Confession time. I have never cooked a turkey before. Since I’m always in charge of Christmas Eve, someone else gets Thanksgiving. I bring the side dishes.
This year, it’s finally time to accept the bird responsibility. After some debate, I decided on a dry brine method. Fingers crossed. I have some bird anxiety.
Apt. 11d 
Happy Thanksgiving. I’m only doing pies and peeling so not under stress.
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How’d your bird do? This year our #2 lobbied for ham, starting three weeks ago. I am thrilled that he is looking ahead so much, and ham it was. The dawn of forethought!
My turkey method is pretty easy, and involved Buying Hardware, which is always fun. I put a frozen turkey into a Coleman cooler with salt-garlic-sugar brine and a bag of ice, five days in advance. The cooler can sit outside on the back porch, or in the spare room – not necessary to take up a lot of kitchen space. Change the ice a couple times, and it is defrosted and brined by the day. We have two turkey racks, this means we can start it out breast down and fat runs down from the back and thighs, then take it out of the oven about 3/4 hours from done, put the second rack over the bird, pick the whole thing up turn it over, pull off the first rack, and in the last bit of cooking the breast develops crispy brown skin as have the back/thighs in the first part of the cooking. If you are going to flip the bird, it is hugely awkward and there is a chance the whole thing goes to the floor, unless you have that second rack and a couple of silicon mitts. Easy, not much time spent, you bought a cheap frozen bird, and the crowd loves it.
But, like I said, we did ham this year.
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