Holiday (or any day!) Turkey Bites
- Total Time: 34 Minutes
Description
The Nom Nom Paleo crew calls these ‘Thanksgiving Bites’, and the recipe is found in the, ‘Ready or Not!’ book. Each bite tastes exactly like Thanksgiving…or Christmas…or Easter or whatever holiday you and yours choose to tuck into a turkey dinner with all of the trimmings. In short, these are brilliant. If you have a food processor, they’re really quite quick, the recipe is easily doubled, and the cooked bites come out of the freezer beautifully – super perfect for an appetizer, lunch or light dinner. We loved ours with Brock’s Cranberry Sauce – enjoy!
Ingredients
Holiday (or any day!) Turkey Bites
1 T. olive oil
1 small onion, 1 medium carrot, 1 medium celery stalk – all minced
1 c. finely chopped Brussels sprouts
kosher salt (about 2 1/2 teaspoons)
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 sweet potato (about 230 g) – peeled and grated, you want about 2 cups grated
1 pound ground turkey
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/4 c. dried cranberries – I used dried cherries and cut them all in half
1/2 t. minced fresh rosemary (I only had dried)
1 t. EACH minced fresh sage AND thyme (again, I only had dried)
1/4 t. + freshly ground pepper
Instructions
So…about that food processor – you’re welcome to spend an hour mincing and grating, or you can spend 3 minutes with one of my favorite appliances.
Heat up the oil in a large skillet, pulse the onion, carrot and celery together and then add to the heated pan. Cook and stir for a few minutes until the vegetables are softened, and as they’re cooking, pulse the Brussels sprouts. Add the chopped sprouts to the cooking vegetables along with a good pinch of salt and cook for another couple of minutes. Add the garlic, stir for about 30 seconds until fragrant, then remove the pan from the heat and transfer it all to a large bowl and leave the mix to cool to room temperature.
Preheat the oven to 400 convection and line a couple of large baking sheets with parchment. Switch the blade out of your food processor and grate the potato then add the potato to the cooled cooked vegetables along with the turkey, egg, dried cranberries, spices, a good grinding of pepper and 2 teaspoons of salt. Gently mix all of the ingredients together, you may need to get in there with your hands. I doubled this recipe and mixing wasn’t an issue with the larger amount.
Using a tablespoon-sized cookie scoop, scoop heaping mounds out onto your prepared sheets, about 2 inches apart from one another. Squish each one down a bit and spend a couple of minutes fixing them so they’re mostly round.
Bake for 10 minutes, remove the pan from the oven and carefully flip over each one – then bake for another 7 minutes. You may need to adjust the cooking time by a minute or 2, but this is exactly the timing that worked for me. The turkey was cooked, the outsides were a bit browned and not a single bite was dry.
Either allow them to cool completely before packaging up for the freezer, or serve them up straight away with your favorite cranberry sauce. When I brought mine out of the freezer I allowed them to thaw in the fridge overnight, then placed them on a parchment lined baking sheet at 350 for about 15 minutes until heated through. So perfect to have handy for the holiday season!
- Category: Appetizers, Freezes Well, Make-ahead, Turkey
