Some post-Thanksgiving cooking:

The obligatory Thanksgiving sandwich, with turkey, stuffing, sage-and-garlic gravy, Dijon mustard, and cranberry sauce (subsequent versions were made with truffle butter instead of mustard and cranberry, a Caitlin innovation):



Turduckconfit - turkey skin wrapped around turkey breast wrapped around duck breast wrapped around Jimmy Dean sage sausage, each layer bonded with transglutaminase, slow-cooked in duck fat:



Chicken-fried steak, pre-cooked - strips of steak bonded to chicken skin, eventually buttermilk-battered and fried.



The cranberry-pecan bread didn't quite work - I substitute fresh-squeezed unsweetened cranberry juice for the water in a regular baguette recipe, but the acidity must have wreaked havoc - the dough didn't stretch so much as tear, and the final product was dense and looked like whole-grain bread. We're going to try it as pain perdu tomorrow.

The colcannon twice-baked potatoes were pretty great, though. Caitlin's idea, my execution:

First make creamed greens - blanch kale and turnip greens, squeeze every drop of liquid you can out, and chop finely.

Meanwhile cook chopped garlic, chopped fennel, and cream together until the cream gets very thick and is about to break. Blend the cream, garlic, and fennel together along with salt, fennel seed, and if you have them, a tablespoon or so of cooked nettles, to make everything bright green.

Return the sauce to the pan, add the greens, cook until very thick.

Bake your potatoes, split them in half, scoop out the innards, and mash them with the creamed greens. Add a little butter or a little more salt if needed.

Fill potato shells with the colcannon; bake 15-20 minutes before eating.

thanksgiving 2012

I'll update with photos of anything interesting, but - the things I am making for Thanksgiving or as part of Thanksgiving weekend:

Cranberry-pecan bread (yeast bread, not baking soda) and pain perdu with the leftovers

Turduckconfit: turkey skin wrapped around turkey breast wrapped around duck breast wrapped around sage sausage, all bonded with transglutaminase, slow-cooked in duck fat.

Colcannon twice-baked potatoes

Carrot and celery root gratin

Maple-coffee pecan pie

Cranberry-lime pie

aka arnold palmer, half and half

Man, fuck a bunch of winter. Sometimes when you wake up and it's still dark out, you need to make some lemonade iced tea.

(I have ceased calling it anything but "half lemonade, half iced tea" when I order it, because there doesn't seem to be a nationally understood term.)

Although there's a cider cocktail called the Stonewall, I implore you not to call this unnamed cocktail the Stone Walnut:

3/4 oz nocino (walnut liqueur)
1 oz rye whiskey
Pour into a mug and top with hot unpasteurized apple cider.

This has been our favorite cocktail of cider season. You really, really need to use farmstand apple cider - I don't think anything in a supermarket will come close. Depending on the apples the cider was made with, and how tart it is, you might want a squeeze of lemon juice.

You might also need to adjust the amount of nocino for sweetness - I'm using homemade stuff (which is dead simple if you can get green walnuts - chop them into halves or quarters, cover them in vodka for a couple months, add sugar to desired sweetness).

I always associate beets with fish.

There's no real reason for that association outside the context of my own life: I first learned to like beets when I was living in Gentilly almost twelve years ago (wow), when I happened to be eating a lot of fish. The beets were a whim - I roasted them, rubbed the skins off, and sliced them, as a side with pan-fried fish and homemade "tartar sauce" made with pickled garlic.

The sweetness was nice with the fish, and I've gone back to it a lot of times since.



The cod fillet was smoked in the stovetop smoker after being rubbed with miso. No tartar sauce this time - just black pepper and a five-minute egg fried in cilantro oil.