To enhance turkey's flavor and moistness, and to create an exceptionally crisp skin, Justin Chapple rubs the bird with a salt, sugar and spice mix before roasting.

This simple cranberry sauce features brown sugar and rice vinegar for a sweet-tart flavor. Its equally delicious served alongside roast turkey with the big meal or slathered on leftover turkey sandwiches.

Braising drumsticks is as simple as roasting a whole bird and the gravy is equally delicious, but there’s no worry of over-cooking, plus you can prepare the dish ahead and serve it whenever you are ready.

Cranberries only need to be cooked for a few minutes before they burst and form a terrific cranberry sauce. Melissa Rubel Jacobson has a number of recipes for them. To mold the sauce so it's sliceable, she adds an apple, which is loaded with pectin, a natural gelling agent.

This chunky sauce gets its nuanced acidity from fresh cranberries, juicy orange segments, plenty of ginger, and a splash of balsamic.

Rubbing butter on chicken skin (as well as under it) and letting it sit in the fridge for a few hours is a great way to make it extra-crispy, with moist breast meat. Here, Floyd Cardoz flavors the butter with cilantro, garlic, mint, chiles, cumin and lime juice.

This classic turkey is rubbed with an aromatic shallot-sage butter, then stuffed with a nutty chestnut-apple stuffing.

This six-pound bird yields a lot of meat. But if you want even more, get a capon (a castrated rooster). They're quite huge: nine to 11 pounds. (You'll have to increase the amount of ingredients relative to the size of the bird, which will also take longer to cook.) Eugenia Bone gets capons from dartagnan.com.

Sprinkled with cardamom, roasted until crisp, and topped with an apple-flavored sauce, chicken legs become extraordinary. The chicken is perfectly matched by the raisin-studded rice pilaf that's also flavored with cardamom.