I hurry home around 10:30am half expecting my entire house to be burned down, and half expecting my turkey to be completely undone. Luckily when I arrived neither had materialized. I checked in on the bird and stuck a thermometer deep into its chest. (I guess you're supposed to try it in the leg?) It read 150 degrees. "Shucks!" I needed it to read 165. So I removed the foil I had placed on top and cranked the heat up to 500 degrees. I've heard you can roast a turkey at this temperature for even less time, but you have to discard the skin afterward. All I was really thinking about was getting the bird done so that I could return to work. I wasn't keeping a close enough eye, and when I went back to check the bird was BLACK!
"Shucks again!" I thought to myself. I pulled the rack out and took its temp. 170. "GOOD ENOUGH!" So I turned off the heat and proceeded to try (in every way imaginable) to lift the darn thing out of the baking tray and onto a cookie sheet. I tried using tongs, spatulas, forks, spoons - you name it. Finally I got fed up and grabbed two kitchen hand towels. With palms wide open on either side of the turkey, I grabbed it like a football and punted it onto a cookie sheet, covered it in tin foil, and proceeded to "TRY" to make a gravy out of the drippings."What the heck am I doing?" I kept thinking to myself, "I must have been crazy to offer to do this..."
All-in-all I think it was relatively successful though. Once you peeled back the skin of the bird, the meat was juicy, flavorful, and a little bit sweet from the apples and cider! I got plenty of compliments, so I'm pretty positive it wasn't a TOTAL BUST. It's probably a bit easier to cook a turkey when you aren't running back and forth between work and home, you have a kitchen large enough to house a turkey, and the appropriate cookware. Next year I may need to invest in one of these: CLICK. And upon further investigation, I definitely twisted the wings back in the wrong direction. Even so! The breast cooked well and it was more than enough meat for our entire office!
