Category — Recipes

The gnocchi post really hit a nerve – apparently the Internet loves gnocchi!  So, in celebration of our shared adoration of this versatile dish, today I am announcing the Best Food Blog Ever Gnocchi Challenge.

The rules, much like gnocchi, are simple: over the next two weeks, develop a gnocchi recipe and post it to your own blog during the week of May 5th, and send me a link to it at ddl(at)bestfoodblogever.com.  Over the weekend of May 11-12, I will post the results of the Gnocchi Challenge here, with links to all of your recipes.  With any luck, and a good level of participation, we’ll be able to collect a goldmine of gnocchi recipes in one spot.

Your gnocchi recipe can be as simple or as complex as you wish, and you can use any combination of flour, potato, and ricotta as you please.  You should strive to keep your sauces simple – the showcase of your Gnocchi Challenge recipe should be the gnocchi themselves.

Now go crazy with your gnocchi-making self.

(Google Reader may not display this – looking for a fix, but, for now, please click through to watch!)
Best Food Blog Ever S01E01 from DDL on Vimeo.

I’ve never made gnocchi before. I’ve had the dish in restaurants, seen recipes for it while reading through my cookbook collection, and even bought them frozen from Talula’s Table. It’s not that I regarded the dish as overly complicated, it’s just that I’ve never really thought about making the dish at all. So, I was somewhat surprised, when I really put my mind to making gnocchi, to find that they’re one of the simplest, yet most versatile, dishes that one could conjure up in the kitchen.

Trying my hand at gnocchi for the first time, I wanted to keep things as straightforward as possible. When going down the gnocchi path, you have three options – flour, potatoes, or ricotta. I chose ricotta based on what we had on hand that day, and because ricotta gnocchi also seem to be the easiest to assemble, if you have access to the right equipment. Potato gnocchi require potatoes to be cooked, pressed or mashed, then cooled before proceeding. Flour-based gnocchi are typically rolled out into thin ropes, cut, then boiled. By comparison, ricotta gnocchi can be whipped up in one bowl using a hand mixer in less than five minutes. If this recipe were going to fail, I’d want to get there sooner rather than later.

The gnocchi mixture is essentially ricotta cheese (15 oz) blended with eggs (3), with flour (1 cup) added to give it body. I had mentioned that you need the right equipment to make ricotta gnocchi – since the batter is far looser than flour-based gnocchi, it can’t be rolled out and cut by hand. Instead, you use a pastry bag, or something similar, to pipe small lengths of gnocchi batter directly over boiling water. It seems to be a bit faster than the rolling-cutting-shaping routine of flour-based gnocchi, but you’ll have to wait until I tackle those before I can weigh in with an honest opinion. I used a mechanical pastry bag for this recipe, and it worked beautifully. Pressing the plunger against my chest, I extruded small lengths of batter through the tip (recalling early childhood experiments with Play Doh), using a knife to sever the dough into the roiling, salted water below. Each batch made about 30 gnocchi, which took about five minutes to cook (like most boiled things, they are done when they float to the top), and as each batch was done, I fished them out using a large Chinese bird’s nest scoop, placing the gnocchi on a plate lined with parchment paper.

After all of the gnocchi had been boiled, I melted some butter in a nonstick pan and fried them up in batches, giving them a quick toss to make sure they had all browned evenly. Accompanied by a quick tomato sauce and a grating of parmesan, these light and airy ricotta pillows turned out to be a substantial, inexpensive meal. You could even freeze the gnocchi after boiling them, and they become quick dinners that can be sauteed, sauced, and on the table in less than 30 minutes.

My gnocchi eyes have been opened, to say the least. This was a very basic test recipe – some obvious additions would be parsley and chopped spinach. I can’t wait to try out different compositions and flavor components (sweet potato and sage come to mind), and you’ll see the results right here, every time.

I’ve lucked into one of the best situations, food-wise, that one could possibly have stumbled upon – my neighbor loves to fish, but he and his wife don’t cook on a regular basis, and even if he did cook the fish, I don’t think she’s at all interested in eating it.

A few weeks ago, mere hours after getting his Pennsylvania fishing license for the season, my neighbor called me.  “Want some fish?” he said.  He has a knack for wading into water and, ten minutes later, emerging with the catch of the day.

This brought up something of a dilemma for me.  For one thing, I was just about to put dinner on the table, so the fish would have to be refrigerated for at least a day.  More importantly, I had never cleaned a fish before – in fact, I had never even handled any type of whole fish in the kitchen.  For me, fish is something that comes cleaned and filleted and wrapped in butcher’s paper from the guy behind the seafood counter.

Suffice it to say, then, that the prospect of decapitating and gutting a fish was somewhat intimidating – but the fish were out of the water, and were going to go to waste unless I agreed to take them off of my neighbor’s hands.  With some measure of reluctance, I told my neighbor to come on over, and in ten minutes he was standing in my kitchen with a plastic grocery bag filled with four trout.

He said he would teach me how to clean fish, and that it wasn’t hard to do.  You know what?  He was right.  Sure, it’s messy, but no more messy than dealing with the gizzards from a chicken or turkey.

Dinner was placed in a holding pattern while, at his instruction, I lined the kitchen island with a double layer of newspaper.  I had not expected the fresh fish to be so slippery, almost slimy – it is the antithesis of what everyone comes to expect from kitchen ingredients, since in every other instance, a slimy ingredient is a sure indication of spoilage and rot.  But here, it meant that the fish were the freshest you could possibly hope for.  The newspaper helps to keep the fish in place, more so than a cutting board would, and you’ll appreciate the absorption that it provides when the knives come out.

I know that I haven’t sharpened my knives in a while, and nothing demonstrates the need for a sharp blade more than cleaning fish.  Holding each trout firmly in one hand, I used my other hand to cut the heads off – something that ideally should only take one or two swipes, but with a dull knife can be near impossible – it took me a couple of whacks, but wasn’t an overly frustrating ordeal.  Flipping each fish over, I removed the tails in a similar fashion.  For the squeamish, I can say that the trout did not bleed as much as I would have expected – on the other hand, you should also know that, unlike supermarket chickens, their innards are not neatly held in a little paper bag (but, on the other other hand, they don’t have very many innards, so it’s not like you’re cutting open a tauntaun with a lightsaber).  A turn of the blade, and each trout was butterflied – emptied and rinsed thoroughly under cool running water in the sink.  At this point, they were ready to be placed into a plastic bag and refrigerated.

Fast forward to the next day.  Since the fish were so fresh, I wanted a very simple preparation that would highlight the trout in its purest form.  I decided to steam them with some ginger, garlic, and soy – a preparation that almost doesn’t even need a recipe, but I’ll mock one up here for you off of the top of my head.

Steamed Trout with Ginger, Garlic, and Soy

Trout, cleaned
1 knob of ginger, peeled, sliced thinly
2 cloves of garlic, peeled, sliced thinly
2 Tbs white wine mixed with 2 Tbs soy sauce and 1 Tbs sesame oil
Scallions, chopped
Salt and pepper

Set some water in a pot over high heat.  Get your steamer insert out and keep it nearby.  Rinse the trout thoroughly under cool running water.

Lay each trout open on a clean working surface, and sprinkle with salt and freshly ground pepper.

Layer the ginger, garlic, and chopped scallions inside of each trout, and spoon the wine/soy mixture over all of that.  Fold the trout closed to make a packet and place into the steamer insert.

When the water is at a full boil, place the steamer insert into the pot, cover, and steam the fish for fifteen minutes.

How to Eat Whole Fish

Yes, steamed fish deserves a “How to Eat” section in the recipe, because if you attack any kind of whole fish willy nilly with a fork, you’ll end up with a mouthful of tiny fish bones and come away with a generally unpleasant experience.  This is probably why more people don’t eat whole fish.

Once you have your fish on a plate, use your fork to gently pull and scrape away the skin, leaving only the delicate white flesh (don’t flip it over until you’ve eaten the top half).

Orient the fish so that the spine is on your left, tail end pointing away from you.  On the left side, you’ll find a nice, thick ribbon of meat running the length of the fish.  Use your fork to gently pry the fish up and away from the bone – this is the easiest meat to extract.  You can either choose to eat this now or continue boning.

Now, from the center of the fish, going to the right-most edge (the belly) are the very fine bones that make up the fish skeletal structure.  Use your fork or a spoon to gently scrape the flesh from left to right, which should encourage the meat to slide along the axis of the bones and right onto your plate.

When you’re done, just flip the fish over and repeat for the other side.

It begins, as many of our dinners do, with chicken.  We eat a lot of chicken because it’s versatile, affordable, and freezes well – unlike beef, which never emerges from the freezer in quite the same condition as it had when it first went in, and pork, which is affordable but requires some mental effort to determine a worthy preparation.  Chicken, by comparison, comes in neat little single serving thighs or breasts, can be sauteed quickly in a bit of olive oil, and ka-chow, there’s a meal on the table.

That being said, we were still getting a little fatigued from chicken, chicken, chicken – but that’s all we had on hand at home.  That, and a bunch of cilantro left over from our weekend party.  So I cast my net into the waters of the world wide web, did a search for ‘chicken and cilantro’, and I found this recipe.

Coming out of Epicurious.com, they call it ‘Chicken and Cilantro Bites’, but as I formed them and fried them up, the term ‘chicken nuggets’ kept coming to mind, so that’s what I’ve come to rename them.  Chinese Chicken Nuggets!

There’s a lot to like about this recipe.  For one thing, it gave me a chance to break out my Kitchenaid grinder attachment, which I bought last year, used once to grind meat for burgers, which then turned into miserable failures – I had not trimmed the beef, and gristle had clogged the holes of the grinder, resulting in burgers that were dense and flavorless.  Intimidated by that incident, I put the grinder attachment away and have not touched it since.  But this recipe, which calls for a pound of ground chicken, was perfectly served by the Kitchenaid, which produced a nice mound of ground poultry in a matter of minutes.  I used chicken thighs which I had deboned and stripped of skin, but this preparation could just as easily be made with boneless, skinless thighs, or just a purchased package of ground chicken, if it’s available at your market.  The most surprising aspect of this dish is how light and airy the nuggets turn out, despite being made with the heavier, fattier dark meat.

This recipe also demonstrates how effective cornstarch can be as a coating for pan-fried foods.  I had always used flour, or dried bread crumbs, or panko as my coating of choice – but the cornstarch lends an airiness to the finished product that just cannot be achieved by any other means.  It’s important to roll the chicken lightly in the cornstarch, passing the poultry from hand to hand, as if you were juggling.  Any firmer handling would cause the cornstarch to be incorporated into the chicken, instead of coating it.

I made a few departures from the original dish, most notably in the preparation steps.  Epicurious specifies that the chicken should not be white meat – since I used thighs, I can’t speak to using white meat, but I don’t see the recipe failing outright if you want to try it.  Also, because I used dark meat, and because chicken needs to be completely cooked, I followed up the pan frying with a stint in a low oven for 20 minutes, just to be safe.

Chinese Chicken Nuggets

1 lb ground chicken
1 large egg, beaten
1/2 cup finely chopped fresh cilantro
2 scallions, finely chopped
2 teaspoons Asian sesame oil
1 teaspoon salt
cornstarch

Combine the egg, cilantro, scallions, sesame oil, and salt in a mixing bowl.  Add the chicken and mix thoroughly using a rubber spatula or fork.

The mixture, I will warn you, will be very loose.  Get a plate, wet your hands, and form the mixture into nuggets, about an inch or so in diameter (they will actually end up being more oval-ish than round).  When you’ve run out of room on the plate, wash your hands thoroughly with soap and hot water, and dry them (you’ll probably get through all of the chicken in two batches).

Set a large frying pan over medium high heat and coat it with about 1/4 cup of vegetable or canola oil.  Preheat the oven to 250 degrees.  Set aside a large cookie sheet with a rack on it.

Spread a sheet of parchment paper or aluminum foil on your workspace.  Pour a small mound of cornstarch onto a plate or wide bowl.  Using your fingers, scrape up a nugget of chicken and drop it into the cornstarch, then sprinkle, toss, and flip the nugget gently until it’s coated, then place it onto the parchment/foil.  Repeat for the other nuggets, working quickly before the prepared ones get too soggy.

Using a pair of tongs and a gentle touch, pick up each coated nugget and place it into the hot oil, filling the pan with as many nuggets as you can comfortably fit without crowding them.  After five minutes, use the tongs to turn each nugget over, frying for another five minutes and then rotating each one so that you achieve fairly even browning on all sides.  As each batch is done, transfer the nuggets to the cookie sheet.

When all of the nuggets have been fried, place them into the oven for 20 minutes.  Serve with soy sauce, chinese black vinegar, or peanut sauce.

I don’t think I’ve tried to make lasagna once in the past ten years, if not more.  What I can tell you is this – at some point since moving into our house, I did pick up a box of lasagna that has sat in our pantry ever since.  It’s on a shelf with the other, more convenient forms of pasta, like fettucine and linguini, but whenever I’m in a pasta-making mood, my hand naturally gravitates away from the lasagna.  I guess I’ve always thought of lasagna as such a high production dish to make, what with the boiling of the noodles, the cooling, the assembly of not only the lasagna itself but also all of the other components, then the baking – it all seemed to be antithetical to the quick and easy boil-sauce-serve nature that is the hallmark of pasta dishes.

I was close to throwing away the ancient box of lasagna (it was taking up a lot of room) when I happened upon the ideal lasagna-making environment – a lazy Sunday, with nowhere to go and nothing to do, with the imminent threat of a snowstorm that would surely ground us for the entire day on Monday.  So, I dug out the box of lasagna, picked up the rest of the ingredients, and set out to overcome my trepidation about this classic casserole.

Now, I’m not sure why I was even hesitant about making lasagna in the first place.  I mean, I spent one dinner this past summer making fresh pasta, which is surely a bigger and more involved endeavor than working with dried sheets.  But I can tell you this – I am over my reluctance, and you can surely expect more lasagna variations to appear here in the near future.  Lasagna is freaking awesome.

This recipe is actually a mishmash of various recipes and preparations culled from pasta boxes, cookbooks, and the internet.  It also happens to be meatless, because I didn’t happen to have any suitable meats on hand.  You can basically break this particular lasagna recipe down into three components – the sauce, the ricotta filling, and the pasta.

You’ve seen the sauce here before.  Actually, part of the reason why I decided to make lasagna was because I needed to make a tomato sauce, and the reason why I was compelled to make a tomato sauce was because I recently realized that, thundersnow notwithstanding, the weather is starting to get gradually warmer, and I’ve been overly conservative about digging into my underground cache of wonderful canned tomatoes from last August.  So, to save you the trouble of bouncing from page to page on this site, I’ll throw together a quick recipe here for the tomato sauce.  It may vary from my original recipe because this is the dead of winter, so it uses dried herbs instead of fresh.

Basic Tomato Sauce

1 quart canned tomatoes (or use a 28oz can of crushed tomatoes, store bought)
Bunch of garlic, peeled and minced (more or less to your liking, at least 4 cloves)
About a tablespoon of dried oregano
Half a tablespoon of dried thyme
Half of an onion, chopped
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
Tomato paste (optional)

Place the chopped garlic into a cold saucepan and coat liberally with olive oil, then place over medium heat.  Once the oil warms and the garlic begins to sizzle, give it a few stirs now and then, making sure not to burn the garlic.  Once the garlic is lightly golden, add the onion and stir occasionally until the onion has wilted and started to brown around the edges.  Add the dried herbs and let saute for about a minute.

Add the tomatoes and bring to a simmer.  Let the whole thing cook down, at least 20 minutes but probably longer is better, then season with salt and pepper.  Especially when you are making lasagna, it’s important to make sure that your sauce is not too watery, or it will make the overall dish soggy or overcooked.  In my case, I had packed this particular quart of tomatoes in water, so I needed to simmer the sauce until most of the water evaporated, and even then I added a little bit of tomato paste to make it thicken up.  When you are ready to assemble the lasagna, the sauce should have a very quick consistency, but take care to stir it often so that it does not stick and burn.

The other major component to lasagna is what I’ll call the white part.  I call it that because some recipes will use a bechamel sauce as the filling, which is made from flour, milk, and butter, while other recipes use ricotta cheese.  Since I wasn’t sure of my lasagna-crafting skills in the first place, and also because it was easier, I opted for ricotta.  While you could just pop open any tub of ricotta cheese and start dolloping away, I did find a few recipes that performed a few tricks on the ricotta filling before assembly, and I’ve adopted them here.

I like the idea of beating an egg or two into the ricotta, which helps it firm up as it cooks, and also the addition of a bit of nutmeg, which adds a hit of sweetness overall.  I had mentioned earlier that this was a vegetarian lasagna, so this is where I decided to add some thawed frozen spinach to the mix.  Parmesan is always a plus, but with the massive amounts of mozzarella, it’s not really necessary.

Ricotta Filling for Lasagna (Spinach Edition)

1 15 oz tub of ricotta cheese
1 egg, beaten
10oz package frozen chopped spinach, thawed and squeezed dry
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 cup of grated parmesan cheese (or grana padano, or romano)
Fresh ground pepper

Mix everything together until uniform and set aside.

This all leads us to the grand performance, the lasagna itself.  From this point on, anyone who’s made lasagna before will find this recipe quite familiar.

Spinach Lasagna from The Best Food Blog Ever

1 box dried lasagna noodles
Basic Tomato Sauce
Ricotta Filling for Lasagna (Spinach Edition)
1 small block of mozzarella cheese, grated

Bring a large pot of water to a boil and cook the lasagna noodles according to the directions on the package.  While the noodles are cooking, lay a large sheet of parchment paper on a work surface (kitchen island, kitchen table, counter – remember to lock the cat up) and get a bunch of paper towels ready.  When they are done cooking, drain the noodles, place them under running water, and lay each noodle down on the parchment, covering each layer of noodles with a paper towel before building a new layer.  Make sure the noodles don’t touch each other, or they’ll stick.  Noodles are done.  Set your oven to 375 degrees.

Take a 9 by 13 inch lasagna pan and give it a quick dose of Pam spray, or coat lightly with olive oil.  Using a ladle, coat the bottom of the lasagna pan with Basic Tomato Sauce, then place a layer of noodles over it.  Use a spoon to dollop some ricotta filling evening over the noodles, followed by a sprinkling of grated mozzarella.  Another layer of sauce, and start over again, ultimately ending with a mozzarella strata.  If you’ve got it, grate some parmesan over the whole thing.

Cover the lasagna with foil and place the pan on a cookie sheet or other large tray, to catch any drips.  Bake the lasagna for 45 minutes, then remove the foil and continue baking for another 15 (keep an eye on it – you want it to brown lightly but not burn).  Let the lasagna rest for about fifteen minutes before cutting and serving.

I stumbled across this photo while looking through my Picasa web album that serves as the host for all of the images on The Best Food Blog Ever.  I guess I uploaded it with the intention of writing about it and never did.  Since all I’ve seen for the better part of a week, when I looked out of my kitchen window, is not-melting-fast-enough piles of snow, I decided that it was time to write out-of-season again and try to pretend that we’re not weeks away from any true sense of spring.

In case this doesn’t look at all familiar, it is the dish from Pixar’s Ratatouille, which we’ve seen twice and absolutely love.  We had a dinner party planned, and I was inspired by the movie.  So, it was on one of those warm summer evenings last year that I got the crazy idea to try to replicate the titular dish from that movie.

The actual recipe that is represented here, and which appears in the movie, is Thomas Keller’s Confit Byaldi.  It’s a colorful mosaic of red, yellow, and orange peppers, tomatoes, Japanese eggplant, yellow squash, and green zucchini.

As would be expected, you spend the majority of your time in this recipe with the preparation and assembly – slicing all of the vegetables to an exacting thickness, then layering them in tight groups of seven colors in a spiral pattern in a roasting pan.  Beneath all of this is a simple tomato sauce accented with garlic, onion, and thyme, and the whole affair is liberally drizzled with a vinaigrette before being set into an oven for a couple of hours, then flashed under a broiler right before serving.

The result?  Sure, it’s pretty, but for the effort I probably wouldn’t attempt this dish again.  It takes quite a while to slice all of the vegetables (I used a truffle slicer, and even then it still took longer than expected), and in the end, the dish tastes exactly like its components – there’s no magical transformation, no ascension to some uber-level of otherworldly deliciousness, but then again Keller probably has access to better quality produce than I do.  It’s a great showcase for seasonal vegetables, to be sure, but you’d probably achieve the same overall taste with a quick chop, a saute in olive oil, and the addition of the same herb vinaigrette.

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from a Best Food Blog Ever reader who was interested in building a cookbook collection, and was soliciting my recommendations on the best titles to pick up.  It seemed like a simple question, but before I realized it, my reply had already reached four paragraphs and a deeper level of analysis than I ever would have deemed appropriate for the query.  Though I never have given much thought to the subject, it turns out that I actually do have a process – a method to my madness – and I’m sharing it with you today.

I’ve written about my cookbooks before, but never really discussed my library in detail.  As I would imagine is the case with any media archive, whether it’s books, music, or a certain movie genre, there are a handful of titles that serve to establish the foundation of your library.  These are your “desert island” titles, the books that you know, for certain, contain the core recipes that enable you to whip up almost any appetizer, side dish, main course, or dessert that you can envision.  Your library doesn’t need more than one or two foundation titles, as you’ll find that the ingredients and techniques for a basic recipe of, say, hummus, are not going to vary much – if you’re aiming for a traditional interpretation of hummus, that is.  Think of the recipes in your foundation titles as starting points that you can riff off of to come up with your own style.  My foundation titles are The Best Recipe, which I cherish because of their scientific approach to finding the optimal ingredients and methods for each dish, and The Joy of Cooking, which is encyclopedic in its scope, especially since they’ve recently updated with a new edition.  I may not completely agree with the preparation for a specific dish in The Joy of Cooking, but I know to a certainty that I am holding a baseline recipe in my hands.

After you’ve settled on your foundation titles, you want to begin exploring method-specific cookbooks, which I refer to as “Technique” titles.  Technique titles delve deeply into a specific topic like roasting, pressure cooking, slow cooking, baking, braising, or any other method that’s used in the kitchen.  By using these books, you’ll learn to identify the best methods of preparing something that you come across at the market – a nice piece of fish, a good cut of beef – and you’ll also prevent your repertoire from becoming boring.  Face it, there are not a lot of protein options in your local supermarket; it’s either chicken, pork, beef, or fish of some sort, and not all of those alternatives will be available on a given day.  If all you knew how to do was roast things in the oven, you and everyone that you cook for would quickly grow weary of roasted chicken, roast beef, roast pork, and roast fish.  Being able to prepare a single type of meat using several methods opens up choices, and it also makes for space economy when you’ve got other things going on in the kitchen.  If the oven is busy with a casserole or other side dish, for example, it becomes essential to know a few recipes that don’t need to use the oven.  I try to pick up as few Technique titles as possible, although sometimes new titles hit the shelves that represent a new “best” guide.  Some of my Technique titles include Roasting – A Simple Art, The Gourmet Slow Cooker, The Pressure Cooker Gourmet, and Splendid Soups.  I also tend to favor the Williams Sonoma Essentials series.

The last tier of cookbook titles that should be in your collection are ethnic classics, and this is where you need to be the most selective.  It’s important to note that when I say “ethnic” I am also referring to regional American cuisines, as well – southern cooking, Tex-Mex, and New England recipes come to mind.  There are many, many ethnic cookbooks on the market, and they all vary in their degree of authenticity.  Ideally, you will want to choose titles that truly convey a sense of a particular culture, beyond just the recipes of that culture’s cuisine.  Peruse the bargain bin of any chain bookstore and you’ll find dozens of Quick and Easy-type of cookbooks that promise to make you the next Martin Yan, Mario Batali, or Madhur Jaffrey.  But, if you really think about it, if you really wanted to cook like these chefs, you would just buy their own cookbooks.

Don’t shy away from an ethnic recipe because it contains ingredients that you haven’t heard of, or are otherwise hard to find.  Many times, an unfamiliar ingredient is the first step on a journey of discovery that will take you to ethnic markets and parts of the city that you would otherwise never know about.  As a last resort, there are sometimes substitutions that you can make (orange and lime juice for bitter oranges in Cuban cuisine comes to mind) that will enable you to experience the recipe in as near-completeness as possible.  Some of my most well-worn books for ethnic cuisine are The Breath of a Wok and The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen, A Taste of Old Cuba, and Lidia’s Family Table.  By flipping through any one of these titles, you’ll see that the authors go to great lengths to educate the reader on their own experiences growing up as part of that culture, and it makes you appreciate the dishes even more when you know a little more about them.

I love talking about this stuff, as you can tell.  If you have any questions, shoot them my way at ddl[at]bestfoodblogever.com.

If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that we all tend to take a lot of things for granted.  Nowhere is this more true than with fresh summer produce, especially when we’re looking at single-digit temperatures with wind chills in negative territory.  Now, in the dead post-holiday slump that is otherwise known as January, summer seems so painfully lost in time, no matter if you are looking ahead or recalling last year’s crop.

It was with an immense sense of victory, then, that I snuck into my stash of canned tomatoes last week.  Having raided the local farm last August, we binged on fresh tomato sandwiches until we thought we would burst, and I slipped the last, best specimens into eleven Mason jars that were shuffled into a dark corner of the basement.  At that time, I told myself that one dark, bitterly cold day, I would thank myself for doing this.

That day, and many more like it, are upon us now.  I needed a sharp reminder of summer, something to get me through until the thawing frost gives way to new spring growth.  I wanted something simple and straightforward, so I went back to an old kitchen staple – spaghetti with fresh tomato sauce.

I dashed out into the yard, the frozen blades of grass crunching under my feet, and quickly snipped a few sprigs of thyme and a branch of rosemary from the garden, which is holding up amazingly well given the weather.  Hurrying back inside, I grabbed a Mason jar of canned tomatoes off of the bookshelf that we keep in the basement.

Starting with more than a few cloves of chopped garlic, set into a pan of olive oil over low heat, I set to making a simple pan sauce.  As the oil warmed the garlic and grew fragrant, I stripped the leaves off of the thyme and rosemary, coarsely chopping them and throwing them into the pan.  Just as the garlic began to color at its edges, I splashed in some red wine, then popped the lid off of the jar of tomatoes, shaking them into the pan.  A quick stir, followed by a gentle simmer for 45 minutes, yielded a garnet mixture that held the aroma of summer, its depth of flavor enhanced by the fall flavors of rosemary and red wine.

Dinner was as easy as boiling spaghetti and tossing the drained strands into the pan of sauce, with a small mound of grated romano to top it off.  Simple, restorative, and a reminder that no matter how cold, how barren the coming weeks become, summer will eventually follow.

I promised to post the Thanksgiving recipes in time for Christmas, so here’s the final, and probably the most critical, one.  As I’ve already mentioned, this roast turkey recipe is a blend of different preparations that I’ve used over the past few years.  I’ve taken the best aspects of every preparation that I’ve used, and this is the result.

When I first decided on a recurring holiday turkey recipe, I started out by using a liberal application of herbed butter under the skin of the bird, which does a better job of flavoring the meat than basting or cavity aromatics would.  If you think about it, basting merely flavors the skin, and no matter how often you ladle pan drippings over the roast, those drippings do nothing but run down the outside of the bird back into the pan.  Psychologically, it’s satisfying, but technically basting accomplishes nothing since the skin acts as a barrier.  The same is true for stuffing things into the turkey’s cavity – no matter what you put in there, the meat will still be shielded from the aromatics by the bone structure of the bird, so the effect is minimized.

Using an under-the-skin application of herbed butter achieves two goals – it flavors the skin from beneath, and it also imparts a wonderful flavor to the meat below.  So, that’s the approach that I used for years, until I discovered brining, and now I use a brine-and-butter approach.

Brining takes the notion of flavoring the meat one step further, by immersing the bird in a salt and sugar solution for approximately 1 hour per pound.  Take note, though, that you should never attempt to brine what is sold as a “self-basting” turkey – which has already been injected with a saline solution, and which will turn out inedibly salty if you elect to brine it further.  Additional flavors are added to the brine according to the results that you’re seeking – the brine carries these flavors deep into the meat of the turkey.  From a scientific standpoint, the brining solution breaks up the fibers of the meat, resulting in increased tenderness, and the retained moisture from a good, long brine will translate to juicier meat.  I highly recommend using a brining bag, but you could use any food-safe heavy duty plastic bag if you need to.

So, here is the holiday roast turkey recipe.  The butter mix comes from a past issue of one of my cooking magazines, which I can’t recall after so many years, and the brining solution is sourced from Saveur, with a few modifications.  Remember that you need to begin brining the turkey the night before you plan on roasting it, so if you want to make this for Christmas, you need to start on Christmas Eve.

The Ultimate Roast Turkey Recipe by The Best Food Blog Ever

1 turkey

For the Brine

1 cup kosher salt
1/3 cup dark brown sugar
1/3 cup chili powder
2 cups apple cider
1 head garlic, separated into cloves, peeled
2 apples, cored and chopped
6 cups apple cider (separate step)
4 quarts cold water

For the Butter

1 stick of unsalted butter, room temperature
Bacon
Sea salt
Ground black pepper
Fresh thyme and sage, chopped

Start by making the brine.  In a food processor or blender, puree the garlic, the apples, and the 2 cups of apple cider, and set aside.  In the brining bag, set inside of a large stockpot, pour the salt, sugar, and chili powder, then add the 6 cups of apple cider and the 4 quarts of cold water, using your hand or a whisk to mix it all together so that the salt and sugar dissolve.  Add the apple/garlic puree and stir to mix again.

Prepare the turkey by first pulling out the utterly useless self timer plastic dart and throwing it away, being careful not to tear the skin as you do so.  Remove the giblet bag and reserve for stock (this can be frozen, whole, in a plastic bag in the freezer).  Carefully lower the entire turkey, breast first, into the brining solution, making sure the brine fills the cavity, and submerge as much as possible.  Seal the bag and place in a cold place – your refrigerator if you have room, or the garage or deck if the outside temperature is low enough.  You should anticipate brining the turkey for 1 hour per pound, thereabouts.

The next day, take your butter out of the refrigerator and let it soften.  Finely chop a few slices of bacon and fry them until crisp.  In a small bowl, mash the butter with the salt, pepper, bacon, thyme, and sage and set aside.  Set your oven to 350 degrees.

Pull the turkey out of the brine and set it in a roasting pan on a rack, making sure to drain the cavity.  Using paper towels, pat the turkey dry, then use your fingers to loosen the skin from the meat of the breast.  Take a spoon and spread the herbed butter under the skin of the turkey – you can use your fingers to push the butter off of the spoon through the skin, and smush it around until you’ve got an even coating of butter throughout.  Apply salt and pepper liberally to the surface of the skin.  If you’re using a probe thermometer, which I highly recommend, insert the probe now into the thickest part of the thigh without hitting bone.

Roast the turkey until the temperature of the dark meat reaches 165 degrees.  You may want to check the bird after about an hour or so, because the residual brown sugar from the brine will caramelize, causing the skin to become brown more quickly than you are accustomed.  If this happens, take the turkey out and tent it with foil before putting it back to finish cooking.  When you take the final temperature of the roast using a probe thermometer, it’s best to poke it in various discreet locations – all parts of the bird should register at least 160 degrees, which is done but not dry.

Remove the turkey from the oven and set it aside, tented with foil, for at least 30 minutes.  If you hazard cutting into any roast before it has had proper time to rest, you risk spilling valuable juices and ending up with dry meat.  The resting period allows the juices, which are pushed to the surface during cooking, to recede back deeper into the flesh.  Don’t worry about the turkey getting cold – depending on its size, the roast will retain heat for close to an hour or more, and your kitchen, if it’s anything like ours, will be plenty hot anyway from all of the other cooking that’s going on.