Delishoosh turkey-based noms

Ah-ha! Did you think that I do only pastries? Noooooooo. I'm an all around chef experience, but I prefer to photograph cakes, because cakes are very forgiving, 'cause people tend to go hungry even if there's a tiny fib somewhere and most people want to know if it tastes great. Other dishes, they can get tricky.

So, here's today's celebratory item -- stuffed turkey.



Turkey on the right, stuffing on top of potatoes, red cabbage casserole and turnip casserole.

Turkeys aren't native to Finnish cuisine. In recent years, we've gotten some, thanks to influx of students and immigrants from countries where it is served around this time of the year, and never let a business opportunity to go to waste, right. Significant Otter made noises about how turkey is so good, but soooo difficult to make right and how we don't eat it that often even if it is soooo goooood and I said I'll cook one any time he brings one to me. So on Friday, I acquired a three+-kilo turkey to make good of that promise.

Step one: acquire a whole turkey of desired size, brined and possibly frozen.

Step two: thaw it (in a fridge).

Step three: discover that on the day of cooking, it didn't thaw enough, and that damn neck and giblets are stuck in a block of ice inside body cavity.

Step four: put the turkey into a large plastic sieve, and start running less-than-hand-warm water into body cavity for the next five minutes.

Step five: extract the extras, and let the bird dry in bowl sieve. Discover there's more ice.

Step... oh you know what, let's go to good parts now.

Preheat the oven to +165 C/+325 F.

Stuffing:
For the most part, the ingredients should be available to a whole lot of you in one form or another. There's just two Finland-specific items that may evade you, but which can be replaced with a bit of tinkering. Note: this is an egg-free recipe.

Dried figs
Dried apricots
Dried cranberries
1 fresh green apple (Granny Smith is OK; needs to be a bit tart sort)
1 fresh green pear
Toasted and peeled chestnuts or alternatively, walnuts, or even chestnut jam if you're that desperate, but real chestnuts are the best
Smoked, cubed, fatty ready-to-eat BACON! (Not mandatory, if your dietary preferences don't go that way, but wwwaayyyy tasty!)
Generous lump of muesli bread or any other weird wholegrain bread with seeds and nuts and things, crust included.
Smaller lump of dark Christmas loaf (as we call it; "Ruthin joululimppu" for personal preference since I live almost next to the bakery), but you can substitute it with darkish, treacle/molasses-sweetened, malted bread.

Cut figs and apricots into smallish slices. Mix cranberries. The ratio of dried fruits is roughly 1:1:1, so estimate for your boid and don't worry if you end up with excess stuffing.

Peel, quarter and remove seedpods from the apple and pear, and then chop up to smallish bits.

Crumble the bread and crusts, tear and hack chestnuts to bits. Add bacon. Mix well with a hand.

Optional: You can put in stuff like salt, black pepper, whatever spices like grated nutmeg, but I decided I wanted mine fruity and bacon had salt anyway.

Grab a handful of stuffing and start fisting your turkey, cram in as much of stuffing as you can.

Put your bird WITHOUT oven-baking bag INTO a deep pan, which needs to have enough room for accessories as well as the main attraction.

Use your hands to make stiff lumps (about fist-size or smaller; you really need to compress hard using both hands) of remaining stuffing, and put them around your bird. If you got some striped bacon, wrap the dumplings with it, if you luv bacon.

Peel some potatoes (of variety that's good for oven-baked potatoes) and make them join stuffing dumpling mourners/bird sacrificing cult.

Moisturizer:
Melt a generous knob of butter in a puddle of oil in a small kettle. Add some salt and grounded black pepper.

Smear this concoction over your bird's skin, and anoint your potatoes and dumplings.

Tuck the pan into the heated oven, and bake for 45 minutes.

More moisturizing:
While the bird cooks for the first 45 minute leg, make broth out of neck, giblets and whatever extras got packed with your frozen mummy turkey.

Take some extra butter-oil mix from the small kettle and put it to a bigger kettle, crank up the heat. Start frying the innards when it bubbles, and add some water and onions (I used dried onion flakes, which are really great for that purpose). Let bubble and reduce somewhat.

Drain before 45 minutes are up, add some of the broth to butter-oil mix and take your turkey out of the oven.

Smear your turkey, potatoes and dumplings with this mix, let it pool on the bottom a bit. Roll your potatoes on a different size.

Put your turkey back to the oven for 45 minutes (second leg).

Let broth reduce more, and before this new 45 minute mark is up, add more broth to butter-oil mix.

Take out, anoint everyone once again; you can add stuff like paprika to this broth-butter-oil mix to give some nice color to your bird, a fake tan, as you might call it. Another 45 minutes is go.

At this point, you'll want to check out how hot your bird is internally, if you didn't stick a thermometer into its thigh and/or stuffing. Everything depends on your bird's size, but my three+-kilo turkey cooked to perfection with three rounds of 45 minute sittings (Butterball's website suggested 2 1/2 hours for bird of that size with stuffing included). Nothing was burned (I didn't need to protect the wings, thighs or breasts with some tinfoil), and everything was evenly cooked, even if I didn't spin it around. Juicy drippings did not go waste, as the potatoes and stuffing dumplings gladly soaked up excess fluids.

The important thing is to keep an eye on the process and intervene if something seems to go awry. You can't just leave it and forget about it.

I personally prefer to cook the turkey in a pan, as opposed to a rack, and sans oven-baking bag. YMMV, of course, and if you think you'll achieve the best result some other way, go ahead, I won't haunt your kitchen.