Still a sickie. This is getting very old very quickly. Thankfully I won't be missing any more school unless I am still sick next Monday.

Yesterday I took advantage of the fact that I was home sick to break in our new roaster oven with a turkey. Did my usual Southwestern-inspired seasonings. Not half bad. I'm sure it would have been tastier had my nose not been olfactorily challenged. Stand-alone roaster ovens have been around for a while, and they are actually not a bad alternative for cooking. Imagine a huge crock pot. That's what a roaster oven is like. However, a roaster oven can be run at 450 degrees as well.

I posted about yesterday's meal on a friend's Live Journal. Here's what I wrote.

The night before I skinned the bird (when you do it this way the skin doesn't get crisped, so what's the point of having the skin on except for making the fat content go up) and rubbed it all over with dry spices:
Sazon Goya Achiote y Cilantro flavor
Garlic Powder
Oregano
then sprinkled it with red pepper flakes. It sat, covered, in the fridge until it was "ready for its closeup." The Achiote in the Sazon Goya gave it a lovely orange hue.

The bird was put in to the roaster oven after preheating it to 300 degrees. Then I backed off the temperature to 250 degrees. 4 hours later it was done and ready to be carved. It got the occasional dousing of lemon juice during the roasting period. I carved the bird, poured the juices out, then put the carved slices of turkey back into the roaster oven to keep warm at 150 degrees.

The results were really killer. Moist, juicy and tasty. The juices were thickened with Knorr turkey gravy powdered mix, the only gravy mix worth using, for a nice spicy gravy. I went with my cornbread southwestern-flavored "Tamale Stuffing" and a classic green bean casserole as sides. I had a pumpkin I was going to cook for mashed pumpkin but I realized that would be overkill. I'll do that some other time. I also took canned whole-berry cranberry sauce and transformed it into spicy cranberry chutney with the addition of chiles, onions, garlic and cilantro.

I'm going to have turkey soup tonight. Hopefully that will do me some good. At least it wouldn't hurt.