For the past couple of years Hillel and I have wanted to do some interesting things for Thanksgiving beyond the usual turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberry. We often talked about ideas like imagining thanksgiving as an Asian holiday.
Last year we tried to do thanksgiving as a small plates meal. Overall I’d call it a disaster. Some of the dishes worked out ok, some failed (truffle mini-souffles) and the many-courses of small plates format kept a bunch of us psycho busy in the kitchen the whole night.
This year Michael agreed to host Thanksgiving and in the end almost 50 people were invited. With that many people we needed some good coordination and we had an opportunity to do both traditional versions of many dishes as well as jazzing things up a little bit. We did three turkeys- one traditional roasted, one deep friend, and my experiment for this year was a Peking Turkey.
Basically the idea was to cook a turkey using the techniques normally applied to Peking duck. Part of the motivation was some less than stellar skin on previous turkeys. Since Peking duck is known for its great crispy skin I wondered if the approach would work on a turkey.
The basic notion is to dry out the turkey and then baste it with some flavored boiling water for 10 minutes. This seals the skin and helps keep the juices in when you cook it. Then you hang it for 8 hours with a fan on it and brush it with a honey-water mix every couple of hours. Then you roast it fairly conventionally. The skin browned fairly quickly, so make sure to cover it in foil and turn down the heat once it browns.
Overall I think it worked out very well and I’d be tempted to try it again. The usual duck recipes tell you to remove the leg bones and I should have followed that- when the turkey was hung the blood all accumulated in the drumsticks and couldnt really drain.
Hillel wrote up some of the meal here on tastingmenu with some pictures. One other observation- I think the class we took at the CIA was some pretty good prep for an event like this. Cooking for 50 can be pretty hectic and we had it mostly all prepped and ready to go with only reasonable amount of work on Thanksgiving afternoon itself.
posted in Cooking |
5th
June
2006
With the weather turning nice I’ve started regular BBQ parties again. I was hoping to do my slow-smoked dry-rub
ribs yesterday but we were travelling over the weekend and I didn’t have the necessary stuff in time (the ribs).
So instead I grilled some lamb with my special marinade. Note that its really
important to understand the difference between BBQ and grilling. Barbeque is
slow cooking with smoke and indirect heat while grilling is cooking relatively
quickly over direct heat. For the marinade my “secret” ingredient is roasted
dried fenugreek leaves from Vij’s Rangoli (the market next to Vij’s) in
Vancouver. I mix them with salt, fresh chopped rosemary from the garden and a
few other herbs (winter savory, some crushed pepper and some thyme) and some
olive oil. Marinade for 4 or 5 hours, heat up the grill. Throw the lamb on the
grill on one side, sear it, then turn it over and reduce the heat. Note that the
grill will flare up quite a bit from the olive oil but that’s usually ok since
you want to sear the outside anyway. You just don’t need to blast the heat
super-high.
I think they turned out pretty great. Hillel mentioned that they were salty
and I did overdo the salt a bit, but the interesting thing is that he mentioned
that he had thought the salt was just from the lamb. Proper seasoning (using
salt) is really important to cooking and its one of those things I often get
wrong, but it was pretty cool when it works out such that it integrates well
with the dish.
Today I plan on shopping fpr materials for my spice rub for some proper ribs
for next week. I also want to try a pork shoulder sometime soon but I need to
make sure I have the heat on the smoker fixed for that.
]]>
posted in Cooking |
17th
March
2006
Kat is busy taking her test this weekend and requested Corned Beef for dinner as a St. Patricks day thing, plus the high-
protein thing is supposed to be good for test taking. I think it turned out pretty good- Whole Food’s had a bunch
they had pre-marinated so I bought a two pound cut and they filled up the bag with a bunch of the brine. I took
it home and put it in the Staub pot with a bit of extra water, some beer, potatoes, carrots, boiler onions, and
a few cloves of garlic. Brought the whole thing to a boil and then turned it down low with the top on for about
4 hours.
I think the main mistake I made was to not skim the surface earlier. There was a bunch of gray congealed stuff
that wasnt very appetizing and while I removed it later it had already gotten all over the veggies. Id also
say that the result wasnt an explosion of flavor- it was a perfectly good corned beef, but it was still boiled
meat Irish-style. Im wondering what is the magical difference between this and the great New York pastrami?
]]>
posted in Cooking |