You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

Hey everybody, it's Maryal.

I have gotten through several decades of my life

without ever having to make a Thanksgiving turkey.

Yes, I have mootshed off the toils of my family,

repeatedly and shamelessly gobbling up turkey legs

and mashed potatoes and a little corn too.

And I'm not planning to stop anytime soon, but I know there are those of you whose time is up,

who are now the ones in charge of cooking Thanksgiving dinner.

And look, I just gotta say, there's a lot of lore out there about how dang hard it is to make a turkey.

Oh, I had to wake up at 2 a.m.

Or the thing lit on fire, or it was time for dinner, and I took it out of the oven but it was still

raw inside. It's not exactly encouraging stuff, but Lon Lamb says I'm

overthinking this. A turkey in the grand scheme of things, not actually that hard.

There's just a couple little things you have to keep in mind.

It requires a little bit of planning ahead,

but overall the process is pretty hands off which is really great.

Lahn is a senior editor at Cook's Illustrated.

Until I started working at Cooks Illustrated, I'd probably cooked maybe five turkeys in my life

and since then I've done, I don't know, fine. maybe five

hundred.

so she is the right person to talk to.

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