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.

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Thanksgiving leftovers

I've gotten pretty darn good at handling Thanksgiving leftovers without resorting to five straight days of turkey sandwiches.  The trick is to shop ahead for a few extra ingredients to make the following recipes at the same time you're shopping for your holiday meal.  And it's not just the turkey that needs using up, so I have a couple of leftover side dish recipes as well. 

In giving shop ahead lists, I assume you'll have pantry and refrigerator basics on hand already...spices, onions, garlic, butter, oil, eggs, and basic baking ingredients.

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Kitchen Math

I am so geeked. 

I have a recipe for a timballo (a pasta-filled casserole entirely encased in a layer of meatloaf) that I want to make as 8 small, pot-pie-sized invidual portions instead of as a giant 8-serving behemoth. 

No problem, you might think, just divide the pasta and meatloaf equally among enough small pans to use up all the ingredients.  But you would be wrong.  The original recipe timballo is baked in a springform pan, with meatloaf mix pressed into the bottom of the pan, up the sides of the pan and over the top of the casserole, forming a shell around the entire casserole.  When you divide the mixture among smaller pans, you keep the same amount of pasta filling but wind up with a lot more "shell" surface to deal with.

In fact, according to my calculations the ratio of shell surface area to pasta volume is 1.4:1 for pot pies and only 1.1:1 for the springform pan.  So the problem for this recipe is in figuring out by how much to increase the meatloaf part of the recipe to fully cover the smaller pans while simply dividing the pasta part of the recipe. 

The trickiest part was figuring the volume of the slope-sided pot pie pans.  I decided to conceptualize them as a slice of a cone.  I used bamboo skewers taped to the side of the inverted pan to create the "invisible" portion of the cone and measure its height.  I calculated the volume of the full cone and the volume of only the "invisible" part (using the top of the inverted pan, ergo the bottom) as the base of the "invisible" cone and subtracted the "invisible" volume from the full volume to find the volume of the slice remaining. 

It's not exactly A Beautiful Mind, but I'm so excited to have such a tangible example of math in action.  And so for any math geeks out there who want to play along, here is what I did:

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Healthy Sweet Potato Pie

I am told this pie was delicious, but alas, I didn't get to try any before my 1.5yo penetrated the kitchen countertop forcefield and pulled the cake dome down, ruining both the cake dome and pie.

Before Destructo Toddler

The recipe came in a mailer about women's health or heart health or something like that from a local hospital (who would be sending you recipes chock full o' fat and calories if they were really serious about drumming up business).  It includes several Miracles of Modern Chemistry.  I've retained one or two calorie/carb-reducing elements and reverted the remainder to "real food" which is IMHO where "healthy" really lives.


After Destructo Toddler

Because there are no eggs in the recipe, it can be stored at room temperature for a few days rather than in the fridge.  You can also freeze it for future service, and perhaps even serve it frozen in an ice-cream-cake sort of way (didn't get to try that one, but I had planned to).

If you happen to bake a lot of pies, these are very nice for weighting a prebaked pie shell to prevent bubbles in the crust.  I used dry beans for a number of years, but the ceramic beads do a better job.

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Garlic Artichoke Pasta

I <heart> artichokes.  They're supposedly cancer-fighting and they're exotic and they're amazing with butter.  That's the first thing that made me want to try this recipe from the Better Homes and Gardens Better Than Mom's Slow Cooker Recipes book.  The second thing was that this is a recipe that is made practically entirely from pantry goods without being one of those can-of-cream-of-death-soup type of recipes.  You can buy all the ingredients you need for this ahead and keep them on-hand as a pantry meal kit.  You can also prep the crockpot mixture ahead to fridge or freeze.

Until I had a toddler, we never had dairy beverages in the fridge routinely.  I had to buy milk or cream or half-and-half specifically for a recipe that called for it.  These days, I use whole milk for all recipes calling for cream or half-and-half because it is what we have in the fridge.  So use whatever you happen to  have here (or use canned evaporated milk, if you are like pre-toddler, dairy-drink-less me) if you throw this recipe together out of "ingredients on hand".  If you're planning to make a meal kit for this recipe, you can freeze an appropriate amount of milk or cream, rely on having some in the fridge on Dinner Day or buy canned evap milk for the "pantry kit". 

Comparatively, cream and half and half will be the highest in calories and fat, then evaporated milk and regular milk.  If you get non-fat evap milk, you'll get the best of both worlds...the lighter caloric/fat profile of milk with the rich mouthfeel of cream.

So a meal kit for this recipe will look like this: canned tomatoes, canned artichokes, box of pasta and can of evap milk (if using) labelled and stored in the pantry with garlic+dry herbs and milk/cream (if using) on hand or frozen in ziptop bags.  OR everything except milk mixed together and frozen with pasta/evap milk in the pantry.

The one gripe I have about this recipe is that it's a crockpot recipe that still requires significant cooking right before dinner.  The joy of the crockpot is that you don't have to cook at dinnertime, right?  Boiling pasta isn't hard, but getting the water up to a boil takes time...more time than I'm willing to spend to "finish" a crockpot meal. 

The solution is to cook the pasta almost fully in advance, toss it with a bit of oil or butter to keep it from sticking, fridge it and stir it into the crockpot at the end to warm up and finish cooking through.  Or you can boil the pasta at the last minute, whatever works with your schedule.  Just please don't rinse the pasta...rinsing washes away starch which will prevent the pasta from sticking to itself but then it also won't stick to the sauce.  Besides, the starch is where the flavor lives (yes, pasta does have a flavor of its own) so rinsing washes away flavor, too.

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Easy-Easier-Easiest: Brussel Sprouts

I know brussel sprouts are not everyone's favorite vegetable.  But they do come into season in the fall, and I've got three recipes that will make you see these mini-cabbages in a new light.

Roasting, as always, is one of my favorite prep techniques.  Put these in the oven while roasting a chicken or thick-cut pork chops for a super-easy, attention-free side dish.  Roasting radically changes vegetables, so if you think you don't like brussel sprouts, do try these.  The mustard-parm sprouts are conventional-but-stepped-up and work well with stove-top main dishes.  And I promise that you've never brussel sprouts like you'll have if you make slaw.  If you want, you can let the dressingn cool a bit before adding it to the veggies for a crispier slaw.

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Pumpkin Soup and Pumpkin Muffins

Oh look!  There I am, reflected upside down, in the spoon!

I was reading a newspaper article recently that claimed Halloween was the only "major" American holiday that didn't have a signature food or meal associated with it...Thanksgiving has turkey, Mother's Day has brunch, St. Patrick's Day has green beer, the list just goes on LOL

That statement rang true at first, but as I thought more about it, I realized Halloween does have a signature food...the pumpkin!  I think most of us tend to think of pumpkins as edible only in pie form, but they're part of the winter squash family and as such, are versatile menu players. 

Peeling a fresh whole pumpkin for a recipe is an undertaking, and I prefer when possible to use canned puree (not pumpkin pie filling which is actual pumpkin plus a bunch of other stuff).  The following recipe for soup (which I made for our pre-trick-or-treating repast) only calls for 1/2 a can, so I made muffins with the remaining puree...less waste = less cost = less aggravation.  I am brilliant ;)

The soup recipe is from the Frugal Gourmet Cooks American.  You can make this soup up to the point of adding the scallops and milk and fridge or freeze it (be sure to include scallops and milk as part of the freezer kit to finish the soup).  Just reheat the soup base to a simmer, add the milk and scallops and simmer 5 minutes to finish.  Or if you don't have front-end time to make the soup in its entirety, prep and group the ingredients for next-day or same-day cooking: onion/celery/garlic/ginger in one bowl, flour/spices in another, stock/Worcestershire/Tabasco in a bowl, pumpkin/squash cubes in yet another and scallops/milk saved for last. 

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