A turkey!

[Independent]

The kids would like me to make a turkey for thanksgiving dinner (I am a single dad). I have never made a turkey before and I do not even know where to start. Can someone point me in the right direction?

 

[Richard]

Oh man, there was an amazing video somewhere online about this that I used last year for the same situation, lol. Try this one; I can't find the same one I used:

Cooking Roast Turkey

 

[Independent]

Wow great video. I am going to book mark this. I think What I will do is have a practice run with a practice turkey and see what happens. That way I know what I am doing by the time Thanksgiving gets here.

 

[HWard84]

Making a turkey is super easy. You basically can just thaw it out, clean it out (be sure to get the bag out of it), butter it up and then put spices on it and toss it in a turkey cooking bag. The bags have the directions on how long to cook it.

 

[Richard]

Cooking bags do make things a lot easier these days, lol. You can go that route as well - and the cooking bag package should also have instructions on it for how long to cook the turkey for. Choosing the spices is harder if you've never done it before, though.

 

[jason]

I like to smoke my turkey, but it takes a lot longer. Try looking the week before Thanksgiving on the FoodTV channel. They usually have an hour or two long episode on how to do Thanksgiving. Alton Brown (my fav) also has some shows and Racheal Ray has some quick Thanksgiving dinners.

 

[HWard84]

You can also cook a turkey in the turkey cooker (A big chicken wing cooker). I don't like it this way as much as in the oven but it's ok.
We always use a bag when we roast ours, it's cuts the cooking time down by hours.

 

[Sampson]

The turkey is the easy part, now if you start to talk about stuffing/dressing there could be some debate. The one turkey tip that I learned is that if you cut the tendons on the legs and squish the meat up it help keep them form drying out.