Cooking turkey on Christmas Eve and reheating next day

If you do cook it on Sunday and reheat it on Christmas Day, you cannot reheat it again and there will be leftovers unless you are happy to eat them cold.

Ours is cooked ,frozen in portions in vacuum bags and grave frozen seperately I never know exactly how many are coming so I'll take the bags out in the morning and let them defrost then heat the meat in a large skillet with the gravy .It has always worked fine.I dont eat fowl so I have to take the families word for it,but it always gets eaten and whats left in the freezer can be taken out when needed

I would take as much as possible out of the fridge and put the turkey in it.

The weather is so mild I'm worrying about whether the garage will be cold enough to keep a small turkey from Friday to Monday

My fridge temperature is currently 6C so if the temp outside goes above that over the weekend, then no, I suspect it won’t be.

I’d clear as much out of the fridge as I could too.
Mind you, I don’t like much gravy so heating it up with gravy soaking into it would not suit me.

I’ve always cooked my Turkey on a Christmas Eve so it freed up the oven on Christmas Day. All good.

We are forecast 14 degrees in the south west for Sunday/Monday. I'm having a re think about storing foods in the garage, especially the turkey.

Definitely Joseann
If your fridge was running at that temperature your alarm would be going off!

Many thanks. I'm inclining to the fridge solution.

If I cooked the turkey on Sunday I'd dismember it as well and carve it up, but is it poss to reheat slices without gravy, which I dislike? No?

So, I had the brainwave in the night to remove the two cool boxes from the bottom of the fridge for the turkey space. The raw vegetables will be fine in the garage. I need all the other fridge space possible.
All good so far.
Except, I've had a new integral fridge fitted as part of the kitchen design, and the door doesn't swing open enough to remove the glass shelf over the top. I can't shift the fridge like I could before. Hmm, I think I'll wait for DH to come back from the dog walk to try because I don't want to cause a big split in the rubber door seal.

Grateful for your thread winterwhite. A timely reminder as we have a pregnant DD2 with us and can't be too careful.

Following my Mum's pattern I've always cooked the bird the night before (always chicken in our house) and served it cold with piping hot accompaniments. Sliced meat doesn't stay that hot on a plate anyway, and I wouldn't run the risk of re-heating.

I have never liked re-heated meat. It’s never the same as freshly cooked.

As we are having unseasonably warm weather I would as Rosie'sMaw said, put the vegetables in the garage and the turkey in the fridge.

I like 1-2 teaspoonfuls of gravy so it is rarely worth making for myself.

Always cook my meat /Turkey the day before. I have a fridge in the garage so so in they go, if it's not cold enough to leave in garage.
Gravy warms it up.. Which I have also done and ready to go.

Cook it on Sunday and reheat.

I am quite cavalier, i heat and reheat almost everything, providing you get it hot enoigh for long enough it will kill any pathogens.

These rules are drawn up mainly for catering establishments, and in a care home, environment i would obey them meticulously, but very few cases of food poisoning start in the home. I have yet to make any one ill with anything I have prepared.

I do understand the Friday to Monday problem with turkey. Fortunately my fridge will take the tuekey, with a little jiggery pokery, also involving less critical items being put in a box on the floor of a north east facing garage.

Ours is a very old house and in the days before fridges, you put the buttery and pantry in the coldest corner of the house, usually north/north east facing, which, happens in our house to now be an integral garage.

DH reluctant to have it cooked on Sunday. Since I'm relegating his 'intermediate' wine store from the utility room back to the garage I will grant him the turkey cooking for the sake of domestic harmony. A lot of jiggery pokery will be going on here, but we can ram it in the fridge.

I will do it now and then for the remains of an ordinary roast, but am 😱 at the thought of cooking the turkey in advance and then rehearing in gravy! In this house it has to land on the table in all its golden glory. The smell of the turkey cooking is part of Christmas - it is to me, anyway.

And TBH I don’t see what the big deal is, though if you insist on having the dinner at 1 pm it’s always going to be a rush.

Until we decided to have Christmas dinner at around 5 or 6 - so much more civilised IMO anyway, not to mention that everyone’s that much more ready for it - we never had it until around 3 pm anyway.

As for ‘plating up’, I hate the idea of that, too.

No big deal, Witzend, question of cooking the turkey the day before arose during discussion of this year’s v mild weather making it hazardous to keep turkey in box in garage from Friday to Monday.
I agree re roasting turkey being central to Christmas and have somehow got mine in the fridge, relegating much else to the garage.
But dislike the idea of eating at 5-6, and so clearing up at 7-8 or later so we still eat at 1.30ish as we did when the children were
young.

I get the meal completely ready, bar cooking, on Christmas Eve and then put the turkey in them oven with the delay start set, so that the oven comes on automatically around 9.00am.

I do not go near the kitchen for christmas lunch purposes until midday. I serve Christmas lunch between 1.00 -2.00pm.

When I was responsible for Christmas dinner .... my eldest daughter does it now .... I used to cook the turkey on Christmas Eve and serve it up cold. No one ever complained and as someone has already said if everything else is hot it is fine. But we used to have a frozen turkey and I used to tie myself in knots working out when to get it out of the freezer! Would it defrost in time? Would it defrost too soon? Oh, I am so glad I don'thave that worry now BTW my daughter and I collected a fresh turkey crown from Sainsburys yesterday and it is in her fridge to be cooked tomorrow. Happy Days!!

One Christmas I put a fresh turkey in the utility room of our rather ramshackle cottage - it was very very cold out there. It was wrapped in plastic and I put a laundry basket over it. Next morning I found that a mouse had nibbled it. And there was evidence of the culprit in the form of droppings.

I brushed them off, washed the turkey and cooked as normal.
No word to anyone else - my OH would have had a fit!

I cooked a special stuffing to go with it.

During the meal one DD said: "What is this in my stuffing? - it looks like mouse droppings!" Gulp!

I don’t mind the clearing up, winterwhite - because if I’ve cooked, I don’t do any of it - that’s down to dh and anybody else. 🙂

Actually, even when we’ve had small Gdcs staying, dinner at 5 worked well, it was their usual sort of teatime. We’d have given them something simple at their usual lunchtime.

Have you got a meat thermometer?