meat

Last weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving, which meant turkey, turkey, turkey (I finally froze the leftovers because I just couldn’t face them any more!). We hosted my parents for dinner and again, I cooked the turkey… but not just any turkey. This year, I took the opportunity cross an item off The List by de-boning*, stuffing, and rolling the turkey. The results were amazing!

While the prep for a de-boned, stuffed, and rolled turkey is a little more time consuming than a regular stuffed bird (it took me forty-five minutes to de-bone it, and another thirty minutes to stuff, roll, and truss it), it pays off in ease of cooking. No estimating cooking times based on weight/stuffed/unstuffed/previously frozen/fresh, etc – just two to two-and-a-half hours! No basting! No specialty gigantic unwieldy roasting pan!

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When I was a kid, roast chicken and gravy was my family’s favorite comfort food (I think it’s safe to say it still is) and it was always up to me to make the gravy. I don’t know how or where he got the idea, but on one occasion my Dad convinced me to put a handful of cured, salted Chinese black beans in the gravy. This was another case of a strange flavour combination working out much better than expected, because surprisingly, the gravy didn’t taste like Chinese take-out – it tasted like delicious chicken gravy with a good dose of salty umani flavour thanks to the black beans. After that successful case, almost any kind of gravy was subject to the addition of black beans, including Christmas turkey gravy (although my Mum was somewhat less enthusiastic about this than my Dad and I)….

A New Kind of Thanksgiving Turkey

Roast Chicken with Black Bean Gravy

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