My Thanksgiving In Pictures

10:30 AM: The best thing about getting an 8 lb turkey is that you don't need to wake up at the crack of dawn on Thanksgiving to start cooking it. The first task of the day (post-coffee, while watching Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade) was to make a compound butter for the turkey, this one with chopped thyme. Every chef I spoke to for advice about how to cook a wild turkey told me to use plenty of butter on the lean breasts.

11 AM: You may be saying to yourself, "What is she doing with that dead bat?" or "Why is her turkey anorexic?" Never fear, this is perfectly normal physiognomy for a wild turkey, which I might remind you is in fact a bird, and therefore built to fly. Note that he or she is built like a marathoner, with long, lean legs, a protruding breast bone, and teeny tiny (A-cup!) breasts.

11:30 AM: On to the stuffing. This one contains white sandwich bread (cubed and dried for an hour in a low oven), sausage, fennel, granny smith apples, sage, thyme, onion, celery, stock, and butter.

12:30 PM: What's missing from this picture? Our turkey's legs, which have been removed and will be braised separately in stock and white wine (which, incidentally, becomes the perfect base for a gravy). Legless turkey is now smeared with butter and ready to go into its 275 degree oven. Legless turkey will be basted, from time to time, with a mixture of melted butter and chicken stock.

3 PM: No Thanksgiving is complete without an appearance by butternut squash. Mine is sprinkled with olive oil, salt, pepper, and rosemary, and roasted. It's then drizzled with a dressing of grain mustard, olive oil, and cider vinegar before serving.

4 PM: After 3.5 hours, legless turkey had reached an internal temperature of 165 degrees and was removed from the oven to rest before carving. I'm aware that this photo of legless turkey listing to one side next to a glass of champagne makes legless turkey look drunk. Teehee.

4:45 PM: Our holiday table, courtesy of my mother, who has a knack for such things.


5 PM: Thanksgiving dinner just seconds before it was devoured by the hungry cook: wild turkey, Brussels sprouts with bacon, roasted butternut squash, stuffing with sausage, fennel, and apples, and gravy. Mmmmmm.

A Perfect(ly Good) Turkey Recipe

It's just going to be my dad, my mom, and me this Thanksgiving. That might lead you to wonder whether it's really worth all the fuss of cooking a whole Thanksgiving dinner for just three people. I reject this line of thinking, partly because I'm in the habit of cooking all day for just two people, and that's in celebration of nothing much in particular. But also because I think that a Thanksgiving that's short on personnel needs to make up for it in holiday cheer, which means plenty of cooking, eating, music, parade-watching, and of course alcoholic beverages.

My plan for Thursday is to cook just enough to keep me busy throughout the afternoon but not so much as to be exhausting. I'll do turkey of course, traditional stuffing, a brussels sprout dish, and a butternut squash dish. I'm buying our pumpkin pie from 'wichcraft - I know what you're thinking, but they're inexpensive and at least as good as anything I would make (using fresh Greenmarket pumpkin, no less) so I'm not ashamed about outsourcing this.

Of all the dishes served on Thanksgiving, it is without a doubt the turkey that provokes the most angst among cooks.

Maybe that's because the turkey is the only thing that nearly all Thanksgiving tables share in common, or maybe because it's the centerpiece of the meal, or maybe just because turkeys can be so incredibly bad when overcooked. At any rate, it's a funny-looking bird to get so upset about.

The questions circulating around turkey cookery are endless and terribly specific, as if proper cooking them is like a geometry proof and one foul digit can ruin the whole thing. Should you brine? Dry brine or wet brine? For how long? What brining solution should you use? If you brine it, can you stuff it? What temperature should you cook the turkey at at? For how long? Should you use a rub? How about a glaze? How often should you baste? Should you rotate it in the oven?

I'd imagine that if you care deeply about the quality of your roasted turkey you've probably already consulted multiple cookbooks and magazines as well as poring over Google search results to the query "the perfect turkey." There's no shortage of material out there about cooking a Thanksgiving turkey, and I'm sure that I'm not going to provide you with any original insight here.

So this one goes out to everybody else: the folks who mainly just want to roast a turkey that might be a pleasant surprise to the naysaying family and friends with takeout Chinese on speed dial.

After doing a fair amount of research and realizing that I was creating more questions for myself than I answered, I finally just spoke to one of the chefs de cuisine at our restaurant company to see what he recommended. His advice is below. It's not revolutionary, nor is it probably the Ultimate, Indisputable Best Turkey Recipe Out There. I know that it's somehow more fun to think that it requires a rigorous rotation schedule, temperature variation, and secret rub ingredients to unlock the code to A Great Turkey, but what's below will get you to the dinner table with minimal fuss and maximal results.

A quick word about brining. Brining is when you use a salt/sugar/water bath to make the turkey more tender and moist by witchcraft osmosis. I've heard many impassioned arguments in favor of brining and no persuasive reasons against it, other than the obvious one that most of us have better things to do than worrying about submersing a 20 lb carcass in a water bath the day before Thanksgiving. If you have the time and inclination to brine then by all means. But at the risk of inflaming all those brine advocates out there...you can skip the brining step without seriously damaging your turkey cookery. Update: I just got a persuasive argument against brining from my boss. He says that that brining dries out the meat and that what people are responding to when they say it's "moist" is the fact that the meat is thoroughly seasoned. Instead, season under the skin and in the cavity well with salt and pepper.

For those that might be interested: this year I got a wild turkey, from Quattro Farm in Pleasant Valley, New York. The main reasons for this decision were a) after seeing Food, Inc. and reading every Michael Pollan book this year, I could not conscience buying an industrially produced turkey and b) the little guy only weighs 7-8 lbs, perfect for a small Thanksgiving gathering. I'll let you know how it goes.

A Perfectly Good Thanksgiving Turkey Recipe

Start with high quality turkey. The biggest single factor in how good your Thanksgiving turkey tastes is what type of animal you start with. It's too late at this point to special order a turkey from a local farm but you should consider it next year (you should get your order in by mid-October). In the New York area, Quattro's Game Farm, Stone Barns, and Dickson's Farmstand Meat all sell turkeys. If you're going the grocery store route, try to get a bird that's been raised pastured (cage-free) without antibiotics, hormones, or other additives. The turkey will have a much richer, fuller flavor.

Separate the legs from the turkey. The legs and breast take different amounts of time to cook, so they need to be cooked apart. I know that this ruins the table-presentation flourish of a whole turkey. Get over it.

Prep the breast and cavity. Rub the turkey with salt, pepper, and butter, both on top of and underneath the skin. Let it come to room temperature before going in the oven. Fill the cavity with stuffing, if desired.

Braise the legs. Put a little oil in a dutch oven over medium high heat and brown the legs. Then remove the legs and add chopped carrot, onion, celery, garlic, and a couple of sprigs of thyme. Let those soften, and then add a little bit of white wine to deglaze the pan (read: loosen the brown bits). Add back the legs and enough chicken stock to partially cover them. Keep covered and at a low simmer until the legs register 165 degrees.

Roast the breast. 325 degrees is a good oven temperature. Roast the breast until it hits an internal temperature of 165 (a pop-up poultry timer lodged in the bird's breast is set to pop at 180 degrees, at which point a turkey is already dried out and overcooked, so do not rely on that), basting occasionally.

And that's it! Enjoy, and Happy Thanksgiving.

Cotes de Veau & Compromise

I am a dedicated meal planner. This will come as no surprise anyone who knows me, given that one of my most salient character traits is that I plan everything. My life can be more or less boiled down to a complex hierarchy of lists, ones that only I understand. Often my 'To Do' list will feature sub-lists as well as reminders to make other lists, a fact which is frightening and comic and tragic all at once.

So once a week --usually Thursday -- I sit down and look at the seven days ahead. I look at which nights I'll be at home and I plan what I'd like to cook. Sometimes I'll cruise through magazines and cookbooks for inspiration, sometimes I'll just get a load of vegetables and a protein and wing it.

The advantages of planning meals this way are manyfold: I can tackle all the food ordering for the week in one go (from Freshdirect, which means that I can do it from my desk instead of braving the yuppie mosh pit that is Wholefoods); it removes all day-to-day 'what are we doing for dinner tonight' anxiety; and it drastically reduces the number of sheepish takeout food orders made due to lack of creativity, energy, motivation.

The big downside: sometimes I get ahead of myself in these meal planning sessions, and my ambition wanes in between the actual planning and execution of said meals.

For instance, last night. There's a recipe in the November issue of Saveur for Braised Veal Breast with Artichokes. Now doesn't everything about that sound completely fantastic? I thought so too. No-brainer. Monday night dinner!

Unfortunately so preoccupied was I by the elegance and very French-ness of this dish that I lost site of the fact that, oh I don't know, I have a day job. The recipe involved straining and reducing a sauce, many different different pots and pans, a 2 hour braise. In my French culinary fantasy none of this would be an issue because I would turn on some jazz and uncork a bottle of Sancerre around 4 PM -- so that's right after my afternoon nap -- and then spend the rest of the evening tending to dinner in a leisurely yet perfectionist fashion.

In my actual life I arrived home at 7 PM, to an apartment that looked like it had been trashed by thugs, limping because I had worn shoes all day that were too small (but on such a good sale!) and my feet were now riddled with blisters. What I really, truly wanted to do was to stare into space for a couple hours, or at the very most watch cable and do my laundry in peace.

So what to do under these circumstances? When you have $35 worth of veal rib chops in your refrigerator and less than zero desire to do right by them?

I compromised. I did not leave the veal languishing in the fridge and dine on white wine and popcorn, as I had half a mind to do. But I did dispense with the fussy, lengthy recipe and looked for the simplest way to prepare the perishable ingredients that I had stocked.

So, I roasted a Delicata squash that I had hanging around. I prepped the artichoke hearts, tossed them in boiling water with half a lemon for 15 minutes, sliced them thin, and then sauteed them in a hot skillet with olive oil, salt, and pepper.

For the veal chops: I turned to Julia Child, who can always be counted on to give you a straightforward and reliable way to cook nearly any cut of meat. Her recommendation for cotes de veau was to brown them, then transfer them to the oven in a casserole dish with some shallots and white wine and let them cook for 20 minutes. The white wine braising liquid then gets heated on the stovetop and reduced down, with butter, a splash of stock, and salt and pepper added in at the end. I put a veal chop together on a plate with the artichokes and Delicata squash and ladled the sauce over the whole thing.

Say It With Me Now: Duck Ham!

It's really a shame that this is probably the single most uninspiring food photo that I've ever posted, because it doesn't do justice to the wonderful root vegetable soup and duck ham that I made yesterday.

"Duck ham" is quick-cured duck breast. I just love saying it. Duck ham!

The idea is that you wrap a duck breast in a mixture of kosher salt, sugar, garlic, thyme, and black pepper for 24 hours and out comes something like a very young prosciutto. Since the recipe for duck ham(!) doesn't involve an oven or a stove, it might be tempting to say but it's raw, it's raw poultry. Danger. It's not raw though -- it's cured.

Here's the thing: the definition of "cooking" is manipulating ingredients chemically. I don't know if that's what it says when you look "cooking" up in the dictionary, but that's what chefs mean when they use the word. When home cooks talk about cooking they're pretty much always talking about heat. But curing is cooking too: salt and sugar draw the water out of meat (osmosis, heard of it?), and dehydrated meat cannot host bacteria, because bacteria need water to survive. Ergo, the meat is safe to eat.

Once the duck was done curing yesterday, I sliced it as thin as possible, but to be honest it was still a little bit too gummy and wet for my taste to eat plain (none of you will be surprised to hear that The Viking sucked it down just fine). But it was perfect as a compliment to the rustic, earthy roasted root vegetable soup.

Root vegetables, roasted almost to the point of burning along with a duck or a chicken, are some of my favorite things to eat in the fall/winter months. This soup captures exactly that flavor in liquid form, which shouldn't be a surprise given the ingredients (root vegetables; chicken stock). Somehow, it was still amazing to me how complex and evocative of a mid-winter dinner the soup was. It's roasted chicken and root vegetables for people who are too lazy to chew. Relatedly, this would be amazing as baby food.

Both recipes are from Tom Colicchio's Think Like A Chef. If you want the full recipes, I encourage you to buy the book here. If you want the executive summaries, see below.


Duck Ham

Remove most of that fat from a duck breast, leaving just a thin protective coating. Mix 1 cup Kosher salt, 3 Tablespoons sugar, 1 Tablespoon thyme leaves, 1 clove minced garlic, 1 Tablespoon black pepper. Put half the salt mixture on a piece of plastic wrap, lay the duck breast on top, and cover the breast with the remaining mixture. Wrap tightly and refrigerate for 24 hours. Remove from the fridge, gently rinse the breast, and pat dry.


Roasted Root Vegetable Soup

Put some oil in a big stew pot (think 5 - 6 quart). Peel, slice, and add the following: 1 parsnip, 1/2 bulb fennel, 1 carrot, 1 small butternut squash, 1 leek (white part only), 1/2 granny smith apple, 1 clove garlic. Let veggies soften, add a knob of butter and a sprig of thyme, let soften further. Add 3 cups of chicken stock gradually, bring to a simmer, and simmer partially covered for 40 minutes. Then puree, thin with another cup of stock, and salt and pepper to taste. Sherry is not called for in the recipe, but indeed would not be out of place.

Nuts For Pumpkins

What is it with Americans and the pumpkin?

Pumpkins have a special role in this country: they're not just a fruit, they're a seasonal mascot. We carve faces on them and call them Jack O'Lanterns (in an earlier post I mentioned our October visit to see 4,000 carved, illuminated pumpkins), we chu(n)ck them, we compete to see who has the biggest one.

In addition to all of that, we just love to eat them, in every conceivable form from pumpkin beer to ice cream, soup, lattes, pies, breads, pastas, and beyond. This is unique. In other countries, there's not so much fanfare. The humble pumpkin is just another type of winter squash.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. I love pumpkins! Nothing gets you into the holiday season like eating something made with pumpkin. Unfortunately for the home cook, they're a real pain to prepare. Almost anything you want to do with a pumpkin involves peeling it, removing the guts (which smell putrid...what a wild contrast there is between raw and cooked pumpkin. God bless the man or woman who first thought to cook something as smelly as a pumpkin), cubing its flesh, cooking it, and pureeing it.

Canned pumpkin puree is widely available (two different brands are pictured above), but I've been told by chefs that there's "no comparison" between pureeing a good pumpkin yourself and using the canned stuff. One of these days I'm going to test it out by making side by side pumpkin soups, breads, and pies comparing fresh vs. canned pumpkin.

Yes, one of these days, right after I back up my hard drive and alphabetize our DVD collection.

Here are some fun facts about pumpkins:

-Out of the seven continents, only Antarctica is unable to produce pumpkins.

-As one of the most popular crops in the U.S., 1.5 billion pounds of pumpkins are produced each year.

-The town of Morton, Illinois, the self-declared pumpkin capital of the world.


And here's a summary of this week's pumpkin consumption:

-On Sunday night, Halloween, I drank Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale (very tasty, pictured above) and we watched lesser-known Hitchcock movies - specifically, Stage Fright and The Lady Vanishes.



-On Monday night, I made pumpkin soup, and I used a real pumpkin to do it. Isn't it pretty? Almost too pretty to eat, I think. Almost.

When it comes to tackling whole pumpkins, there are a couple of things that will help you out: a very sharp knife, and a Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale. Once I survived the tedium of peeling, gutting, and cubing the pumpkin, the rest was a piece of cake. The soup turned out to be very tasty, thanks in part to 1/4 cup of shaved Parmesan added in at the end, which lends a richness and tang (the recipe calls for Gruyere, but I didn't have any on hand, although for whatever reason I always seem to have a cache of half-used domestic Parmesan in the fridge). The recipe is from Fine Cooking, it's very healthy, and can be found here. In retrospect, I think the soup would have been even better if I added sherry. Every soup is better with sherry.




-Last night I made pumpkin bread, using canned pumpkin, and it wasn't very good at all. Just flat. Dull. By the time I finished eating a slice this morning, I had already forgotten about it. I don't know whether to attribute that to a shortcoming of the canned stuff, or the fact that I decided to "wing it" instead of using a recipe. Probably a combination of the two.

And that, friends, is the pumpkin report.