Getting ready for Christmas dinner

Now that we have a house, the wife decided that we would be doing Christmas dinner at our place this year. That means instead of us heading out of town, the horde will be descending on our little house.

This year, instead of the traditional roasted turkey, we decided to try cooking it on the grill. So to practice, I threw my first turkey on the grill yesterday. We stuck with Alton Brown‘s tried and true Good Eats Roast Turkey (from the Romancing the Bird episode. The bird was brined overnight and then a basic BBQ rub spread liberally over and under the skin. Placed a drip pan under the rack over the two middle burners and fired up the two outside burners. Made a little foil packet filled with mesquite wood chips and tossed it on the grill. Once everything got nice and hot, on went the turkey and some sweet potatoes. Roasted everything until the thermometer in the turkey read 165°F (I never roast anything without a thermometer anymore) and everything came out just about perfect. The only problem was an area on the back of the turkey that didn’t get cooked all the way. Must have been near a cool spot on the grill. Not a place where there’s much meat for eating anyway, and the rest of the bird turned out fine. It didn’t come out quite as smokey as I was hoping (a lot of the smoke escapes out of the grill), so I think next time I’ll try to fashion some kind of foil tent to put over the turkey and wood chip packet. Still, it was a mighty tasty bird.