convection withrdrawal

Thanksgiving is coming up and I find myself faced with the task of cooking a turkey in the oven. I haven’t cooked a turkey in a regular oven in almost 14 years. That’s a long time, folks. I’m not sure I remember how that’s all supposed to work. I mean, am I going to have to get up at the butt-crack of dawn to shove this bird in the cooker and baste it throughout the day and hope like hell it’s cooked through by dinner time without burning the skin to cinders? If so, I hope someone’s going to supply me with the necessary inducements. Say a new jug of apple cider and a fresh bottle of bourbon? I’d like some cinnamon swizzle sticks with that, please.

Last year, courageously limping its way it through Thanksgiving dinner preparations, our favorite kitchen baby, the Farberware T4850 convection oven which we had lovingly used for years, finally called it quits with a gurgle and wheeze in the last hour of turkey cooking. I’m still in mourning. So is my husband. I find him trolling the internet looking for a suitable replacement and sighing pitifully whenever he realizes the crappy size constraints of the wussy microwave/convection combo’s listed everywhere. Unless we buy something in the commercial line, all the convection ovens he finds barely fit a 10 pound chicken let alone the 20 pound turkey we often cooked in the T4850. What is up with that?

This thing was no microwave/convection combo wanna be. It was a beast in size, straight up convection cooker. Took up considerable counter space but I never begrudged it its space, because oh it was so good to us. Damn you Farberware for discontinuing this line of convection oven. Damn you. YOu could have at least given us the chance to buy every last one of these you had available before you closed up the supply line.

We cooked just about everything in that T4850. Chicken, Turkey, Duck, Pork, Beef, roasted vegetables, baked potatoes, pizza, and the list goes on. Why did we use the convection oven so much? Because it cooked everything to perfection and cut the cooking time by at least a third.

A THIRD people! With full time jobs, crazy schedules, two kids and an aversion to hours at the stove, the time saved with this thing was priceless. The roast beefs were juicy and succulent, the chickens golden and tender, you see where I’m going with this right? The first time I roasted a chicken in the standard oven after the Farberware T4850 died, it was dry as dust.

The only thing I didn’t use it for was baking. And that was more me than it. I’m lucky a damn box mix cake emerges edible when I use the regular oven. Trying to compensate for convection time on a cake was more than my brain could manage. I tried once. The outside edges of the cake came out all firm and rubbery and the middle was the consistency of the La Brea tar pits. It smelled yummy though. No one in my house wanted to try it. Cowards.

Unless my guy finds a suitable convection unit before Thanksgiving, one that doesn’t cost the equivalent of the per capita GDP of Kiribati, we’re resigned to the standard oven. Anybody got any tried & true Thanksgiving turkey recipes that do not involve 10 hour cook times or the need to baste every fifteen minutes? Failing that, I'll take a used Farberware T4850 in realtively good working order.