Talking Turkey

It's November which means Holiday Cooking Season is officially open!  If I'm cooking, I start planning my menus weeks in advance.  If I'm making the whole meal, I also break each recipe into steps, figure out which ones I can do in advance and how far in advance, and draw up a schedule to save myself the grief of discovering that I need to do 8 different intensive cooking tasks at once.  Making Thanksgiving (or Christmas or New Year's or Easter) dinner in a step a day makes life so much easier on the holiday itself!

I don't generally subscribe to notions of "tradition" and "convention" and "because we always do it this way" LOL  I mean, I've done that for holiday meals b/c my husband prefers it when I don't muck around with his favorite dishes, but truthfully, it kills a little bit of my soul not to try at least one thing new.

I have come to a point though where I've found a few things that work really well and so I gravitate to those recipes.  I don't do exactly the same thing every year, but I've got a rotation of less than half a dozen Thanksgiving main dish recipes now.  My favorite preparations are either brining the turkey or using some kind of butter-herb rub under the skin.  Brining gives a very moist turkey with crispy skin after roasting, while the sub-q butter gives the turkey an unmatched flavor although it sacrifices the crispy skin.

Either way, you want to make some turkey stock in advance for gravy.  I have occasionally seen boxed turkey stock at the store, if you wanted to buy it rather than make it.  No, homemade gravy is not hard (whereas canned gravy is yucky).  The turkey needs to cool before you whack into it anyway, so there's plenty of time for gravy-making.  If you make stuffing, you can also use the turkey stock for the stuffing.  Btw, I do not stuff my turkey, partly b/c of the health recommendations against doing so and partly b/c if I make stuffing, I want those crunchy, crispy bits that only come from being baked next to rather than inside of a turkey.

A quick thought about thawing...the standard line is that you want to give the bird 24 hours in the fridge for every 5 lbs, so a 15 lb. turkey should thaw in 3 days, etc.  I find that this never is sufficient to thaw that block of ice in the cavity, the one you'll have to chisel the giblet package out of if you don't have a totally thawed turkey.  So I calculate 1 day per 5 lbs. plus an extra day for the giblets.  And if you plan to brine, don't forget to set your thawed-by target 24 hours prior to actual cooking (I screw up so you don't have to).

First things first, stock.  Make some the weekend before Thanksgiving (or earlier) and freeze it.  Use the meat from the wings/drumsticks in tacos, soup, pot pie, salad, sandwiches...you know, any of the Thanksgiving leftover recipes.

Pin It

Crockpot Onion Soup

It's not really *soup* season but it is sweet onion season, so now's the time.  The crockpot is a beautiful thing for this recipe...you use it to caramelize the onions overnight and then cook the soup.  I have seen recipes that call for one process or the other (or ofc for doing it all on the stovetop), but not both and quite frankly I think doing both is a brilliant proposal.  Especially when I do not want to babysit a pot of soup on the stove or even turn on my stove right now. 

Like any soup, leftovers reheat very nicely so you can make this totally in advance if you wanted.  Though since it goes in the crockpot, all you need for convenient cooking is to premeasure the second-stage ingredients and have them ready to dump in after the onions are brown.

I really like a little heat in this recipe.  The sweetness of the onions mellows the chipotle, and the chipotle keeps the onions from being sickly-sweet.  But if you don't do heat, don't add the chipotle.  One can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce will go a LONG way.  I go ahead and chop up the whole thing, and freeze the leftover smoosh in ice cube trays or pressed thinly in a ziptop bag for future recipes. 

A classic element of French Onion Soup is that melty, cheesy mess on top.  I loathe that part.  It's a pain to execute and a pain to eat.  I prefer to have grilled cheese alongside an unadorned bowl of soup.  I figure a grilled cheese sandwich hits all the same flavor and texture notes as a broiled cheesy baguette slice.  If you are *really* pressed for time on Dinner Day, you can butter the bread and stack the sandwiches the night before when you start the onions and just put the prepped sandwiches in a panini press or on a griddle, saving you a few minutes' prepwork and cleanup.

You do want to use the biggest crockpot you have, a 6 quarter preferably.  A 4 quarter will be very full, but if you reduce the amounts of the ingredients to 75%, you should be ok.  For one of those cute little 2 quart crockpots, you could reduce the ingredients by half and have a nice little dinner for 2.

Pin It