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.

boom, roasted

I know what I'll do with that squash, I said. I'll make a soup with cumin in it.

Everything else grew out of that, using stuff I happened to have in the house.

Roasted squash soup with cumin and lime; with brown butter peanuts and goat cheese.

I chopped the squash into pieces that would fit in the pan and roasted them at 375 for several hours - you can roast a squash in about an hour, I just wanted bigger, deeper flavor.


Meanwhile I used my kitchen torch to roast some red chiles.



I scooped the roasted squash out of the shells and pureed it with the chiles, the juice of two limes, a good deal of cumin, a tablespoon of red miso, two cloves of black garlic, a teaspoon or so of "black mint" (use cilantro or whatever other herb you like), and a bit of hot water, and strained it. The seasonings were picked partly because they go well with cumin, and partly for the earthy umami flavor they contribute.

The strained soup was topped with hoja santa goat cheese and brown butter peanuts (heat butter until it starts to brown, add Trader Joe's blistered peanuts and stir until you smell peanut).



You can see the soup clinging to the tortilla chip in the upper left.

Spicy, warm, not overwhelmingly rich or monochromatically earthy thanks to the lime juice.

sandwich creamery

While we were up at the lake, we made the journey out to Sandwich Creamery, which makes ice cream, sorbet, and cheese, and has a little store on-site that's open to the public. When I say little, I mean little: there's a cooler of cheese (only cheddar and fresh cheese when we went) and organic eggs, a freezer of ice cream and sorbet, and a table of amazing sourdough bread. No staff, cash only - you put paper money in one slot and coins in another, and a video camera enforces your honesty.

The Creamery is kind of in the middle of nowhere.



... no, seriously:


You drive through the center of Sandwich - which was at the time hosting the Sandwich Fair - and then down a country road, turning off that country road onto another country road (marked by the sign above), then another country road, then another. The winding dirt roads reminded me of Hollis when I was a kid, before everything was paved and they put a traffic light in.



There were a few people eating ice cream at the tables when we got there, but they'd left before I took photos.


The little shack on the left is the part open to the public:


Cooler of cheese and eggs.


Bread. I apparently forgot to take a photo of the ice cream! We picked up three small containers of ice cream (each about two small servings): cranberry, cinnamon, and "tipsy turtle," which tasted like chocolate, amaretto, and pecans. All excellent, as always.


Like most cheesemakers these days, Sandwich Creamery buys its milk from other farmers, so there are no cows there - we did see sheep, pigs, and chickens.