cranberry relish.