Food and Friends

I find the best meals tend to be with good friends and the best dishes tend to be those that are the most spontaneous, cooked while sipping wine in the kitchen and gabbing with good company.

Having just spent Thanksgiving near Traverse City, I realized that my dinner invite to one of my oldest and dearest friends, S., was not well-timed for cooking a gourmet meal. Whoops. However she is like family and as my fridge, pantry, and bar have been well stocked of late, I figured an improvised meal would be possible.

The freezer tends to be underutilized in my kitchen, but when I do use it, I realize how hugely helpful it is to keep good frozen food. Buschs had had a sale on frozen wild shell-on shrimp a few weeks ago, so I had bought an extra pound and chucked it in there thinking it could come in handy. It did.

My mother, bless her, always buys extra produce with me in mind, so I had a beautiful large eggplant, bell peppers, fresh tomatoes and fresh herbs in the crisper drawer in my fridge. And then of course I had some olive oil (Colavita extra virgin and my current obsession, a Chilean varietal from Fustinis) , butter (you really can't go wrong with butter), sea salt from the always reliable Trader Joes, canned organic chopped tomatoes, fresh garden grown jalapenos, onions from the farmers' market, and french feta cheese and couscous from the Middle Eastern store, all of which I set out, mulling what to do and sipping a lovely 2009 Chenin Blanc. (Thanks again, Whole Foods!)

I initially thought I would make karades guvec, a Turkish shrimp casserole that is baked in a clay pot, and incorporate eggplant in the stew. So I set to peeling and salting the eggplant, and thawing the shrimp.

Though, while I am not engineer, the shrimp to eggplant ration already looked a bit off. . .

And as the onions and garlic sauteed and were joined with the red bell peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants, S. came, the conversation and wine flowed. As we launched into our catch up, it was clear that my initial plan would not work or be too time consuming to tweak.

So I switched to a far easier ratatouille and decided to cook the shrimp shell-on in a very hot pan with just some olive oil and green onions. I had fresh rosemary, thyme and sage all of which I chopped and added to the eggplant mixture which was cooking down, and the shrimp cooked very quickly. While a pain to peel while eating, they tend to be so much more tender when cooked with the tail, shell and legs still on.

And in the end, for an extremely improvised dinner it was not bad at all. S. and I both agreed that the couscous could have been more flavorful (I only used butter and sea salt) but the ratatouille and shrimp were both tender and flavorful, and complemented each other better than I planned.

But more importantly, it was so nice to spend an evening with someone I have known for the better part of 23 years. Laughing, commiserating, and going down memory lane. That the evening was accompanied with good food and better drink was a lovely bonus. As is the fact that my 1990s pictures of S. and I remain happily in the non-digital world - MC Hammer pants and crop tops not being my most elegant of looks. . .

Thanksgiving, Past and Future

This year’s Thanksgiving was, modesty aside, The Best Ever. Naturally I attribute that to two key factors - excellent food, for which I was partially responsible - and a healthy amount of Moet et Chandon White Star and Evolution from the Sokol Blosser vineyard in Oregon - for which I was fully responsible for. Family gatherings can be tense in the best of situation, but loosening everyone up, albeit in a reasonably civilized way, ensured that the final prep, dinner, conversation, desert, and subsequent card games all flowed smoothly if not a little hazily.

This year was the second time in my life that I made the turkey. Now cooking in my house is very daunting as everyone is an amazing cook and thus, a spot on critic. So rather then completely winging it (no pun intended) I decided to stick as closely to a recipe as possible. Naturally, that didn’t fully happen and what turned out was an improvisation of two recipes. One was for the actual brining, which I shall forever do before roasting any poultry, the second for roasting the turkey. I found both on epicurious.com, which has always proved reliable in my experience and usually has very helpful user comments.

The first step, after we bought the 13.15lb (5.9 kg) monster was to wash it thoroughly and remove giblets and organs. I then found a pot large enough to put the bird in so that it would completely submerged in the brine, plunked it in, and improvised the following brine recipe.

Rather then adding a whole three pounds of kosher salt, I added approximately 1 1/2 cups, and while we didn’t have marjoram, I used fresh rosemary instead. This was done the day before to let the Turkey soak overnight, and the whole concoction looked something like this:

The hardest past was probably washing the bird after the brine, because you really do want to do it thoroughly, but it is a large, slippery, unwieldy thing.

As to the actual bird, I decided to improvise on the Porcini Mushroom Turkey with mushroom gravy recipe with fresh baby portobello mushrooms instead of dried porcini.

What that meant was that I boiled approximately 8 ounces of the mushrooms (cleaned and sliced) and using maybe 1/4 of that for the mushroom butter that went under the skin and the rest for the gravy. Thinking back on it, 1 1/2 sticks of butter under and over the turkey’s skin is a bit much, but it made the meat unbelievably juicy.

For the actual bird, my mother had brought homemade chicken stock from her cafe, and I had saved the mushroom broth, so I combined both of those to put in the roasting pan with the bird and the fresh herbs. Luckily there had been a farmer’s market at the Corner Brewery the week before and one of the vendors and been kind enough to give me a ridiculous amount of fresh rosemary, thyme, and sage (alas no parsley or we would have had us a good old Simon and Garfunkel moment) for only five dollars.

There was extra butter, so in addition to putting it under the skin (a very intimate process not for the squeamish) and in the cavity (ditto), I put it over the skin as well instead of the olive oil the original recipe called for.

So as the bird was ‘doing its thing’ roasting in a separate roaster oven we have, I started the prep for the gravy. Again, I substituted fresh portobello’s and used regular onions for shallots. I started the gravy with a blend of the chicken and mushroom stock, and added some pan drippings later once the bird was out and tenting. The sauce was way too much for the 5 of us, however I refrigerated one part, and froze a good 2 cups of it for future use. The part initially saved was used with the last of the turkey breast, sauteed mushrooms, and extra fresh herbs to create a sort of post-Thanksgiving Fettucini Alfredo. I don’t usually much care for cream sauces, but given this had more broth and white wine in it then actual cream, it was surprisingly light and yet still onctueux.

I was told by no less than my father, one of the kindest people I know but with a highly sophisticated palate, that it was the best turkey he had ever eaten, and my mother, who has even more discerning taste buds, seconded this. It was pretty damn good, and though time consuming, surprisingly easy to make. In the future, I would roast it in a conventional oven as I think it lets the skin brown more and maybe try it with a mix of mushrooms to add even more woodsiness and richness to the flavor.

Also on the dinner menu was the wild-rice and chestnut stuffing my mother makes’ every year (unbelievably good, also time consuming but fairly straightforward). I had my dad send me the recipe the first year I cooked Thanksgiving dinner by myself, but have been unable to locate the .pdf file or the recipe online. As suggested by the title, the stuffing involves loads of wild rice and roasted chestnuts, is cooked with chicken broth and celery, flavored with fresh thyme and the rest I will leave to your imaginations. Because the bird was brined we did not stuff it, but baked the cooked stuffing.

Other sides were roasted Brussels sprouts (the only way I eat them), mashed yams, and a lovely cranberry-orange sauce whose recipe was from a girl who works at my mom’s. I’m not a huge fan of cranberry sauce, usually finding them far too sweet, but this one had no added sugar and fresh orange rind, so it had a lovely citrusy, aromatic bitterness.

For desert I made a maple-pumpkin pie, with the best crust recipe I’ve ever found, all from November’s edition of Real Simple.

I made the crust the day before and was really hesitant about rolling out. All previous crusts I’ve used have been with the “pat-in” method, and I’m really no baker. However with my mother’s help, we rolled it out evenly and it turned out flaky, not too sweet, and buttery. I think I’m going to use the recipe next time I make my caramelized onion quiche.

So as I get ready to go back to Berlin (where ironically, I cooked my first Thanksgiving dinner by myself) my brother and I are planning to have a late Thanksgiving dinner for him and some of our friends. It will also be a Festivus celebration (dorks that we are). I suspect we will substitute 2 roast chickens for the turkey as it is hard to find a reasonable sized one, and I will bring canned pumpkin, ready roasted chestnuts, maple syrup and other ingredients from the States. I also suspect we won’t make all the trimmings, but definitely the stuffing and one other veg. Either way, it should be a good time and a fantastic trip.

Thoughts on drink 1 of ?

Baachus

My old friend! Your gut protuberant

your horns

palely carved, your tongue claret-sticky - 

how good it is to see you! Take

the weight off your rump. 

I think we’ve listened to this plopping

music before, 

have we not? This lucid gluggling?

Tall-stemmed glasses catching fire from light? 

So who’ll drink first? You or me? 

How specific our taste is - for just this raisin, 

just this weedy fragrance, the tannic

beatitudes of wine!

Do we abjure the proletariat of corn and hops? 

We do!

Wine is how words taste, fermented in darkness,

releasing tongues from cobwebs that restrained them. 

Old friend, I can see by the look on your face

you’ve

something to tell me. Good or bad? Speak!

Extract from ‘Cafe des Artistes” by John Hartley Williams (Cape Poetry)

Published in the Financial Times, April 18 / April 19 2009