I cooked Thanksgiving dinner this year for the first time in 30 years, and it wasn’t a disaster. I didn’t take any photos because I was too busy cooking, but I’m going to post at least a couple of recipes, for cranberry sauce and turkey rub. I don’t want to forget what I put on the turkey because it was awesome.
Since I was cooking everything myself, I thought I’d do as much ahead of time as possible. I’d been eyeballing a recipe for make ahead turkey gravy for a long time, and decided I’d give it a go. It calls for roasting turkey wings with vegetables, then boiling them, then using the broth to make the gravy. Since you can’t buy just turkey wings, at least I haven’t seen them, we got some pruning shears and hacked the wings off of our bird. So yeah, you wouldn’t really want to see photos of my double amputee Thanksgiving turkey. Or maybe you would. Anyway, we carved it up before company arrived, so no one was the wiser.
Back to the make ahead gravy. Sucko. It tasted like carrot water. I doctored it up with packaged gravy mix until it was tolerable, but it wasn’t great. What was great was the broth from cooking the turkey. I cooked it in an oven bag, so there was lots of broth. It tasted amazing and made the best gravy. I didn’t even have to doctor it up to make it taste good. Just thickened it with a little cornstarch. So moral is, there are no short cuts if you want good turkey gravy. Sorry famous chef who shall remain nameless.
And for posterity, I pass along recipes for the turkey rub and easy cranberry sauce.
