The State of the Turkey, 2007
It’s something I did last year, and considering that it’s now 5 days since the holiday, I better get this posted. Without further ado, the State of the Turkey, 2007 edition. Now, with side dishes 
The Turkey
State 1: Just before cooking, with a lemon on the inside. Seasoning is with poultry seasoning and ground black pepper.
State 2: Right after taking out of the oven, with the temperature gauge still in it. It had to sit for about 20 minutes to rest.
State 3: Believe it or not, this is how it looked right after I did the first cut of the carving instructions. The instruction was to pull the bird out of the pan. All that came out of the pan was the chest. 
State 4: What’s left in the pan after taking out the breast; thighs and legs, and wings. The dark meat was really moist
State 5: A note to you and your family, when there are hungry people who mostly eat the white meat, don’t worry about the stuff on the left side of the plate. (As it is, I eat the white meat, but I have a good excuse - the carving guide I was using said that you were supposed to do the thighs first 
)
State 6: The leftovers. This time, there was less left over (though the fact that the bones went AWOL after the carving didn’t hurt that cause), so we kept it all.
Side Dishes
Two of the traditional side dishes at Thanksgiving are stuffing and pumpkin pie. Last year, I was in charge of the pumpkin pie and kind of misread the instructions, and made a sugar free pie. Needless to say, it didn’t taste the greatest…I redeemed myself this year
Stuffing
A couple of pictures of the stuffing - we don’t put it in the bird, but cook it on the oven and let it heat up through the day. The recipe isn’t written down, but we do it from memory for the most part. My favorite part is grinding the stuff up by hand.
Frying up the ground chicken gizzards, onion and ground beef; interestingly you don’t drain the fat from it. I wonder how much different it would be if you did…
Everything’s been mixed together, after grinding up some fruits and veggies, mixing in some chicken stock and one egg. We also add poultry seasoning, salt and pepper.
Pumpkin Pie
It’s just a simple recipe, off the side of a can of packed pumpkin; here it is in the made-from-a-box pie shell, just after coming out of the oven.
There was also a chocolate pudding pie, which didn’t do a good job of filling the pie crust, so we decided to fill up the rest of the pan with chocolate Cool-Whip which didn’t do that bad of a job of filling in the space. Interestingly, we didn’t open the can of cranberry sauce, which didn’t seem to be missed terribly much (it never really is eaten all too much here anyway…)
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MrCorey said,
November 27, 2007 @ 9.20 pm
That looks like a really tasty treat. I’ve never had stuffing that had so much meat in it. I’ll have to try it that way. I’ve always saved the gizzards and organs to chop up into soup or a pot pie afterwards. I bet that if you drained the fat in that stuffing you would find that you’d have to really watch that it didn’t dry out too much. It would taste completely different as well, since there’s a lot of flavor in the fat of poultry. Happy soup making!
Rip said,
November 28, 2007 @ 1.55 pm
Nice looking feast thanks for the menu. Now I am hungry
This was the week that was, Vol. 24 | Sephy's Platzish said,
December 3, 2007 @ 2.55 pm
[...] week around the blog, I showed off the Thanksgiving Turkey, finally finished the Indiana Jones Trilogy with The Last [...]
Sephyroth said,
December 4, 2007 @ 9.02 pm
MrCorey - Well, we didn’t make any broth with the leftover bones, but it is something that’s certainly worth exploring. However, yeah, I’d definitely give a more meat-based stuffing a go. Then again, I don’t mind having a stove top stuffing every now and again (like on one Christmas when we got the Turkey stuffing)
Rip - You’re welcome!
Thanks y’all!