Miles Standish Stuffed Turkey

It’s true that the Thanksgiving bird sits at the center of every table, but let’s tell the truth here and admit that we want to get down into the bird and get that delicious stuffing out. So I’m going to prepare my family recipe, and as we all see, it has a few slightly unusual ingredients in it and now for the unveiling of the more mysterious elements of this family stuffing.

My father believes that they had these essential ingredients on the Mayflower with them, mozzarella and pepperoni. I’m going to cook out a little bit of the grease from this pepperoni and I’m going to use that to wash this grease to cook the vegetables. So now I just a touch of salt and pepper. We really want to make sure every element to the stuffing is fully flavored. We can hear that crackle as the waters coming out of it and you're getting some nice grease. You want to cook this for a minute. I’m going to take that out and drain it. I’m going to take this and beautifully cut onions and secure. And you see right when you put the onions in, they just start to really drink up that grease. Some salt, freshly ground black pepper for a little extra punch. You’ve got to make sure all these ingredients can stand up to that pepperoni, the beets. Just cooking so they’re tender a couple of minutes.

You have a lot of really vibrant flavors here, the pepperoni and the onions. Everything is all melted together so you want the bread to be like behind the scenes of work course really kind of wacky. I want to pop this in a 350-degree oven for about five to seven minutes or until it’s golden brown. We have our pepperoni cooling off. I’m going to add that celery, very nice. Now the celery is really important because it’s the crunch. So move it and cook it for a minute, you see these onions are going to a little bit tender. But the celery is going to be much quicker, just to make sure you get every bit of that pepperoni grease into your stuffing.

So since I’ve added quite a bit of celery, which can be bland to pan, we want to make sure this is a really important part. I’ll season this with salt and pepper yet again. And now we start to get to the really good stuff. I’m just going to take a pound of pork sausage. I’ll put it in the pan and as it cooks, and as it starts to ground I’ll use a spoon to break it up into small pieces. So the sausage is broken up. And I’m going to add that to my onion and celery mixture. And now I have all these crispy level little bits left so I really leave all those behind. I want those to go into my stuffing. I see no better thing to do than to just mince all these little bits with that chicken stock. I just want to heat it slightly because scraping on those delicious bits into our stuffing. So I’m going to pour that liquid. You can see how enrich it looks now that it’s gotten all those little bits of sausage.

Time to add the pepperoni. Brian is very speedily chopping up the mozzarella. We’ll add the pepperoni. I’m going to mix that. If you don’t overcook, the celery and you leave it nice and crunchy, just cook that liquid out and it will be left with this beautiful, crunchy celery. What about our toasts? It’s fun to make a whole batch of toasts in the oven. It just smells so good.

Now I have to thin toast butter in mind already. I’m giving you the “I” and this is what you're going to do. Just take a little bit of butter and you're just kind of lovingly butter the toast. But that’s not enough. Turn it over and just slightly butter the other side. All sides are created equal. And then, just cut that into small pieces. And I’m going to take from this shallot, the sage and the fresh thyme. I’m also going to take a sprinkle of dried rosemary. I find fresh rosemary to be really strong. I like the dried better. Here we go.

So we have the toasts and the chicken stock on the bottom so it’s really important to coat everything with that chicken stock and the mozzarella. Now this you really want out of the last minute because if the stock is all warmer or anything, you want the mozzarella to stay and it’s pretty little cute until the end so I’m going to add that in and I always find a great stuffing is the heart of the meal because it could be a meal unto itself. Okay, so I had my turkey sitting out a little so, we can get the chill of the refrigerator of it and I’m having this beautiful roasting pan fitted with a rack and the rack is great to prop the turkey up of the bottom of the pan so the heat can circulate as it cooks.

With no further ado, and this turkey is enormous. I am going to begin with salt and pepper. You want to salt the outside in the cavity and now coat of pepper all the way in there. And now I’m going to start stuffing the turkey. I like to create a little Thanksgiving package and just tie up the legs so that the stuffing doesn’t fall off while it cooks. I’m just going to come around and just loop around each leg. I’m going to give that a nice, tight tie in a knot. I’m just going to soak the cheese croie in a little bit of that melted butter. And I’m going to just drape that right over the top part. I’m going to protect that white meat.

Then after it’s cooked for a while, I’ll baste it, peel this off and brown the skin on the white meat. So I’m going to start my turkey at 400 degrees, cooked it for about 15 to 20 minutes and then lower the temperature. And I’m counting about 15 minutes for every pound of turkey.