The brine recipe is here, daughter strongly recommended it. I cut the amounts in half since didn't have a whole bird. Then, in the spirit of "Can't hurt" I sliced up a red bell pepper, crushed two big garlic cloves and found two more sprigs of rosemary and stuck them inside just before put it in the oven at 325.
Damn. Tender, not in the least dry, wonderful flavor. I'm going to do this again some time.
4 comments:
Turkeys are raised in Finland too - we don't have anything like Thanksgiving, but they are a popular Christmas choice for those you don't like pork. I usually go with pork, but sometimes I have bought a turkey after Christmas since you can at times get them cheaply then. Might try your recipe next time.
An off topic local turkey story: a little while ago a truck full of them run off road, the turkeys it had been transporting run for freedom and local firefighters spend hours running after them. And I just saw the news that many of those firefighters are now sick with campylobacter. The suspected reason is that they didn't bother to clean their hands before eating their sandwiches on the scene, while catching turkeys before and after.
And from pork you can get trichinosis. Sometimes I might consider going vegetarian, except you can also get all kinds of stuff from badly cleaned veggies, and besides I just like meat way too much (plus it's a lot easier to have a well balanced meal with all the bits necessary for your health if you eat meat).
Besides, when it comes to animals, I presumably have at least one thing one catches from cats, toxoplasmosis, because I have had cats most of my life. (I like dogs as much as I like cats, but have been mostly working jobs where giving a dog the needed exercise would have been at times difficult, cats are a bit easier with that).
I think you can catch something from just about everything.
Couple of years back there was a nasty outbreak of can't-remember-the-name in Los Angeles schoolkids; turned out their 'organically-grown' raspberries had been watered with sewage-contaminated water and hadn't been washed quite well enough.
The vision of a bunch of firemen chasing turkeys... that's just kind of wonderful.
'The vision of a bunch of firemen chasing turkeys... that's just kind of wonderful.'
It is, isn't it? Damn shame nobody with a camera seem to have been on the scene. Or if somebody filmed it he hasn't put it online. Or I just haven't found it yet.
60 or 70 years ago Trichinosis from home grown pork was sometimes a concern. Commercially grown and processed pork today is trichinosis free. Actually, cooking pork to an even grey color always killed off trichinosis no matter what era it was from. When I was but a sprog, we raised most of our own small meat critters, turkeys, ducks, chickens, rabbits and the odd guinea hen, they make wonderful watch critters, they're very territorial and raise general and particular hell if an interloper show his, her or its face. They're also delicious. It seems to me I remember the dark feathered turkeys could watch out for themselves, but the albino birds were stupider than hemlock stumps, no offense to hemlock stumps intended.
I often compare the relative intelligence of politicians to hemlock stumps. The stumps almost always come out ahead by a comfortable margin. At least when a stump takes a position, it maintains it.
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