Thanksgiving 2008 Recipe Wrapup
Amanda and I made Thanksgiving dinner pretty much from scratch this
year, and happily everything turned out very well!
I picked up a 10 lb turkey from Dipaolo turkey farm. Initially we
had planned on brining the whole bird, using a recipe from epicurious,
but we did not have a pan large enough to submerge the carcass. So the
day before Thanksgiving I found myself dismembering a raw turkey,
which is quite a bit more exhausting than carving it after cooking!
Then again, how often do you have the chance to snap a turkey's spinal
column with your bare hands? Opportunity of a lifetime, I'm telling
ya.
We decided to brine the dark meat in the legs and wings, and bake
the breast meat separately in citrus
and rosemary. The brinng worked spectacularly well, easily the
most tender flavorful turkey I have ever had, but sadly the breasts
came out dry. At one point we had discussed wrapping them in
prosciutto prior to baking to help keep them moist, but in the rush it
was forgotten.
A stuffing recipe with
bacon and apples? OK! I went heavy on the thyme (from the
windowbox plant) and sage. The bread (along with the beans and
whatever else we did not get from Greenmarket) was from Fairway, the best-est grocery
story in NYC). The only complaint I had with the stuffing was that the
apple flavors were mostly lost. If I try this recipe again, I'll
probably double the amount of apple and cut it into larger pieces, to
help it survive the long bake time.
While I was tending to the gravy, Amanda made stuffed sweet
potatoes wrapped in prosciutto, based on a recipe from
what we're eating. One factor we did not anticipate was that the
potatoes did not really soften up much during their time in the oven,
despite the claims of the recipe. We had pulled them out of the
boiling water a bit ahead of them being completely finished, thinking
they would soften further in the oven, but the potatoes that were not
soft all the way through after boiling remained a bit tough
post-bake.
Serious Eats had a recipe for
string beans with bacon and chestnuts had sounded great, until we
realized exactly how much work preparing chestnuts is. The recipe has
using "bottled peeled roasted whole chestnuts", but being the DIY
types we picked up whole fresh chestnuts from Greenmarket and set to
work. How hard could it be? To prepare chestnuts, Joy of Cooking
recommended cutting an X in the side of each nut and boiling them for
5 minutes. Then peel off the shells - which we found an incredibly
time consuming task, and exhausting for the fingers! Now that the
chestnuts are peeled, they can be cooked, which is done by boiling
them (again) for 30-40 minutes, then baking them for an hour. We got
about halfway through the shelling process and realized there was just
no way we had the time to devote to doing this with so many other
dishes still up in the air. So we aborted on the chestnuts, but the
string beans were fresh and the bacon was
good quality, so I think everyone was still happy with the
results.
The rolls were made with mashed sweet potatoes, using a recipe from
pinch
my salt. These were a huge hit. I had been worried the sweet
potato would dominate but instead it just gives a slight flavoring to
the yeast rolls. The ones that were left unfrozen (but bagged)
unfortunately turned moldy after only a few days, probably due to the
egg and sugar. Fortunately I have at least half a dozen still in the
freezer...
For desert we made
sweet potato,
pecan and date,
and icebox pies. I was a bit dubious of the pie crust recipe thekitchn
had, but for heavy pie fillings like these the extra density of the
crust worked. (The Oreo crust of the icebox pie was pretty tasty too)
The cranberry sauce, gravy, and mashed potatoes were consumed
without ever being photographed. Very sad.
So, was the meal worth 12+ hours of cooking over two days?
Ummm... YES! But once a year seems about right to me.
Syndicated 2008-12-03 22:16:00 from Jack Lloyd