A Traditional Turkey Day

As a public service, here are the recipes for My Traditional Turkey Dinner: Herb-Brined Turkey, Chestnut-Rice-Rye Stuffing, Roasted-Garlic Gravy, and Two-Cranberry Sauce with Grand Marnier.

In order of preparation:

1. Stock

6 lb turkey parts such as backs, necks, wings, drumsticks, or thighs
3 medium yellow onions, left unpeeled, then trimmedand halved
3 celery ribs*, cut into 2-inch lengths
3 carrots, quartered
6 fresh parsley stems (without leaves)
1 Turkish or 1/2 California bay leaf
10 black peppercorns
5 qt cold water
1 1/2 teaspoons salt

Preheat oven to 500°F, put rack on lowest level. Roast turkey parts in large ungreased roasting pan, starting skin sides down and turning once, until golden brown, 30 to 45 minutes. Transfer to stockpot with tongs, then roast vegetables in fat rendered from turkey, onions cut sides down first, stirring halfway through roasting, until golden, 10 to 20 minutes total, and then add vegetables to pot. Deglaze roasting pan with 2 cups water. Pour pan juices into stockpot with rest of water and remaining ingredients and bring to a boil over high heat, skimming froth as necessary. Reduce heat and gently simmer, partially covered, 3 hours.

Remove pot from heat and cool stock to room temperature, uncovered, about 1 hour. Pour stock through a large fine-mesh sieve into a large bowl and discard solids. Measure stock: If there is more than 10 cups, boil in cleaned pot until reduced; if there is less, add water.

Cool stock and remove fat.

2. Brine:

12-16 lb turkey
3/4-1 1/2 c salt
3 gals water
1/2 cup whole black peppercorns
1/3 cup fresh thyme sprigs
1/3 cup fresh marjoram sprigs
1/3 cup fresh sage sprigs
12 Turkish bay leaves

Clean turkey, cut off tail and reserve, along with neck. Feed rest of giblets to cat if he cares for them.

Put a turkey-sized oven bag in a large cooler, then place the turkey in the bag. Pour in the brine and seal tightly. Place ice over and around turkey, close the lid tightly, and let it brine 8 to 10 hours, adding ice periodically to keep temperature at 40° or below.

3. Stuffing

2 cups rice (brown or white)
bay leaf
fresh or dried thyme
fresh or dried sage
1/4 c. unsalted butter
3 medium onions, chopped medium
3 stalks celery plus all the leafy bits from the bunch of celery*, chopped
3 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and chopped
1 14-oz jar cooked peeled chestnuts (or boil or roast your own, but these are *well* worth the money)
1 big round Knackebrod wheel (or equivalent in other rye crackers), about 4 oz.
white wine

Cook the rice with the bay leaf, 3-4 sprigs of thyme, and 3-4 big leaves of sage.

Melt the butter in a frying pan and saute the onions and celery until the onions are translucent.

Put the rice in a big mixing bowl (or your largest salad bowl) and add the onions & celery with their butter and the eggs. Crumble in the chestnuts and Knackebrod. Crumble in thyme & sage to taste. Mix together with the hands. Taste the stuffing and add pepper if you like, but not salt -- it will get salt from the brined turkey. Moisten with white wine until it hold together nicely.

4. Turkey

Turkey, above
Stock, above
Stuffing, above
1/4 c unsalted butter, softened
1/4 cup mixed herbs, chopped: thyme, sage, parsley, winter savory
8 large cloves garlic, unpeeled
white wine
1/4 c. flour

Preheat oven to 425°F. Mash herbs into the butter.

Take the turkey out of the brine and wipe off the herbs. Wipe out the inside with paper towels, but don't obsess over getting out all the herbs & pepper. Dry off the outside with paper towels as best you can.

Loosen the skin over the breast with your hands and smear herb butter inside. Wipe your buttery hands off all over the turkey. Tuck the legs into their holder, tie or tuck up the wings. Stuff the small (head end) hollow and tuck or sew the skin flap over it. Stuff the large hollow (tail end).

Put turkey on rack over roasting pan, put in oven on lowest level, and immediately turn the oven down to 350°F. Put the remaining stuffing in a casserole and lay the neck & tail on top. Set it aside to cook after the turkey is out of the oven (because you only have one small oven).

Roast the turkey 30-45 minutes, pour a cup of stock over. Roast 30 minutes, pour over another cup of stock. After another 30 minutes, baste turkey with pan drippings. Continue to baste at 1/2 hour intervals until done.

When you figure you have maybe 30-45 minutes left (depending on size of turkey), lightly oil the garlic, wrap it all up in aluminum foil, and put it in the oven next to the turkey.

When the thermometer says the turkey is done, take turkey, pan and garlic out of the oven. Pour a cup of stock into the casserole dish of extra stuffing, put it in the oven, and turn the oven up to about 400°F. Put the turkey on the carving board to cool down. At some point while you're making the gravy you'll need to turn the neck & tail over so their greasy tastiness gets into the stuffing.

Pour off the drippings from the pan into a measuring cup so the grease rises to the top. Deglaze the pan (=heat up with liquid to scrape up tasty bits) with 1/2 c white wine or whatever you need.

Squeeze the roasted garlics out of their skins into a medium saucepan. Add 1/4 c. flour and 1/4 c grease (from the drippings) and mash the garlic into the flour and grease over medium-high heat. After everything is nicely blended, mix in the wine & deglazed goodies from the roasting pan. Pour or scoop the extra grease out of the cup of drippings, and slowly add them to the pan. When the mixture thickens up, add two cups of turkey stock. Let it thicken, then add another 2 cups. Thicken again, another 2 cups stock. Taste for salt & pepper.

Make someone else carve the turkey.

Take the stuffing that comes out of the turkey and add it to the stuffing in the casserole, or put them together in a large bowl, mixing the two lots of stuffing together for uniform tastiness.

For extra credit:

A. My cranberry sauce

2 bags of fresh cranberries, picked over
1 bag dried cranberries
orange juice
2 cinnamon sticks
4 whole cloves
4 whole allspice
about 1/4 c brown sugar
1-2 tablespoons Grand Marnier (or other orange liqueur)

Put the fresh and dried cranberries in large saucepan, add orange juice to barely cover (amount will depend on how many cranberries were bad). Add spices (reduce amount if lots of the cranberries were duds) and brown sugar. Cook over medium-high heat until most of the fresh crans have burst -- about 15 minutes. Taste, and add more sugar if necessary. Take sauce off heat, put into bowl, and add Grand Marnier to taste. Chill.

The herb brining comes from this Epicurious recipe, the herb butter from this one, the stuffing was invented by my mother (who finds traditional bread stuffings too gluey and greasy), the gravy and cranberry sauce are basically my own inventions -- insofar as anything in a traditional meal counts as any one person's invention.

*this year I used the tops from celeriac (part of our CSA farm share), instead of celery.

CSA Food: Lettuce Pray

I think I'm going to try to do a weekly post on, "what I got from my CSA this week and how I cook it". One of the things about a CSA is that it is *seasonal* -- you only get what's ripe this week, and you often get a *lot* of it. I'm glad to more of my flisties eating locally, so I figure I'll share some of my experience -- we've been in this CSA for maybe 15 years.

This week, it's lettuce. Four heads, each about as large as your head -- so each is maybe twice the size of what you'd get in the store, because so little is lost in transport. This week we got two red-leaf and two green leaf. We pick up on Tuesdays, so Tuesday dinner during lettuce season is generally this meal. We've had it twice this week so far, not counting leftovers for lunch.

All measurements are approximate.

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Thai Beef or Chicken Salad
serves 4-6

fresh ginger, approx. 1 inch cube, cut into a couple of pieces
an equal quantity of fresh garlic
4 Tbl (1/4 c) soy sauce
4 Tbl (1/4 c) corn oil (cheaper) or peanut oil (tastier)
8 Tbl (1/2 c) lime juice -- I use Nellie & Joe's
2 tsp coriander seed, ground *or* about 1/4 c fresh cilantro, chopped
1-2 lb beef (London broil is good) or chicken breast
another 2-4 Tbl oil
at least 1/2 head of lettuce, washed, then chopped or ripped into bite-sized pieces
rice

Mince the garlic & ginger by whirling them in the food processor together. Add ground coriander (if you don't have cilantro), soy sauce, 1/4c oil, lime juice. Whirl together.

If using beef, marinate in lime mixture in fridge for at least 2 hours, more if beef looks tough. If using chicken, cut it into strips and marinate for only the time it takes your rice to cook.

When the rice has about 15 minutes to go (beef) or 5 minutes to go (chicken), heat the remaining 2-4 Tbl oil in the big frypan. When it's hot, take the meat out of the marinade, scraping the bits of garlic & ginger back into the bowl. Saute the meat until it's cooked -- for the chicken, just a few minutes of stir-frying. For the beef, cook until brown on both sides, then reduce heat (and maybe cover pan if needed) and cook to desired doneness.

Take the meat out of the pan and put it on a plate (chicken) or chopping board (beef).

Pour the remaining marinade into the pan with the oil & tasty bits from cooking the meat, and boil for 3 minutes or so, scraping up any bits.

Have the lettuce in a large to very large glass or stainless steel bowl. Pour a good amount of the hot marinade over the lettuce and toss it so that the greens wilt slightly. Then add the fresh chopped cilantro (if using) and toss again. Put any remaining marinade in a gravy boat or measuring cup to add ad lib.

Cut the beef into strips.

Serve: a pile of rice, either next to or covered with lettuce, meat on top, extra sauce dribbled onto the rice. There will be sauce in the bottom of the salad bowl, pour that on your rice, too. Some people will want hot sauce or peppers, others won't.

This is an exceptionally tasty meal, and one of my family's favorites.

Heads They Win; Farming

I left a comment at echidne of the snakes:

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from What’s $34 Billion on Wall Street? [NYT, Jan 27 '08]

In any other industry, Mr. Kim and Mr. Maheras would be pariahs. But in the looking-glass world of Wall Street, they — and others like them — are hot properties. The two executives are well on their way to reviving their careers, even as global markets shudder at the prospect that Merrill and Citigroup may report further subprime losses in the coming months.

... The quick comebacks of these executives stand in stark contrast to the plight of the hundreds of investment bankers who have received pink slips in the last two weeks. They also illuminate a peculiar aspect of Wall Street’s own version of a class divide.

... To some extent, it is personal: Mr. Kim and Mr. Maheras have a web of relationships with Wall Street’s top executives.

I don't see anything "peculiar" about this class divide at all. This is what a ruling class looks like: if you're on the inside, your friends help each other loot & pillage when times are good -- and cut back to just looting when times are bad.

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also posted at Making Light, Heads they win, tails we lose. With much other discussion:

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It looks like one of the oldest games of all: It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know. The complete decoupling of risk and reward is not a bug in this game, it's a *feature*. For the winners, at least.

I'm not sure what kind of -cracy this is. Plutocracy? Aristocracy? BigGuycracy? In any event, it's not "a peculiar version of a class divide", it's the same old class divide made especially stark.

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albatross @ 215:
I think you'd find it hard to make an argument for subsidizing small farmers (being pushed out of the market by economic forces) that didn't also apply to all kinds of other businesses

The traditional argument is that food is special because everyone needs food to *live*, so (a) monopolies are especially dangerous, and (b) letting the supply be controlled by other countries is especially dangerous.

In the case of France, at least, one can see an additional consequence of small-farm supports: French food. Most food ingredients just aren't as tasty when they've been mass-produced and travelled hundreds or thousands of miles. To get French food, you need local ingredients, and that's part of what French agricultural policy has gotten them.

Of course, this is doubly untrue in the US, where (a) people historically don't care how the food tastes, and (b) ag policy supports the food that travels best (grains, sugar, butter). But the local harvest idea really does mean something.

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PJ Evans @219:

One of the great benefits of Community Supported Agriculture is that the farmer gets the money in the spring, when ze needs it, and then the risk that a particular crop will fail gets spread across all the members, not just dumped on the farmer. I've been a CSA member for about 15 years, and you really get an old-fashioned attitude toward the weather -- it's *personal* when an early frost means no more basil, or too much rain at the wrong time means no carrots this year.

I strongly recommend this directory to find a CSA near you -- though shares are mostly gone for the 2008 season as the popularity of "eating locally" increases.

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Greg @ 234:

It really, really depends on what they're farming and where. I'm not far from Princeton, NJ, and I know a number of people who have successfully gone into "boutique" farming from a non-farm background. The CSA has interns and apprentices every year. A bunch of my middle-schoolers friends are in 4H, just like the farm kids were when I was growing up -- but these aren't farm kids, they're not born into farming -- they're learning it just as the kids on the robotics team are learning engineering, or the kids in woodworking classes are learning that trade.

It's definitely the organic farmers who are the real cutting edge, here: they're developing a model of farming as a *career*, not a birth right (or curse).

As PJ says, it works for unprocessed fruits & veg, and for high-value items like organic dairy products and wine. And it also works here because the land is so valuable that farming *has* to concentrate on high-value items -- though there's some talk about people experimenting with field corn this year.

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Koske @ 261:

My thinking is that many of these O/N/L businesses and products come closer to reflecting the actual costs of the food

That is certainly my observation. The organic vegetables I get from my CSA actually cost no more in $$ than buying the same thing in "non-organic" form at the grocery store, and are *much* cheaper than buying the organic equivalent at the natural food store.

Basically, I do not spend more money by getting food from the CSA, but the quality is enormously higher. They're not just tomatoes, they're a religious experience.

albatross @260:
As I said above, farming is not-just-a-business because we need food to *live*, in way that we don't need hardware stores.

I live literally next door to the CSA where I get my food. It is enormously easier for me to put up with the local externalities -- tractor noise at odd hours, some pretty organic smells from time to time -- because I know that I'm not living next to a mere business of which I happen to be a customer, but a source of my physical existence. Even so, I wouldn't be nearly as tolerant of a non-organic farm, because the externality of breathing pesticides & herbicides would be too high.

Greg @236:

One thing about "boutique" farms is that, to be viable, they need to grow an enormously greater range of crops than the farms you grew up with probably did. The CSA farm (less than 100 acres) where I get my veg grows 40 different crops, each in multiple varieties (there must be 30+ different kinds each of tomatoes and peppers). The orchard (200 acres) where I get most of my fruit grows 30 varieties each of apples and peaches, along with 20 other crops.

This is clearly enormously inefficient by agribusiness standards -- but it buffers the farmers against the random factors that always make agriculture precarious. That buffering is what agricultural subsidies are supposed to be *for*, so in many ways I'm paying the subsidies for my food upfront -- by getting only what they are able to grow despite their inefficiency.

The way I get my food has an "anti-capitalist" feel, because it involves actual human relationships, not just the exchange of money. But this discussion has made me see that a lot of what we see as part of capitalism is passing the buck on externalities. What I'm experiencing is not really romanticism, it's "not escaping the externalities".