Tips For Carving Your Thanksgiving Turkey & Adding Flare To Your Feast

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Before you sit down for your Thanksgiving dinner, CBS2 has some expert tips for carving your turkey and adding a festive flare to your holiday feast.

At the Urbani Truffle Lab, Andrea Correales with Elegant Affairs catering showed CBS2's Cindy Hsu some Thanksgiving surprises, like a special way to serve apple cider.

"You can take a paring knife, cut the top of the apple off, and then scoop out the contents in the middle, making sort of a hollow bowl or cup," Correales explained.

Pour hot apple cider into the apple, then add a cinnamon stick. Once you drink the cider, you can even eat the apple.

For a cute idea for the kids -- fill a muffin tray with finger food. Take mac and cheese in a paper baking cup, add chicken or turkey nuggets and some kind of fruit, like apples.

Correales also made potato croquettes shaped like pears.

Put mashed potatoes in the fridge, then use an ice cream scoop to help form the potatoes into a ball and shape it into a pear.

"You dip them in egg, you dip them in breadcrumbs, and you can either bake them or you can put them in frialator oil," she said.

Finish them off with a clove and a leaf.

She also made a stuffing muffin with mashed potatoes and gravy.

Just bake your stuffing in a muffin pan, put a scoop of mashed potatoes on top, then add gravy and greens.

From there, Hsu visited Old Homstead to talk turkey with Marc Sherry who shared some of his secrets of carving.

First, never cut a warm turkey, as the meat will shred.

"When the turkey comes out, what we do is we cover it with a tin foil tent for 30 minutes. This reintroduces the juice to the turkey," Sherry said.

Also, never carve your turkey in the roasting pan.

Next, make a baseline cut down the center of the turkey and cut through to the bottom. Once you remove the breast meat, go with thin slices, always cutting against the grain of the meat, which you can do by cutting at an angle. Then, the last thing to go are the wings.

When it comes to carving, only cut what you need and leave the leftover meat on the turkey so it doesn't dry out.

To view all of these recipes and more, please click here.