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Enjoy your turkey!
Papersatan:
I'm going to object to night before turkey cooking. The meat will be cold, and the skin no longer crispy and wonderful.
I don't think cooking turkey is difficult. If you are buying a frozen turkey then it has so much "flavor enhancing solution" added anyways, that I think they are hard to dry out. I think the most difficult thing is allowing time for it to defrost. It will needs days in the fridge, or hours in a sink. Other than that stuff an onion and or some herbs in it and coat it with butter and herbs, if you don't want to get creative, poultry seasoning won't fail you. Throw it in the oven at 325 and baste it when you remember. I cooked mine yesterday at 50 degrees too hot and basted it twice, cause I was drinking... It turned out just fine.
The most annoying thing about planning a meal around a turkey is if you have other things which need to bake, but you just make other people bring them and then reheat them in the oven while you carve the turkey.
TheEvilDog:
The sliced turkey can always be reheated and to be honest, as much as I like the skin of a turkey (or chicken), its just fat. As well as that, the juice-fat you get from cooking the turkey the night before can be used to make the gravy (Incidentally, you can separate the fat from the juice by putting a couple of ice cubes into the juice as it cools, the fat pools around the ice cube and its far easier to remove).
As I said before, cooking the turkey the night before takes away a huge amount of stress from holiday cooking. If you have a lot of dishes to prepare the day, you don't want to be checking the turkey every thirty minutes to baste it. And unless someone has dual ovens in their kitchen, the turkey takes up a huge amount of space for what is just one part of the meal.
That said, the last couple of years, I've gotten a boned and rolled turkey for christmas (seriously, all meat, no carcass and it takes up a third of the space).
Papersatan:
I don't think I understand your gravy making procedure. The fat is the part of the dripping that I want, it forms the roux which thickens the gravy.
I take the turkey out of the roasting pan and put it on a cutting board to cool a bit. In this time anything that needs finished in the oven or reheated goes into the oven. Roasting pan sits on two burners of the stove I remove some of the fat if there is too much, and then add flour to make a roux. Heat that while scraping up any bits that may be stuck in the pan, when it is thick enough, add liquid to make the gravy, remove to a serving dish. Slice the cool enough to handle turkey, then remove the sides from the oven.
I mean, if it works for you, that's all that matters, but I'm not sure that re-heating the turkey would be any easier for me than cooking/re-heating other sides at the last minute. Most sides I would bake take less than 30 min to cook, and there is plenty time for them while I make gravy and slice the meat.
Bread gets made the day before or passed on to someone else. Pie either gets made ahead, or baked while we eat.
TheEvilDog:
Sorry, full of cold medicine so I haven't been exactly clear all day. What I meant was I get rid of the grease, not the fat.
What we do is take the drippings and leave in a separate bowl and put a couple of ice cubes into the bowl. The grease gathers around the ice cube and solidifies, allowing the worst of it to be removed. What's left is a clear jelly (I can't think of the proper term), which is used as the base for the gravy and in the potato stuffing or roast potatoes. The jelly is melted in hot water and cornflour is added to thicken it while it reduces. It was my grandmother's recipe and passed it on to my sister.
In my case, while we do have a fairly large kitchen, three people making whatever tend to bump into each other and while Christmas might be a time for family, no one wants to hears "Get your bloody ass out of the way!" preparing dinner :-D
Is it cold in here?:
Is turkey for Christmas just a UK thing?
Everyone's seen the viral video about using an iPad in the kitchen?
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