Remember The Turkey?

So you might think I would need to have my head examined. After cooking a full bird on Thanksgiving a few months ago, half-assidly I might add, I decided I needed to cook some turkey in a different way. Well, I had two extra legs in the freezer that I didn’t take out to cook with the big bird. So I decided I would try out, on a small scale, what I planned to do next Thanksgiving. Yep, going to jettison roasting the whole bird and braise the damn thing. In parts of course. Taken apart. So I can get the dark and the white meat cooked correctly without doing the back flips it takes to roast the damn abnormally bred fowl we use for that oh so thankful holiday. It was far enough away from the actual holiday, so the memory of that crappy turkey was far enough back in the rear-view mirror

I browned the legs quickly in a hot pan with oil, took the legs out, and then added some vegetables, some brussel sprouts, carrots and potatoes, to give them a little browning. I put it all in a roasting pan, and threw in a halved apple for good measure. Little white wine (it was a bit too fruity, but it was what was open), a bit of turkey stock I had made with the carcass just after the Thanksgiving meal, and the drippings from the pan used for the browning. I set it in the oven for a slow roast, about 225, for a few hours. The liquid was about half way up the meat and was plenty to last the whole braising in an uncovered roasting pan.

After it looked right, I swear I’m not using a thermometer any more and just learning to do it by feel. I pulled it of the oven, pulled the legs out to rest on a board for a bit, put the vegetables on a platter and cooked down the pan sauce after skimming off some of the fat.

Eh, sauce wasn’t so bad.,.would have been better with a drier white wine. Turkey was perfect though, moist, flavorful with a nice crisp skin on top. Vegetables had a real nice flavor after swimming in the braising liquid and roasting a bit. The apple was killer. ( I had one slice cut side down and one up to see the difference, keep it up, falls aprt too much if you don’t.) My roasting turkey days may be over. No more wrestling with a 20 pound bird at eight in the morning and worrying all day about it. Just braising my fowl to make it right.