Healthy and juicy whole turkey

The holiday season is here, so of course we have the perfect recipe for you! A healthy, tasty and easy to make turkey that will impress your guests while you can relax and enjoy the company of family and friends, all while eating healthy!

We often get questions from a people on how to eat healthy during the holiday season, this juicy turkey definitely helps! 

We cook the turkey in a cast iron pot from Le Creuset, this way it doesn’t become dry that quick and you don’t have to add that much fat during cooking. 

What you need: 

• 1 whole turkey
• 4 Chili & jalapeños
• 2 Green & red peppers
• Thyme
• 1 1/2 Garlic
• 4-6 Red & shallot onions
• 3-5 spoons of Olive oil
• Salt
• Pepper
• Cumin
• 2 Sweet potatoes (depends on how many you are)
• Vegetable stock (for the sweet potato mash)

What to do:

• Turn the oven to 180°C
• Chop all the vegetables into pieces, not too small because we want them to remain crisp and juicy
• Chop chili & jalapeño smaller
• Clean the garlic, but don’t chop them, we want whole garlic cloves
• Stuff the turkey with all the good stuff incl herbs, what you have left (which is a lot) you leave in the pot
• Thyme, garlic, chili & jalapeño can be smeared on the turkey
• Add some olive oil on the turkey
• Season the turkey with salt, pepper and cumin
• Insert the thermometer deep between the breast and leg
• Put the turkey into the oven with the lid on, leave the turkey in the oven until 67°C, about 45-60 min per kg

Mashed sweet potatoes: 

• In the meantime, chop your sweet potatoes, put them in water with vegetable stock
• When the turkey is almost done you fire up the sweet potatoes and boil them until soft
• Mash the potatoes and add a little stock, garlic, peppers, chili, onion from the turkey
• Add salt & pepper until you think the mash tastes good
• Chop up the turkey and it’s ready to serve

Sweet potatoes are really tasty with turkey and if you’re looking for a twist to your side dishes for thanksgiving why not make sweet potato fries?

You can always add butter and more olive oil to the turkey, both inside and on top, but we reduced this because we wanted it to be lean and both RP and macro friendly.

A bonus with cooking a whole turkey (or chicken) is that if you don’t eat it all (as I’m sure you and your guests will though..) you can put the leftovers in the fridge and either eat it the next day or use it for foodprep. As you know, we love to enjoy both fantastic and healthy food, but like so many others we have hectic lives and don’t have time to cook fancy meals every day, so we very often cook a whole turkey or chicken and enjoy that beauty for days! We use it for dinner, lunch, food prep, whatever floats your boat.

Anyhow, we hope you enjoy this healthy, tasty and easy to make turkey, and that it will reduce your holiday stress and make the holiday season all about family and delicious healthy food.

Happy holidays and happy cooking 🙂