Dinner time is always a bit of a gamble.  Will we have enough time to sit down with each other, will everyone be hungry at the same time, will Greg get caught in traffic on the way home from work, etc.  Therefore, I find it hard to get excited about cooking dinner these days.  Sometimes, it just doesn’t feel worth the effort but yesterday, I was making myself the Roasted Butternut Squash for lunch and decided to throw in a turkey roast at the same time!

I sprinkled 1 Tbsp. of olive oil in a pyrex dish, put in the turkey roast (bone-in would have been better but the boneless was on sale), dusted it with salt, pepper, crushed rosemary, garlic powder, ground mustard and cayenne.  I threw ¼ of diced onion on top and 1 cup of water into the bottom.  

I inserted a meat thermometer and set it for 160° and covered it with foil.  Into the 400° oven it went.  I didn’t time how long it was in there as I just waited until the thermometer alarm went off.  Easy!!

When the alarm went off, I simply removed the turkey and let it cool a bit with the foil on.  

Then, I wrapped the turkey in the foil and put it in the refrigerator until dinner.  I drained the liquid into my fat separator to make the gravy.

When it was time to make the gravy, I melted 2 Tbsp. of butter in a pan and waited for it to brown.  I added 2 Tbsp. of flour to make a roux.  

When that looked brown, I added the liquid from the turkey and boiled it to reduce to a thick gravy.  This process took about 10 minutes total.

While that was cooking, I made mashed potatoes.  With the leftover salad from the night before, dinner was ready and we all enjoyed it together, until Zack and I had to run out and go to his violin concert!  

The moral of the story is you can have a relatively easy dinner ready if you work the cooking into your day somehow, whether it is while you do taxes and laundry or while you are eating breakfast.  You could even throw the turkey in the crockpot in the morning and it would be ready for dinner.