One way we save money on our grocery bill is when we find something on sale, something that we know will keep in jars or in the freezer, we stock up. After Thanksgiving (and sometimes before Thanksgiving) is a great time to get turkeys on sale. There’s a lot of meat on a turkey . . and with just of us eating, I can do a whole lot with all those turkey leftovers.
From the youth fair recently, I bought a pig and he’s back on his farm being fattened up before going to . . well, before coming to my freezer . . we’ll just leave off a few steps on how he gets from the farm to my freezer if that’s ok with you . . but I need to use some stuff out of my freezers. We have two uprights and they are full to the top. Some of the garden produce was frozen, and then we had deer season (notice I left out the steps of how the deer ended up in the freezer!) and there are tamales and I bought a bunch of grass fed beef from a local rancher but the bottom line is . . I have to make room before the pig gets here.
Last week, I took a turkey out of the freezer and put it in the fridge to thaw. Sunday I seasoned it up, with lots of salt and rosemary, made a dry rub of sorts, wrapped it tightly in a plastic bag and put it in the cooler on the front porch with ice. This morning I took it out, washed it, oiled it, seasoned the skin and it was ready to go into the smoker. This is a post about our smoker, which we’ve had for about 8 years and we love it . . absolutely love it. It’s one of those things that if it broke tomorrow (I hope it doesn’t), I’d order one exactly like it ASAP.
Turkey
I wasn’t sure how long to smoke it and I didn’t really worry about it. I wanted the internal temp to get to about 150º because I was going to finish cooking it in the oven with the convection fan on so the skin would crisp up. Here it is after about 5 hours in the smoker at 225º.
Turkey
About 45 minutes before it was time for dinner to be served, I stuck it in the oven and here’s how it ended up. It isn’t a whole lot different but it’s down reached an internal temp of about 170º in the breast.
Turkey
We had okra (from the freezer) and tomatoes (that I canned from the garden) and fried (in olive oil) sweet potato slices.
Dinner
Some of the leftover turkey was sliced really thin and I’ll do something with that for our lunches. The remaining leg, thighs and wings went into a bag and Vince will probably eat those. I’m not real crazy about plain meat as leftovers. If I can disguise it as something else, I’m ok with it. The remainder of the white meat will be ground, vacuum sealed in small packages and I will use it to make smoked turkey salad. Yum!
Judy D in WA says
Yum! We were talking the other day about smoking a turkey. 🙂 I think it’s time to get one out of the freezer.
Donna Williams says
We have a Green Egg, and I simply adore it. Everything tastes so nice. I am thinking about a turkey now, so if we ever thaws out (we are in the midst of an ice storm event) I think I will do one too.
By the way, I used to get posts as they were posted, but now I just get them once a day, in the evening. I think I saw where you were having blog issues, so I figure it is something to do with that. I miss the happy posts throughout the day, but certainly understand if there are computerish issues. 🙂
CindyM says
I’ve got a couple of turkeys in the freezer, too… and of course they do take up so much room in there…Smoking one of them Friday or Saturday sounds like a great plan! Anyone else just not think of things so often until someone else tells about doing it?
CJ says
I’m so happy you still love your smoker, us too! My only regret is that it isn’t larger, even with just the two of us. I love my big green eggs to, but they don’t hold a candle to the cookshack when it comes to smoked meat.