Thursday Three-way - Turkey Lurkey

Have you seen this product where you are?

It is a Butterball Turkey Breast Roast, which is basically a half turkey breast minus the bone that has been brined and herbed.  These showed up at our costco about a week before Thanksgiving, and I went ahead and bought a few of them to put in the freezer, thinking about all the wonderful things that I could do with them.

I didn't follow the package directions for preparing the roast.  I preheated the oven to 450 degrees.  Then I got my biggest cast iron skillet out, and heated it on medium high heat.  Once it was hot, I added a little coconut oil (you could use whatever oil you like), and placed the turkey breast in the pan skin side down.  I let it go for about 5 minutes, after which I gave it a flip.  At this point the skin was dark golden brown and well on it's way to blackened, but that was fine, in fact that was what I wanted.  Once I flipped the breast, I inserted a digital probe thermometer, tented the breast with aluminium foil, and put it in the oven.

It just so happened that I had frozen some dressing over Thanksgiving (I always freeze dressing raw in a pyrex container to cook later on).  From the freezer to the oven it went alongside the turkey lurkey.  They both were just perfect at right at an hour of cooking time.  I think that you could also prepare this in the crock pot.  If that were your plan, I would completely thaw the dressing, and put it in the bottom of the pot, and then still brown the turkey breast on the stove top, and then set it on top of the dressing to cook.  5 hours on low should do the trick.

Our first meal that we had from it was just good old turkey slices with dressing and green beans.  We decided that we liked it even better than Thanksgiving dinner.

Our next meal was Turkey Quesadillas!

For these I took whole grain uncooked tortillas (cooked ones would be fine), added two slices of muenster cheese, and a few slices of turkey, along with a dab or two of cranberry sauce.  Toasted it up in my cast iron pan (he is getting a lot of love lately), and it was my favorite of the three recipes here today.

Our third meal was a very tasty Turkey and Biscuits.  

This was inspired by Ina's Chicken Stew with Biscuits.

I started with 2 tablespoons of butter in a cast iron skillet.  To that I added two thinly sliced carrots, 1/2 of a small onion diced, one celery stalk diced, and a handful of green beans (leftover from the previous dinner).  I seasoned with the mixture with salt, pepper, poultry seasoning, and sage, and let the veggies sweat for about 10 minutes. Next I added about 3 cups of turkey breast leftover that I cut into 3/4 inch cubes.  I sprinkled 2 tablespoons of flour over the mixture and let it cook for a few minutes so that it wouldn't taste like raw flour, and then added 2 cups of chicken stock.  I let this bubble away on the stove top over low heat, while I made biscuits to top it with.

The biscuits were made in the food processor with three simple ingredients, self-rising flour, ice cold butter, and buttermilk.  I cut them with a fluted round cutter (because I just know that is what Ina would do), and then I placed them on top of the bubbling turkey goodness, and put them in the over at 475 for 20 minutes.  It was awesome, and even my 5 year old went crazy for it.