This Thanksgiving marked the one year for closing the deal on our farm, and also the first time cooking turkey on a grill! After having lived here and cooked in our teensy farmhouse kitchen for a year, I was especially grateful for having the extra room outdoors!
And since I was bothering my pretty little head to cook all this food, I figured I'd just make up a whole boatload, even though there were only four of us eating. Leftovers till 2014, baby!!
SO! Down to the nitty gritty. We had two 14lb turkeys which we injected the night before, first with olive oil infused with sage, rosemary, and thyme. Then we injected with chicken stock, and thirdly with butter. (My first time doing injecting... I might have been a wee bit overly excited to play with it!) Found out injecting melted butter under the skin works great, compared to just stuffing chunks of butter under the skin like I normally do.
I kind of roughly followed my cooking crush's (Meathead) turkey recipe, putting a drip pan under the grates to catch the yummy juices to use for gravy, and leaving the bird un-trussed to get the 'armpit' and 'leg pit' areas nice and crisped too.
Smoked 'em for about 3 hours, then cranked it up to 325 to get a lovely crisp on the birds, which took about 1 1/2 hours to get up to an IT of 165 in the breast. We also cold smoked 5 different types of cheese in the cold smoker while the turkey was going (fresh mozzarella, extra sharp cheddar, habenero cheddar, gouda, and manchego.)
While the MAK was making short work of the turkeys for me, I roasted about half a dozen heads of garlic for the mashed potatoes. (James usually sneaks the equivalent of a couple heads of 'gahlick candy' while I'm not looking, so I always make way more than I use.)
I fried up some rabbit hearts and kidneys to throw into the stuffing along with mushrooms, celery and onions.
Was trying to get a shot of the turkey with my chickens running around in the background praising the heavens for not being born turkeys, but it's just a phone camera, so didn't quite get the depth of field to truly show their ecstatic little faces.
AND the last shot is my fourteen year old suddenly coming to the hard realization that directly after gorging oneself on turkey is hardly the best time to act on that niggling question of "Can I fit through the dog door?" Thankfully we had plenty of cooking spray on hand to ease his embarrassed retreat back onto the patio. I told him to just thank his stars that our golden retriever wasn't outside with his lower half-- she would have taken advantage of his predicament like nobody's business.
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