Transcripts

Mike Carruthers:
Thanksgiving dinner presents a set of problems we've likely all encountered, for example you forget to defrost the turkey in the refrigerator and now it's too late.

Susie Middleton:
And you can't leave it out on the counter because the outside of it will be an unsafe temperature by the time the inside is thawed - what you can do to speed it up is to put it in a sink and cover it with cold water.

Susie Middleton, Editor of Fine Cooking Magazine…

And it'll thaw at the rate of about 30 minutes a pound - that speeds it up quite a bit from just thawing in the refrigerator,

which typically thaws about 5 hours per pound. Another problem is keeping the mashed potatoes warm - the answer: put them over a pot of boiling water.

So you can mash them ahead of time, and I prefer hand mashing because the mixer makes gluey potatoes. Put them in a bowl, cover them with foil and just keep them over simmering water and they'll hold warm like that for a couple of hours.

It's just about impossible to keep all of your Thanksgiving food warm, so Susie says the secret is…

Always being sure that you have hot gravy - that is the number one thing at Thanksgiving because it is hard to keep everything absolutely hot.

And another tip to having a juicy turkey that Susie uses is…

I roast my turkey breast side down for the first half of cooking time and that allows the juices to, just through gravity, gather in the breast of the turkey. If you keep your turkey breast side up the whole time, the breast just slowly dries out.

There's a Thanksgiving dinner survival guide on the finecooking.com website which you link to from ours: somethingyoushouldknow.net - I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.