Recipes & Food Styling

Spiced Cherry Jam-Basted Turkey

I love cherries, and this year for Thanksgiving I tried making a baste for the turkey with a wonderful jar of Food for Thought Spiced Cherry Preserves that I found at Whole Foods. Flavors are spectacular.

I love the color that the spiced cherry baste gave the turkey, and the pop of flavor of a cherry in each bite of turkey was a flavorful new twist on a much-loved tradition.

Spiced Cherry Jam-Based Turkey

For a 15-pound frozen turkey, thaw in refrigerator for 3 days.

On Thanksgiving Day, plan on 13 minutes in the oven for each pound of turkey. Turkey this year was 14 1/2  pounds, so I pulled out the neck at 8 a.m. on Thanksgiving morning so it could be ready at noon. I put it in the roaster in a 350-degree oven.

Before you place the turkey in the oven, be sure you have removed the little bag of other part of the turkey down deep in its cavity. Be sure to pull this out before roasting.

Butter your roasting pan. Cover turkey with salt and pepper. I use pink Himalayan sea salt and fresh ground pepper. Fill the cavity of the turkey with fresh sage.

After the first 90 minutes, pull the turkey and slather with mix of two jars of Food for Thought Spiced Cherry Preserves mixed with 1/2 cup of chicken stock. Put turkey back in oven. Repeat baste after about another another hour.  Make sure to cover the whole turkey as much as possible