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time to put together the other parts of your Thanksgiving feast - make your stuffing, your gravy, your cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes - or run back to the supermarket and buy them. You can safely ignore the turkey for several hours.

"What you want to do," says Trites "is, in the last half hour of cooking, remove the cover and take some of the pan juices, spread them on the bird, and turn the heat up to about 350. That'll help the bird brown. If you have trouble getting your bird to brown, rub a little orange or lemon juice on it. That'll do it."

And then you just cook it 'til it's done.

How can you tell when that is? "Give it a poke in the thigh," Trites says. "If the juices run out kind of pinkish, it needs some more time. If they run clear, they've had it."

And before you carve it, you should let it sit for about a half hour. "When you heat a bird up, the juices kind of all get driven to the center. If you let it rest, the juices go back into the rest of the meat. It makes for a moister bird, that's all. Let 'em sit, and then start carving.

"They're a pretty simple bird to cook," Trites concludes. "You can't really go too far off. The worst that's going to happen to you is you're going to end up with dry turkey. Of course, that's why everyone serves 'em with gravy and cranberry sauce."

Learn more about this author, Jeremy Bloom.
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