We made two turkeys thinking one wouldn’t be enough for ten diners. The one closer to the camera is a damson plum and five spice basted turkey that I have featured on this site before and made 3-4 times over the years. The other turkey was simply basted with butter. Each was roughly 13 pounds each, and unstuffed, took under three hours to cook. I took them out of the oven about an hour before we carved them (dinner started later than planned) and tented some foil over the birds. They were surprisingly hot when we carved them. The nice thing about having two turkeys instead of one is that you have four legs, thighs, wings, etc. instead of just two humongous ones.
The turkeys on the platter were just for “show” and once guests had a look, they were whisked back into the kitchen to be carved on a wooden board. With the turkeys we had two different gravies, one sweetened just slightly with damson plum jam and the other a slightly lighter gravy. Both were made with slow cooked turkey stock that I made two days before from turkey parts and the necks and giblets from the two turkeys we cooked. We also made cranberry sauce from scratch, using frozen whole cranberries, sugar, orange juice and orange zest. After a night of rest in the refrigerator, the sauce had the perfect jelly like texture. Also on the menu were two kinds of stuffing, both cooked outside the birds. The first, in the rectangular ceramic dish, is a bacon, sausage, onion and celery stuffing made with sourdough bread, lots of herbs, cream and turkey stock. It was good, but nowhere near as delicious as the individual ramekins of Bettyq inspired wild foraged mushroom bread pudding. For the latter I used challah bread, and I will post a more detailed recipe separately. Suffice it to say it was a total slam dunk. Something we will be doing again and again. Great with turkey, probably superb with beef as well. In the background, some mashed potatoes with more butter and heavy cream. A dish of sweet potatoes baked with butter and maple syrup.
To balance out the carbohydrates and protein, we also cooked a dish of haricots verts or small green beans and a slow-roasted head of cauliflower.
A small green salad for anyone seeking a lighter acidic hit…
… a large apple pie made with 17 smallish granny smith apples…
…and a classic pumpkin pie for the traditionalists in the group. I am not a huge fan of pumpkin pie, but understand it is a big part of most thanksgiving celebrations in North America… Guests also brought a bread pudding as well as some butter tarts, a Canadian staple I gather.
37 Responses
MM, have not tried cooking a turkey, yet. Any tips?
I know you said you plan to post the challah bread recipe, but is there any way we can convince you to post the other recipes? :D
i can almost smell that apple pie! am not an apple pie fan, but that one looks particularly delicious. is that cheese on the crust, MM?
Chinky, it is VERY VERY EASY. KC, I have several recipes for these types of dishes in the archives. millet, no cheese, just an egg wash on the pie dough that caramelized a bit. There is some sugar sprinkled on the egg wash as well…
YUMMY!!!
During my first thanksgiving in the US, someone told me that they had fried their turkey instead of roasting it. I told my friend he was crazy, but apparently it’s a real thing. They have this weird contraption where they lower the whole turkey into a pot of oil and fry it. Apparently lots of people have burned their houses down this way coz insurance companies like Geico and State Farm have commercials about this.
Another thanksgiving staple that I had was sweet potato (kamote) pie with a brown sugar and pecan topping. Yummy!
OH, yah…BUTTER TARTS RULE, MM!!!!!! ….especially when the filling is just barely set and still warm upon eating them….THanks for reminding me…have to make them later today!!!!!!!
been a long time since i had turkey. can’t recall how the taste differ from chicken. the feast looks great!
MM…will the pumpkins go over to Cebu after Halloween? If it does, how about Pumpkin lumpia using Manang’s recipe instead of ubod with your ZUBUCHON?
bettyq, somehow my default pumpkin favorites are okoy, curried pumpkin soup, and the japanese stewed pumpkins with a sweetish soy-based sauce. a friend makes pumpkin custard with a touch of cinnamon but i’ve never tried making it myself. have never liked pumpkin pie.
yup, thanks MM. some folks put grated cheddar on the crust, that’s why.
Millet…I love, love , love PUMPKIN OKOY! I use tempura batter…not much …just to hold it together and just make bite size ones. It is light, crisp not like the heavily laden bean sprout okoy I used to buy that weighs a ton! BUt more importantly, the light crisp bits that float…the boys fight over them to top their Nabeyakis with those crisp bits.
Oh…Lori B. of DCF makes a pumpkin base for pumpkin lattes! AHA…I know what to send you besides the cold-smoked hickory maple smoked salmon, Millet! Do you like lattes? Do you have the gadget (turbo frother) that you just stick in you mug of coffee with milk and makes the froth?….not an immersion blender but a mini version of it!
Yummmm, I am drooling as I read your post. Am looking forward to Thanksgiving too. It took years before I succumbed to turkey and pumpkin pie (Tyler Florence’s Ultimate Pumpkin Pie). I now love both of them and can’t wait to have them. Especially after Thanksgiving when every leftover is the BEST!
Some Turkey math tips say approximate 1/2 kg per person of turkey (meat & bones). So a 5 kg turkey will feed approximately 10. I am expecting 6 adults and 4 kids, so I got a relatively small 5 kg one. Last year, we had about the same and we had massive leftovers of turkey meat! We had turkey pot pies for weeks! I am excited to try Betty Q’s mushroom-bread pudding, but I will be using buna-shimeji, bunapi, enoki, shiitake and oyster- Asian mushrooms available at my local grocery. Happy Deepavali (Indian festival of lights – like Christmas)!
Those are perfectly golden brown roasted turkeys. It really looks delicious. Mr. MM do you brine your turkeys?
Hi MM. I’m a regular lurker of your great website. Recently, I’ve noticed that half of the times I try to go to your website, I am re-directed to other suspicious looking sites — one about popular hollywood videos and another about the kid in Harry Potter. I’m not sure if you’re aware of this.
Ah, MM…the perils of having one of the BEST BLOGS!…I am redirected, too to such sites!
Can you share with us how you made the apple pie? Or have you shared it before and I just need to do some back reading? It’s one of my favorite desserts and so far I haven’t found one that’s sold commercially that’s as good as home-baked ones. Suggestions as to where I can get a good apple pie?
Also, what really amazes me is your foresight and patience with the things that you need to prepare days before a meal MM! High five!
.Congratulations to the Teen, and also to the proud parents. This is belated, I know.
Wonderful dinner, MM. I will try bettyq’s mushroom bread pudding. I will be in Vancouver this weekend so will look for Tiroler bacon. Where can you get those, bettyq? I see that Costco has some chanterelles. Hope that is similar to what bettyq picked.
ayla, yes, there is a recipe for apple pie in the archives. bettyq and billy, you have to go and clear you cookies and cache, and the problem should stop. Several weeks ago the site was “under attack?” and it lodged stuff in your cookies or cache, that you need to clear out. It’s good practice to do that weekly or so, I am told… thanks. Joseph, yes, I sometimes brine the turkeys, particularly large ones, but I didn’t bother with these two and they still turned out well… millet, yes, the cheese thing provides that salt/sweet thing, but I prefer apple pies without, just a personal preference…
Fards, the only place I saw selling Tiroler bacon was at any Save -On Foods and Oyama’s. The bacon slab must have been coated with molasses before smoked so it has that blackish cover all around the bacon. It is sold in the deli section of Save on and I like to buy them in 1 or 2 inch thick slices when I use them for cooking so I can custom cut the thickness of the slices I want.n
Thanks, MM ….it only happens when I use my son’s computer but not on my IMac ……so I already cleared them in his computer.
Speaking of turkey legs, on a trip to Disneyworld Orlando a couple of years ago I was surprised to see folks walking around eating turkey legs. I still regret to this day that I didn’t look hard enough where they were selling those things.
Though a better view is not available, that looks like a nice table in the background of the second photo. As is the table used to serve the prosecco and flutes in the previous post.
Fards…do they have white chanterelles or Golden ones? If they have fresh white chanterelles, buy more of those than the fresh Golden ones. The white ones are meatier, has more substance even when young. The Golden ones are far more delicate than the white ones esp. the buttons. If they have more Golden chants buttons in the package, mawawala na sila once you’re done. YOu can mix the mushrooms even with Portobellos. But be sure to scrape the gills of the Portobellos before sauteing for the gills will turn your mixture really dark.
Yummy food. I didn’t know that they already now celebrate thanksgiving in the Philippines.
Yummy….
Wow, I feel hungry in all the pictures that I see. It seems so very yummy. I want to try how to cook turkey. Turkey’s meat is an expensive one bu it’s a reasonable price because of this great taste.
out of topic lang MM… i’m not sure if it is just me, i tried four computers already. 3 at home and one in the office but everytime i go to your site it diverts me to porno or virus sites. marketmanila.com in fact is already blocked in my office because of that, it is classified now as a “malicious site”. i tried everything my friends asked me to do so i was able to now see your site at home but still from time to time it diverts me to a porno site. anybody experiencing this?
@robksa, it’s not just you. I already cleaned up my cache and cookies after the first “attack”, but now it’s back again. It started about three days ago and just now i experienced it again and only after four tries that i manage to get in.
the turkey looks yummy though i haven’t tasted one yet…
botchok and robksa, clear cache and cookies if you haven’t done so lately. Apparently it is something leftover from weeks ago. But let me know if that doesn’t fix it, as perhaps the site is under attack AGAIN. My apologies for the inconvenience. I just checked my visitor stats and page views and traffic has not dropped off significantly in the past two weeks, so the vast majority of folks seem to be getting to the site…
MM, you forgot the essential gravy, Mang Tomas lechon sauce. Gives it the ultimate filipino touch. Ain’t eating my drumstick with some lechon sauce.
I already did MM. what i can’t understand is it’s not always like that, sometimes i can get to the site without problem and sometimes i get redirected. Thanks anyway, it won’t stop me from reading your blog.
MM, I too have a problem with being redirected. It seems I have to clear cookies et al every other time I try to visit your blog, and I do that at least once a day. Thank you for your efforts at trying to resolve the issue.
i did clear my cache and cookies but just right now, if i said ok my computer could have been erased. whoever is doing this must really really pissed with his/her mom :-)
Sorry guys, not sure what is going on. And I don’t want to bother my tech guy over the long weekend, I hope this doesn’t get worse over the next few days…
The turkey looks yummy… I usually loosen the skin near the breast area, spread softened butter and insert few sprigs of rosemary in between the skin and flesh to add flavor and prevent the breast meat from drying out.