cream pies and seltzer bottles

When I'm cooking for just me, any gravy I make tends to be pretty rustic.  There might be some shreds of meat in it, or displaced bits of stuffing that fell out of the bird while roasting.  And it's usually made the day after the bird cooked, which a) makes it easy to separate the fat out from the drippings and b) means I have some turkey stock to work with, which likely simmered all night.

Scoop the fat off the drippings and fond.  Make a roux with some of it and some flour in a pan.  Cook some thin sliced onions and ramps in the roux.  Add the drippings and turkey stock.  Simmer for five or six minutes.  Add a little cream.  Season with salt and summer savory.

Rustic, but ridiculously flavorful, and whatever's left will go into a pot pie.

Yeah, I said ramps.  More on ramps coming up, and fiddleheads, rhubarb, and green almonds.  It's spring!

who is killing the great turkeys of europe

The turkey white chili I made isn't really white chili -- because it isn't white.  Typically, white chili is this weird interzone between chili and cream of chicken soup -- chicken, beans, and chiles in a sour-cream-thickened creamy sauce.  It usually lacks the conventional chile con carne seasonings like cumin, but might have some oregano, maybe a pinch of cinnamon.

But I included those, so it's really an orange chili, I guess.  Simplest thing in the world: I tossed some chopped turkey thigh with a little flour and a little red chile pepper and then quickly browned it in turkey fat; added onion, garlic, salt, and smoked turkey stock; simmered for a while until tender, and then removed it from the heat and stirred in sour cream mixed with The Spice House's chile con carne seasoning.  Good, rich, hearty turkey chili.

I didn't cook it with the beans because I'm using black beans, and I didn't like the mental image I was getting from black beans cooked with sour cream.

wild bikini

How To Stuff A Turkey (or Chicken) Wing:

Proceeding without photographs, I'm afraid.  

The wing has three parts: the wingtip (the mostly meatless flappy bit the furthest distance from the chicken), the flat (the middle portion with two parallel bones), and the drum (the drumstick-shaped portion which attaches to the chicken).

My experience with turkey wing drums is not very positive.  They cook confit style okay, and are excellent for making stock, but the meat tends to be tough -- which is true of turkey wings in general, compared to chicken wings -- and is inclined to drying out.  Thankfully, they aren't needed for stuffed wings.  Do something else with them.  And use the wingtips for stock -- they're rich in collagen and extractable flavor.

So now we've got the flats.  And you gotta get the bones out of there, see.

Imagine the flat in front of you on the cutting board, horizontally.  Using a heavy cleaver if possible, you want to chop the ends off.  Doing this will remove the joints that connect the two parallel bones.  At that point, you can slowly run your fingers -- or the point of a paring knife -- along each bone, pushing the meat away from it so you can pull the bone out.

Now, while this can be a bit labor-intensive with turkey wings, it is a serious pain in the ass with chicken wings, and by the time you have enough de-boned wings for more than a couple people, your fingertips may be sore from pushing on sharp little bones.  It's a nuisance.  The nice thing about the turkey wings is that they're so much bigger that it takes fewer of them per portion.

Once you have the bones out, you want to wash the flat, because it's very possible that the cleaver left little bone fragments.

NOW, you can stuff the flat with something.  I used smoked grits mixed with pecorino romano.  It doesn't take much stuffing, and I don't think you want to use cheese by itself, since these need to cook for about half an hour.  Sausage would be another good option.

how do you solve a problem like three turkeys

Turkey stock: carcasses and wing tips simmered for 24 hours in the lobster pot, at which point I strained it and brought it back to a simmer with turnips, carrots, celery, and onions.  This is nice, nice stock.

Turkey "gai kaprao": breast and thigh meat ground up and sauteed with prepackaged Thai holy basil sauce (chiles, Thai holy basil, soy sauce, garlic); because I had a pound of meat and the sauce was for half a pound, I stretched it with culantro and oyster sauce.  So not only is this not really gai -- chicken -- but it's not really kaprao either.  Same basic idea, though.

Hot wings: I had two turkey wing drumettes for dinner last night, cooked confit style and then tossed with Buffalo wing sauce and served with a little blue cheese on the side.

Turkey pot pie: chunks of white meat, roasted carrots and celery, reduced stock and a little cream, baked in a pie crust.

Smoked turkey stock: the other four turkey wing drumettes, along with the popes' noses, were smoked for hours and are simmering in the crockpot.

I also froze about 2 1/2 pounds of breast meat.  Tomorrow there's white chili and stuffed turkey wings.

Gonna have leftovers for quite a while.  I avoided turkey soup specifically because making the soup is always one of my Thanksgiving duties when I'm up here in NH, so there'll be plenty of that anyway.

No photos cause I'm out of batteries; maybe some of the stuffed wings, which are a little tricksome, if I can find some in a drawer somewhere.

I'm not gonna lie to you. This is gonna get kinda weird.

First: I'm watching Eric Ripert on Charlie Rose while eating lunch, and although it's not a very good interview, it reminded me to mention Ripert's PBS show, Avec Eric.  I don't like very much food television.  Most of it is either too recipe-oriented, too voyeuristic/foodpornish, or just straight-up reality show bullshit.  (I am addicted to Top Chef, but it took me four seasons to be talked into watching it.)  But Avec Eric is great stuff.  Worth finding.

Second: this post features more free stuff for me: dried wild mushrooms from Marx Foods.  Like I said, I'll always point out when I'm using free things.  I'll have a post specifically about the mushrooms later, though the short version is that after trying them in various ways, I think soup is far and away the best use for them.  But they did make a nice gravy here.

Third: I bought three turkeys.

"Bill," you're asking, "what the hell? How many Thanksgivings does one man need?"

None of these turkeys is my Thanksgiving turkey.  They're three turkeys ABOVE AND BEYOND Thanksgiving.

See, here's the deal.  I'm at the supermarket with a few bucks, I'm picking up some Pepsi Throwback and some pretzels, and I see the frozen turkeys.  Forty cents a pound.  Forty cents.  You know how much the cheapest chicken in the store is?  Three times that.  You know how much the ground beef is?  Twice as much as the chicken.  Forty cents a pound.  That's cheaper than soup bones.  You could drop the turkey in a lobster pot, simmer it all day, and throw it out -- keeping only the broth -- and you've still saved money.

Basically, I would be an irresponsible asshole if I didn't buy a bunch of turkeys.

So for twenty dollars, I got three turkeys, a blue bag of Pepperidge Farm stuffing mix, and a pound of Jimmy Dean sausage.  My family has always made Pepperidge Farm stuffing, with sausage.  Even when I shake it up and do my own Thanksgiving, in the ten years when I didn't live near my family, I still used Pepperidge Farm; that's just stuffing for me.  Traditionally, "my" stuffing has been Pepperidge Farm, shredded rabbit, lots of sage, and tart apples.  But the only place around here that I can buy rabbit is a store that I dislike enough that I don't want to give them my business.  So I compromised: Pepperidge Farm, sausage, tart apples (Roxbury Russet).

Why was I making stuffing if this isn't Thanksgiving?  Well, because turkey and stuffing is fucking awesome, and there's not going to be much leftover at Thanksgiving.  So I'll get my fix now, and let my brother have the leftovers next week.

But first I broke down all the turkeys -- cut off the leg quarters and the wings, sliced the meat off the breasts.  I have no need to roast a whole turkey -- I'm going to do all sorts of OTHER things with the turkey parts.  I used one of the carcasses as a stuffing roasting vessel -- packing the stuffing into it, roasting it until the stuffing was cooked, and then cleaning the carcass off and tossing it into the stockpot with the other two and the wingtips.

The thighs?  I used three of those to make turkey confit, cooking them at a low-temp covered in duck fat for hours.

After roasting the three turkey carcasses, I had plenty of fond in the pan, so that became my gravy.  I cooked a little flour in the drippings, deglazed the pan with one part apple cider to four parts turkey stock, and cooked it down until thick, with a healthy pinch of salt and a handful of Marx's dried mushrooms (chanterelles and oysters) ground up in the Cuisinart.

So that's our first (rather out of focus) meal from those turkeys: turkey confit, apple/sausage stuffing, mashed potatoes, and wild mushroom cider gravy:

The mushrooms add a nice, nice note to the traditional sage-and-apple flavors of the rest of the food.  Very satisfying.