I Am Such a Turkey

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I haven't ever really had trouble cooking a turkey - but I have had a lot of troubles with turkeys that resisted being cooked. One year, the turkey started turning pink, and purple. And it wasn't because it wasn't cooked through. The timer had popped, but it was purple. I mean, the longer I cooked it, the more purplish the meat became. I even took some of the meat and microwaved it to see if it was a problem with doneness. It wasn't. It just got more magenta as it cooked in the microwave. I decided not to let anyone eat it and I threw it out. I bought another turkey and made it on another day. I discovered later that the meat turning pink was a sign that it had been frozen, thawed and frozen again. Turkeys never thaw in the amount of time that the USDA says they will. I have had turkeys thawing for days that still refuse to give up that bag of giblets stuffed deep inside their ice crystal cavities. But I should have been okay with yesterday's turkey, because I was cooking in the Nuwave and I can cook from frozen in a few hours' time. And the website says to just check halfway through and pull the neck and giblets out then. What I didn't know until I had my frozen bird unwrapped, is that they had also stuffed a plastic bag full of gravy inside the turkey. The end of the plastic bag stuck out, waiting to be melted by the infrared waves of the Nuwave. So, I stopped the oven every 10 minutes, trying desperately to wrest this plastic bag from the turkey's icy grip. It wouldn't budge. But it would rip, and soon melted gravy was filling the cavity and runnin out and down the turkey. By that time, I realized the plastic pouch wasn't going to melt so I set the oven for a longer period and waited. By the time I got that pouch out of there, I had to actually pick up the both frozen and hot bird and dump the gravy out of it. On the other hand, the giblets and neck did come out at halfway through the cooking time, with no trouble. A little tin foil over the breast at this point helped keep it from getting too brown and the rest of the cooking went fine. Fine meaning unattended. Anyway, despite the way it started, the turkey was delicious and we had dressing and potatoes and corn and cranberry sauce with it. And the Nuwave cooked my 12.5 pound turkey from completely frozen in under three hours. So it is nice to be able to decide to cook that turkey in the freezer for dinner.