The glory that was Turkey and the grandeur that was Leftovers

I think it’s an awful shame that as a culture we enjoy turkey only on Turkey-Day.  Turkey is more flavorful than chicken (if you do it right), better for you than red meat, and you can use nearly every piece of it as leftovers (or wishbones). Sadly, it’s also the focus of some major anxiety for lots of people.

Which is why, even though we celebrated Thanksgiving across town at the house of friends, Anton and I made our very own 19.5-pound bird the next day. This not only took the pressure off of us, since we didn’t have to present the bird in a gasp-worthy moment at the table, but it also netted us two gigantic tupperware containers of meat and almost 80 cups (that’s 20 quarts) of stock.  Most of that has gone straight to the freezer, but a goodly portion has gone to making soup, some incredible sandwiches, and excellent dinners that made use of pre-cooked poultry.  Because while I do love Thanksgiving dinner, it’s the week of leftovers that I really look forward to!

First off, the bird:

We went shopping the day after Thanksgiving to buy a roasting pan and rack, a gravy separator, a stockpot, and a probe thermometer (ours broke last week!).  We got a few odd looks for buying turkey-roasting equipment the day after the turkey was meant to be roasted, but we got everything we needed and all was well.

The recipe we use is Cook’s Illustrated Turkey for a Crowd.  It only takes about 3 hours, but requires you to flip the bird (hee hee) an hour into the roasting process to keep the breast juicy.  Last year this was an ordeal that required three people (thanks Jenny!) and dirtied every spatula in the kitchen and more than one towel.  This year, Anton discovered his turkey turners in a box and we managed the flip with ease!  We slightly undercooked it on purpose, so that the breast was perfect (perfect, I tell you!) but the thighs were still slightly raw.  After we took the rest of the meat off the bone, we nuked it in the microwave a little bit to finish it off.

For what we did with our embarrassment of turkey riches, check after the break:

A Revelation, and Two Ways to Eat It

I have a confession.

I am addicted to bread.

Not in an “oh yes, mother, I’d love a second slice of the wonderbread” kind of way, but the kind of addiction where if you sit me in front of a warm, crackly, really top-quality loaf, bad things will happen.  Like consuming the whole thing.

Which is almost what happened yesterday when I made Jim Lahey’s revolutionary No-Knead Bread.  The New York Times featured his recipe back in 2006, and I happily copied it into my recipe database.  I can’t believe I let it sit without making it for so long.

Anton and I started baking bread when we moved out to Montana, with some success (the challah especially turned out really well, and made great French toast).  But this is easily the best bread I have made, and I spent less time working on it than on any other loaf.  And I was skeptical.  I managed to use the wrong kind of yeast, too much salt, didn’t have the recommended baking vessel, and if you think our kitchen is ever going to get to the requisite 70 degrees, I should inform you that in our house “room temperature” is considerably below room temperature.

After mixing up the dough and letting it sit for 18 (!) hours, it looked like something you throw in the garbage.  But it made the house smell incredible, and the loaf (which I baked in a 9×9 pyrex dish with a tin foil “lid”), was perfect.  Artisan bakery-perfect.  Thin, crispy, crackly crust; moist, open, tender crumb; and the most incredible chew.  We ate half the loaf before it had cooled all the way, totally by itself.  Seriously, go make this bread now.  It requires a bowl and  a wooden spoon and a lot of patience.  You can not go wrong.

The entire point of making bread, was to use it as a base for Roasted Cod on Large Garlic Croutons, which I found on the RSS I follow that sends me healthy recipes from Epicurious.  Frequently I change a recipe a little, or wish I had when I see the finished results, but this is a winner.  Rub some brand-new toasted bread with a garlic clove; top with some lightly-cooked tomatoes, anchovies, and red onion; layer with fresh basil leaves; and top with a perfect piece of cod?  Sounds like heaven on a plate to me!

I would have discovered more ways to eat this, but we had some toast in the morning and nibbled throughout the day, and now there’s only two slices left, which we’re saving for breakfast tomorrow.  I’ll make it again, though, I promise!

(I’ve just discovered that Lahey has a book out!)

The week of Indian food

Since Mom has been getting on my butt to keep posting here Quelle Fromage, and I have recently been inspired by the craziness over at Smitten Kitchen, I feel obligated to mention the incredible week of Indian food we have just finished here in Montana.

Indian food is a curious thing in Montana, by which I mean nonexistent.  The whole state appears to have just two Indian restaurants, neither of them within 200 miles of us here in Bozeman, which I think is a great tragedy.  A childhood of pseudo-curries (inauthentic but delicious!) leaves me craving the occasional Indian food, the way most people start to crave a rare steak (which is not to say that I do not also crave steak from time to time, it’s just a lot easier to obtain out here in ranch country).

And so we (I) decided that the time had come to attempt some really great Indian food.  My birthday present from Anton last year was an Indian cookbook by one of the legends, Madhur Jaffrey, and I picked up another great book before we left Chapel Hill, called It’s All American Food, about ethnic food in the U.S.  So I hitched up my pants and planned a week’s worth of menus.

My first observation is that good Indian food (at least what I made), is not fast, cheap, or easy.  Two of my recipes called for lamb, which is not easy to get or cheap when you can find it (solution: substitute cubed beef chuck), and the fastest meal we made this week required an hour and a half before we could finally sit down for fifteen minutes and polish it off.  These recipes were not written with the harried modern cook in mind.  Fortunately, being unemployed has its advantages, and I have plenty of time to stir Dilli ka saag gosht (Beef with Spinach) for two hours while it simmers on the stovetop.  The number of pots and pans that Anton washed this week merits a gold star, too.  I made at least three dishes every night, just for the heck of it.

We also used more spices this week than in all the time since I bought them: nearly a whole jar of cumin (ridiculous!), but also fennel seeds, celery seeds, cardamom pods, bay leaves, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cumin seeds, curry powder, garam masala, cayenne, mustard seeds (both yellow and black), caraway, black pepper, turmeric, and vast leafy bunches of cilantro.  Even with all those spices, only one or two of our dishes turned out more than moderately spicy!

We made multiple varieties of rice dishes, all of them absolutely delicious, several varieties of cauliflower, multiple Indian breads, and all of it delicious.  Sadly, I don’t have digital copies of the recipes, but if there’s anything anyone wants a copy of, I could probably oblige you to transcribe it.

So, without further ado, our menu after the break:

Aji de Gallina and Tacu Tacu

We finished our adventures in South American cooking this week with Aji de Gallina and Tacu Tacu, Peruvian comfort food according to Epicurious.com.  While not our best meal of the week (Anton and I are divided as to whether that was the steak or the moqueca), it was certainly very good!

I haven’t been able to parse Aji de Gallina yet, despite my passing knowledge of Spanish.  Aji means a chili pepper, and gallina is the feminine form of chicken.  So essentially “chili pepper of chicken”.  I’m not sure either.  But this dish does include both chicken and chili peppers, so I suppose it’s accurate.  It’s a very simple dish, just a pan-seared, oven-roasted chicken breast with a sauce seasoned with aji amarillo (yellow chili pepper) paste (which I had to make myself, South American specialty grocery stores being notoriously rare in Montana) and turmeric.  The sauce was really good in my estimation; much less spicy than I had thought it would be, which may be the fault of my bootstrapped paste.  The sauce was also good on the Tacu Tacu.

And what is Tacu Tacu, you ask?  It is a delicious combination of cooked rice, brown lentils, onions, and some seasonings, all tossed together and then fried to create lots of little brown crunchy bits to chew on.

You can view the epicurious recipes here:

Peruvian Rice and Lentils (Tacu Tacu)

Aji de Gallina (Chicken in Chili Sauce)

Black Beans, Beets, and Rice

The highlight of my day was receiving a call from my best friend, who wanted my recipe for Brickle Crunch Cookies.  Apparently he was cooking dinner for a new lady friend and wanted to impress.  This gave me very mixed feelings: I was pleased that he wanted my recipe (it is a good one) and glad that he is meeting cool people he wants to impress, but it made me feel a little guilty about feeding my own significant other rice and beans tonight!  Granted, they were very tasty rice and beans, but still, flank steak and homemade cookies are way better!

This meal was something of a leap of faith for me.  I had never made beans before, neither beans nor beets being anywhere near my list of foods I have traditionally enjoyed.  However, this being South American week and me wanting a vegetarian option, beans and rice it is.  The recipe came from Martha Stewart, and I was very pleased to discover that my tastes for both beans and beets have matured and I enjoyed the dish pretty well.  Anton has requested more beets in our diet from now on.  Both of us agreed that something was missing, but couldn’t quite put a finger on what.  It was decent, hearty vegetarian fare, but it may be that a sauce of some kind for the rice would be a good addition. I somehow managed not to dye my fingers red peeling and dicing beets, so that was enough to make me thoroughly satisfied with the meal.

Moqueca

Moqueca is a Brazilian seafood stew with a coconut-milk base.  Anton pulled out a bottle of wine to celebrate his first day of class so I’m afraid I don’t have a whole lot to say other than this was very excellent served over a bed of white rice.  We’ve been having great luck with the easily-available Pacific cod here in Montana; I’m afraid I may have gone a little overboard chopping up the vegetables a little too small in the new mini-food-processor Anton got me over the weekend, but the resulting stew was tasty anyway!

Moqueca was also courtesy of It’s All American Food, by David Rosengarten.

Treat of the Week: Chocolate-Chunk Oatmeal Cookies with Dried Cranberries

So part of my attempt (all right, all of my attempt) to ingratiate Anton to his new department is sending him off to work once a week with a baked good.  Last week I made cowboy cookies, which are essentially sugar cookies rolled in or sprinkled with a mixture of cinnamon, paprika, chili powder, and cayenne, which is really incredible if you’re up for the spiciness (they’re called cowboy cookies because way back when when my mother made them she rolled them out and used cowboy boots, cacti, and bucking bronco cutters before she sprinkled them with the spices; I wimped out and rolled them into little balls before rolling them in sugar).

This week I made one of my very favorite cookies evar.  The way the nuttiness of the oatmeal combines with the sweetiness of the chocolate and the cranberries and the whole thing takes on a toffee-esque flavor is just delicious.  I think I’ve eaten five in the last two days.  >.<

Anyway, the department apparently got a kick out of them.  I even got fan mail from the administrative assistant!

Steak with Chimichurri and Saffron-Scented Quinoa

Our first attempt turned out really well.  Anton grilled a really great medium-rare London broil, which I topped off with chimichurri (a parsley and garlic sauce, which makes me think of an Argentine pesto with a lot more kick then you’re used to) and served with an incredible quinoa dish redolent of saffron, cumin, and red pepper.

The steak and chimichurri was good, but the quinoa was absolutely incredible.  If you haven’t experimented with this grain, I highly recommend it.  Quinoa was the major “grain” crop of the Inka empire (it’s actually a seed), and it made its way to the US about 20 years ago.  The National Academy of Science calls it one of the best vegetable sources of protein out there.  On top of that, it’s absolutely delicious and easy to prepare.  If you haven’t experimented with this grain, I highly recommend it.  Usually I find the flavor of cumin slightly overpowering, but in this application it was mellowed by the red pepper and saffron flavors.  If you’re not that adventurous, you could probably make the exact same dish but substitute cous-cous.

Chimichurri courtesy of Cook’s Illustrated, quinoa via It’s All American Food, by David Rosengarten.

Theme of the Week: South American

One of the ways I’m going to stretch my culinary repertoire over the next however-long is going to be declaring a theme occasionally.  Sometimes Anton will be challenging me, sometimes I’ll just be challenging myself.  Themes might be ethnic in nature, or limiting meat or other ingredients, or confining myself to a certain method.  I haven’t really thought this out much in advance, so mostly it will be on a whim.

I hereby declare this week’s theme, as per Anton’s request, to be South American food (I feel like the Chairman from Iron Chef)!  Stand by for Latin dishes from Peru, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile!

Tortellini Salad with Roasted Broccoli

Once upon a long time ago, I made a tortellini salad with asparagus for the graduation lunch at my fraternity and it went over very well.  I’ve kept the recipe on the back burner since then, but a cook-out hosted by Anton’s department over the weekend gave me an opportunity to dust it off and try it out again.  Since it’s late summer in Montana and asparagus has gotten expensive, I decided to swap it out for one of my very favorite vegetables: roasted broccoli.  Frequent visitors to this site will have realized by now that roasting is my favorite cooking method for veggies, so no-one will be surprised when I tell you it was excellent.