Stanley's Roasted Turkey with Bacon Recipe

When it come to roasting stuff, I have a few basic rules that I follow. Marinate and baste! I'll marinate the turkey one day ahead in very basic stuff. Just throw in salt, pepper and Worcestershire sauce till you feel that the thing is coated nicely and leave it to marinate in the fridge till you start roasting it.  

Then before roasting poke some rosemary all over the chicken. People say that it gives the turkey some sorta aroma, I think it just looks really cool and professional!  After that just put bacon all over the turkey and anchor those babies down with a toothpick. For the stuffing I just use the one from the supermarket. Stuff that thing right into the turkey's behind and tie the legs together with a wire.

Most of the stuff here is taken from various recipes all over the web. I checked out how people would roast their turkey and sorta came to a decision on how I'm gonna do it. Just do what Jamie Oliver does in his kitchen; grab stuff, throw them in and BOOM you got yourself something to eat.

Now you're all set to start roasting. Preheat the oven to around 200 degrees Celsius. I cooked mine for about four episodes of Supernatural, so that's roughly around three hours plus. Baste the turkey every half an hour or so. This means that you take the turkey out of the oven to slab butter and honey marinade all over it (For this you just melt a whole stick of butter and heap it with honey). Cover the turkey with aluminium foil while roasting for the first two and a half hours. This and the bacon helps keep the turkey breast meat moist. Plus this is the part of the turkey that usually over cooks.

For the final hour remove the bacon and roast the turkey without the cover. The thing about roasting is that there's lots of guessing work involved. So you don't have to be too strict about the timing, just use it as a reference. Its hard to go wrong with roasting actually. You just need to worry about not burning your meat.

For the gravy I collected all the juice from the bottom of the pan, mix in with a pot with two cups of chicken stock, and add corn starch to thicken it. Mom said that I should mix corn starch in water first to dissolve it before pouring it in. So do that because I found out too late! It took a while to make sure the gravy had no more lumps in it.

The turkey was really nice and juicy. Only thing is that even with my cousins over we only managed to finish half of the bird! My little cousin ate one drumstick and he was done for the day.