Thanksgiving

I have a confession to make. I've never made a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. I always cook something for the feast at my parent's house, but not the whole meal and certainly not the turkey. I'm not sure I could take the pressure! Thanksgiving is one of the most traditional of meals and most of us have very specific expectations about what that dinner should be.

Here to help make yours a success, whether you are cooking one dish or ten, is cooking teacher and cookbook author extraordinaire, Rick Rodgers. His book Thanksgiving 101, is out in paperback and in stores now. Rick is answering questions about Thanksgiving and sharing his advice over on the Epicurious blog but I snagged him for a few questions of my own...

What kind of turkey do you recommend for Thanksgiving – organic, heritage, wild, fresh, frozen?
 
Look for a fresh bird from a local source.  Where I live, organic Eberly from Pennsylvania is my bird of choice, but when I teach in Northern California, I am happy with Foster Farms. There are a lot of very good supermarket birds out there at a reasonable price.  Look for the words "all natural, minimally processed" on the label, and your bird won't have been shot up with lots of gunk.

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In a Thanksgiving article Harper’s Bazaar published in 1900, the author, Anna Wentworth Sears, recommends a jolly game of Pin The Head On The Turkey.  Rather than a tail and donkey, this requires a large paper bird missing his noggin which, given the bill of fare, seems to me not so jolly and also somewhat tragic.  But that’s just me. She also suggests, should this game grow tiresome, that ‘reciting Longfellow’s poetry to music’ makes for swell after-dinner fun.

It is 3:30PM November 26, 2009. I take a deep breath as I swallow a spoonful of green bean casserole—probably from my third round of food. I look at the table to see what is left for another helping. My eyes get big as I notice that the vegetarian stuffing hasn’t been touched and that there are a few shrimps left at the end of the table. “Yes!—I think.” Shortly after, I go into a food coma, throw on my sweatpants, and curl into a ball for an afternoon nap. Not before long, I awake and pounce on apple pie for dessert. This is Thanksgiving…this is a true American Thanksgiving. This year I won’t be having one of those. This year I will be saying “Grazie” rather than “Thank you” and I will be stuffing my body with endless baskets of bread, bowls of pasta, and bites of pizza. This year I will spend Thanksgiving in Florence, Italy.

It was just two years ago that I spent Thanksgiving in Rome, Italy. At the time, the class that I had studied abroad with was fortunate enough to have our group leaders organize a Thanksgiving dinner at one of the most prestigious hotel rooftops in all of Italy, The Marriott on Via Veneto. As a few of my roommates, my brother, and I approached the beautiful hotel, we began to ponder what we would be filling our plates with that night. Of course I cried out, “There better be green bean casserole.”

I have always been a big proponent of deep-frying a turkey. It has been, until now, the juiciest turkey I have ever made. However, the biggest turn-off of the whole deep-frying process is the $50 of oil you need to buy and then have to dispose of...it's kind-of-a-pain and always feels like a big waste.

However, there is nothing better than not tying up the oven on Thanksgiving Day with a turkey that needs four hours to cook. Therefore, deep-frying the turkey continued for a few years until I just couldn't get myself to buy those large vats of oil anymore. So the turkey made it's way back to my indoor oven and last year I did make one of the most delicious turkey's ever.

But, over the past year I kept seeing this Char-Broil The Big Easy Electric TRU Infrared Smoker and Roaster everywhere I went. Mostly at large warehouse stores like Lowe's. Seeing it so many times wore me down and I finally decided to buy one. It was a sign, right? I wanted to get the turkey cooking back outside where it belongs. This way the oven is reserved for all the beloved side dishes. Good idea? Yes. I thought so too.

This past weekend I finally fired it up to give it a test run. It requires a 30-minute seasoning cycle before using, which was not a big deal to complete.

I wanted to make a "no-frills" recipe. No exotic rubs and/or seasonings. No brining (which I always do). And no expensive free-range, local, special-fed, gobbles in seven languages turkey. I wanted to see what this machine could do on its own with a simple, frozen Butterball, rubbed in peanut oil and seasoned with salt and pepper. That's it. The results were kind of astonishing.