…which cooked while the Redskins were busy losing, was a smoked whole turkey breast. Trader Joe’s had a sale, charging 99 cents a pound for whole natural pre-basted turkey breasts, so that was a no-brainer. This one cooked for about 2.5 hours at 325 degrees on the smoker, and I used sugar maple (i.e., ‘chunks of fallen limbs from my back yard’) for the smoke. I used a light portion of my basic rub: 1 portion good sweet paprika, 1 portion turbinado sugar, 1/2 portion kosher salt, along with cumin, garlic powder, onion powder and cayenne pepper to taste.

I really like the smoke flavor that the sugar maple imparts on chicken, turkey and pork. It’s a light smoke that really smells great and doesn’t overwhelm the meat.

I deboned the breast after cooking, slicing up one breast fillet and freezing the other for future consumption. My wife will make turkey stock out of the carcass and smoked turkey salad out of the part of the fillet we didn’t eat. She made a salad out of farmers’ market heirloom tomatoes, good-quality olive oil, basil from the yard and buffalo mozzarella, and we also thawed and reheated some corn that we bought fresh during the summer, cooked, stripped from the cob and froze. I used the Weber bullet for cooking, following this recipe sans brining, since the bird already was injected.