Although most people will tell you that turkey is far from their favorite bird to eat, most of us still end up making one on Thanksgiving. There are a lot of questions every year -- should I brine it? Should I stuff it? Should I rotate it? Should I baste it? How long do you even cook a turkey for? By now, you've likely found your resources for the answers to these questions, so we wanted to quickly draw your attention to how not to cook a turkey, facilitated by our favorite corner-cutter, Sandra Lee.
There's nothing reckless or dangerous about the way Lee cooks her turkey -- it will cook through, it won't make you sick, it might be really dry and reek of dried spices, but it isn't actively irresponsible. The problem with this turkey recipe is just that it's complete and utter nonsense.
Let's start with the compound butter -- a combination of two sticks of the good stuff, 1 1/2 teaspoons of dried, ground poultry seasoning, 1 1/2 teaspoons of pre-minced garlic and 2 tablespoons of powdered "garlic herb sauce mixture." For those keeping track, that's a lot of garlic, a lot of dried herbs and a lot of flour, which Lee says "helps bind the butter together." From this Martian planet, we travel on to freezing and slicing compound butter that you could easily just shove under the skin instead, making a bed of pre-cut carrot and celery sticks laced with pre-chopped frozen onions and then we stuff the turkey with three whole packages of fresh herbs. Where were those fresh herbs when we needed them in the butter? Can this possibly taste good? Our guess is that it's going to taste like an enormous bird made of dried thyme.
Once she dumps an entire quart of chicken broth into the roasting pan (which is now going to be more like a steaming pan), she does the only thing we can all agree you should definitely not do: she insists that a plastic, pop-up turkey timer is better than an actual thermometer. Good luck steamed, overcooked, oddly seasoned turkey! We hope you like the tablescape!
Lest we forget, this year Thanksgiving is also Hanukkah. We'd like to formally insist, once and for all, that no one make a Hanukkah cake for Thanksgivukkah. In case you've forgotten what we're talking about, here it is.
Why do we hate this Hanukkah cake? Well, for starters, it has about as much to do with Hanukkah as a Nativity Scene. Second, the only embellishments that signal that this is, in fact, a Hanukkah cake and not just a blue cake are inedible! We might not celebrate Christmas, but we don't eat pearls and wire, lady!
Happy Thanksgivukkah from all of us here at HuffPost Taste. We hope you know what you're doing.
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