Yes, I know it’s already Wednesday

But it’s sort of Tuesday because Monday was a holiday, right? And also I’m being lazy and re-using a post from the old A Frayed Knot blog. But it is both relevant, because after writing this post I did find a great local farm store, but just heard this past week that they’re closing their doors, which is sad and also leaves me once again without a local produce source. Anyhow, here’s your Tasty Tuesday post:

Originally published in A Frayed Knot Knits on July 7, 2009

Sometime last year, I read a book called The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. It’s quite good, and I recommend it if you’re interested in where your food comes from. I found it much more compelling than a similar book, Fast Food Nation, as I don’t actually eat fast food all that often (once or twice a year) so being grossed out by the fast food industry’s practices was, well, gross, but didn’t really give me any information about changes I could make to my own personal habits. TOD, on the other hand, looks at food from three different sources: industrial farms, small growers, and hunting/growing/gathering your own. Pollan even takes the time to point out the many similarities between large-scale organic growers and non-organic industrial farming — things you’ll want to take into consideration if you’re really concerned about your food and how it relates to your own health as well as the environment. Which is all a really long way of saying that I’ve decided to try to eat more local food, especially produce.

Last weekend, I asked Kit to take me to one of our local farms. They have a petting zoo, so it’s kind of perfect for the kids. He took the kids up to visit the animals while I perused the produce in the farm store. What I found was really, really disappointing: very few things they were selling were actually grown there. I got some carrots (which, OMG, why didn’t someone tell me how amazing fresh carrots are?), some celery, and some mushrooms (which I apparently don’t know how to store because they went all ooky before I had a chance to use them). I believe the blueberries were also grown there. Everything else was from some place else. The peaches were at least New Jersey grown, but the strawberries were the same old big name farm berries they have at my A&P, the apples were from Chile, and most of the other fruit was from California. They also had pineapples and bananas, which were obviously not from around here, and the grape tomatoes I bought were from Florida. They did have some regular tomatoes that I think were grown there, as well as some lettuces and other veggies that I didn’t buy — I was just surprised at how much produce they offered that was not only not from their own farm, but not in any way local. So that was a really disappointing attempt at buying local produce. There are a couple of other farm stores in reasonable driving distance, so I’ll try those next and hope for better results.

One of the big reasons I’m doing all this is to try to introduce the kids to good fresh fruits and veggies. Zack will eat pretty much anything — he’ll try everything, and most things he actually likes and will eat lots of — but we’ve had lots of issues with getting Becky to try things. To be clear, it’s not that she won’t try “healthy” things — we have trouble getting her to try anything. She doesn’t respond to bribes (even crazy ones, like eat one pea and get a whole cookie), and I’m loathe to actually punish her for not eating something she didn’t request. It’s incredibly frustrating and we’re constantly trying new things. One thing we’ve incorporated is an idea from friends of ours who have a daughter about the same age as Becky: when dinner is served, she may eat what is on her plate OR if she tries it and doesn’t like it, she may request a (reasonable) alternative that she does like. If she doesn’t try it, though, she goes to bed hungry. We’ve been trying that for a few weeks now, with little success — Becky gets so involved in saying “no” and throwing a tantrum that I think she doesn’t really realize what she’s saying no to. So I came up with a new idea to add on: we’re going to do a menu each week [Note from present-day-me: this was a short-lived idea that didn't work out for us after I got all employed and stuff]. One day a week she gets to choose what we eat, and on the other days, I’ll serve whatever we’re having for dinner and the previous rule applies. This allows me to tell her well in advance what we’re having for dinner, which allows her time to get used to the idea. Last night was our first menu dinner (meatballs and noodles for “International Monday” served alongside some frozen veggies), and Becky even helped prepare everything. She decided not to try anything on her plate, but she was very calm and polite about it, which is a big improvement. She didn’t eat much all day so I wasn’t terrifically surprised that she didn’t go for the deal, but I was very pleased with her behavior, at least.

Tonight we’re having tostadas for “Try Something New Tuesdays” — technically, I served tostadas Sunday, but nobody was prepared for them and there was a tantrum and I think we might do better tonight. I had one for lunch yesterday, topped with a few diced grape tomatoes — yummy!

The base is a fresh corn tortilla that I fried myself in vegetable oil, so I feel better about it than commercially fried and salted chips. There’s also some whole corn hiding in there between the beef and the cheese.

PDM again: Glad I found this post — I’d completely forgotten about these and now I want them. And I’m pretty sure Zacky would chow down on them, too!

Sacre bleu cheese!

Delish.

I’ve been eating a lot of green salad lately (mostly Romaine, arugula, and baby spinach, for those of you keeping track at home), and thus a lot of salad dressing. My absolute favorite has always been Bleu Cheese. When I was a little girl, restaurants charged thirty-five cents extra for it, and my dad groused about paying it, but I wouldn’t budge. For me it was Bleu Cheese or no salad, end of discussion. So I’ve been going through a lot of Bleu Cheese dressing lately, and I figured I’d save myself some chemicals and maybe some money, too, and make my own. So I did! It’s super creamy (maybe even a little too much, but I don’t mind it thick) and really rich and delicious. I’m almost done with my first batch…I’m thinking I might add some bacon to batch two. Because why not?

Recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 15oz jar Hellman’s Light Mayonnaise
• 1/3 c. plain Greek yogurt (I used Chobani)
• 1/4 c. olive oil
• 2 tsp. roasted garlic rice wine vinegar
• 4 oz. crumbled bleu cheese

Whisk together mayo, yogurt, oil, and vinegar until thoroughly combined. Stir in bleu cheese. Top your salad!

O. M. G.*

* The “G” is for gumbo.

Yum. Just…yum.

Remember last week I told you about my Shrimp’n'Grits, and promised to tell you all about the gumbo I made later that evening with the shrimpy butter as the base for the roux? Well, here you go. I call this my “Kitchen Sink Gumbo” because, in direct violation of everything I read in my Louisiana cookbooks (specifically Donald Link’s Real Cajun and the Times-Picayune collection Cooking Up a Storm) it involves seafood, chicken, and andouille sausage all thrown in the pot together. And it’s goooood. I tasted it to see if it needed more salt/kick/whatever and said, “Oh, that’s good. [pause] OH. That’s goooooood.”

I’d never made a gumbo before, but there were things I knew I wanted (shrimp, chicken, andouille) and things I knew I didn’t (green peppers — I’m allergic). I ended up consulting all of the gumbo recipes in both of the aforementioned books and then making a bit of a mish-mosh of them all. I think the biggest deviation I made (aside from combining all the meat types) was the roux. All of the gumbo recipes I consulted called for an oil-based dark roux; I wanted to use my shrimpy butter so I ended up with a lighter roux. I think it came out just fine (where “just” = “damned”). I served it over rice, and found that a sweet cornbread makes a nice side.

Recipe

(loosely adapted from recipes found in Donald Link’s Real Cajun and the Times-Picayune collection Cooking Up a Storm)

Ingredients:

• 3/4 c butter
• 3/4 c flour
• 1/4 c diced celery
• 1/4 c carrots, sliced into coins
• 1/4 c onions (I don’t really like onion a whole lot, and I especially hate chopping onion, so I used itty bitty pearl onions that I just cut in half and threw in.)
• 1 can Progresso red clam sauce
• 32 oz. chicken broth
• 1/2 lb shrimp, peeled and deveined
• 1/2 lb chicken, diced and cooked
• 1/2 lb andouille sausage, sliced into half circles
• 2-3 bay leaves, crushed
• Salt to taste
• Cayenne pepper to taste (1/2 tsp was just enough for me, but I’m kind of a wimp when it comes to spicy)

In the bottom of a large stockpot or dutch oven, melt butter. Add flour to make a roux, and cook until fairly dark (but be careful not to burn it). Add celery, carrots, and onions. Cook until soft. Add clam sauce, broth, and all meats. Boil for a few minutes, stirring frequently. Reduce heat, add bay leaves and simmer for 2hrs (give or take). Add salt and cayenne pepper just before removing from heat.

Things that make me say “y’all”

Been wondering what awesome looks like? This is it, right here.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it here or not, but as a general rule I have not been fond of seafood. Fish and chips (it’s battered and fried — what’s not to like?), yes, but otherwise, not so much. As I’ve been cooking more, though, I’ve been reading recipes and descriptions of seafood that just sounds delicious. So over the past couple of years, I’ve been making an effort to try more seafood, both different types and different preparations. There was that salmon a while back, which was pretty tasty, but I don’t think I’m going to become a regular salmon eater. A few months ago, though, I discovered shrimp, in all its shrimpy goodness and glory, and now I find myself craving shrimp once or twice a week (at least).

Now, I do have very specific needs when it comes to shrimp: they must be warm, and they must be either small or cut up into bite-sized chunks. No Jumbo Shrimp for me, thankyouverymuch. But, as long as those conditions are met, I adore shrimp. I especially adore shrimp when they’re all Southern’ed up… barbecued, for instance. So I was pretty excited when Michael Ruhlman’s recipe for butter-poached shrimp served over bacon grits came across my interwebs.

Y’all. I cannot even tell you how mind-blowingly delicious this is. I did change it up just a skosh from Mr. Ruhlman’s recipe, namely by adding cheese to the grits and leaving out the onion. Also, since I added the cheese, it wasn’t necessary to add the butter from the poaching (don’t worry — it didn’t go to waste…I used it later when I needed to make a roux for my gumbo, which I will tell you all about in another post). I also adjusted the timing a little, and I halved the recipe (which ended up being about 2 servings for me). Here’s how I did it:

Recipe

(adapted from Ruhlman’s Twenty: 20 Techniques 100 Recipes A Cook’s Manifesto by Michael Ruhlman, as reprinted on publicradio.org)

Ingredients:

• 1 c water
• 1/4 c old fashioned grits (NOT instant. Seriously, y’all. If you’re gonna use instant grits you might as well just stop right now.)
• 1/2 c diced bacon, cooked
• 1/4 c shredded sharp cheddar cheese
• 1/2 c butter
• 1/2 lb shrimp, peeled and deveined

In small saucepan, bring water to a boil. Add grits and stir, then cover and reduce heat to medium low. Let cook for at least 25 minutes, stirring frequently.

When the grits have about 5 minutes left, melt butter a couple of tablespoons at a time in a saucepan just large enough to hold your shrimp (I used a 3qt saucepan for the 1/2 lb), stirring constantly. When all of the butter is melted, add the shrimp and cook for about 5 minutes. Shrimp should be cooked through. Remove from heat.

While the shrimp are poaching, uncover the grits and and stir in the bacon, heating it through. Remove from heat and stir in the cheese until melted. Plate the grits, then spoon the shrimp over them.

Plan Z, or Fourth Time’s the Charm

Y’all, Zack’s birthday is in November. That’s how long this post has been waiting around for me to get my sh*t together and put the photos in and post it already. I feel much shame. The timing’s good, though, because Becky’s birthday is this week and she’s decided she doesn’t like cake that much, so we’re not doing a fancy cake for her birthday this year. Just brownies and Rice Krispie Treats, oh, and homemade mint chocolate chip ice cream. Recipes (such as they are) for the latter two will be shared soon. Swear.

I have established a tradition of baking awesome cakes for Becky for her birthday. Zack hasn’t ever requested anything particular, so he’s just gotten cake. This year, though, he decided he wanted a Thomas cake. No problem, I figured. I made the Millennium Freaking Falcon, after all. How hard can Thomas be? They even make cake pans in the shape of train engines! This was going to be, excuse the expression, a piece of cake.

Zack’s party was Sunday afternoon. The plan was to bake the cake Friday night so it would be nice and cool for me to decorate Saturday. I considered using the yogurt cake recipe that I’ve had so much success with, but wasn’t sure if it would be structurally sound enough to hold the novelty shape. So I whipped up a box mix, added the blue food coloring (as requested by the birthday boy) and popped that sucker in the oven (after I figured out the pan — it’s two parts that snap together. Weird.). Seemed to come out okay — the tester came out clean — so I set it on the rack to cool as per the pan instructions.

After it had cooled I went to pop the pan apart and while the part under the tester hole was fine, much of the rest of it was raw batter. Failed cake #1. Saturday morning I hied myself to the store and bought another couple cake mixes. Mixed cake number two, poured batter into train pan — separated this time (with foil over the tester hole) — and back into the oven. Forgot to add food coloring — no good.

Batter, batter, no batter!

Open another box, mix/add food coloring/pour/bake. Finally, cakes bake through and are the right color. Sweet! Now, to decorate. So now I have to get the cakes together. I shave the center edges of each cake, slap on some frosting, and push them together. Success! For about four minutes. And then the structural integrity — or lack thereof — shows its ugly face and large pieces just start falling off.

I find your lack of structural integrity disturbing.

I try to stick them back on with frosting (because you can never have too much frosting, and incidentally, the frosting was homemade cream cheese frosting), but every time I get one piece stuck on, another one falls off. Eventually, I have what is basically a lump of frosting with some cake stuck on. It is clearly not going to stand up properly. Maybe I can just lay it down on the track? So it’ll be like a photo laid down flat?

Looking like the train wreck it is.

Right. Clearly, the train cake is just not going to happen. And now I’m beginning to doubt that I can make this happen at all. A Facebook friend pointed me to this alternative (love crowd sourcing!):

Cute, right?

and I was considering it, but my confidence was, frankly, a little low at that point. Also it had gotten to be about 9pm. So I decided I’d just buy a damn cake in the morning — I could just draw a Thomas on with frosting (have I mentioned that I love my frosting gun? Got it half price on clearance at Bed Bath and Beyond because the box was damaged.).

Off to the A&P and they actually had a Thomas cake!!! I was halfway to the checkout when I looked at the price and saw it was $27. Yeah, I ain’t paying 27 bucks to feed cake to a bunch of toddlers (yes, I ended up spending way more than that on cake mixes etc. You keep your logic to yourself.). I hemmed and hawed and finally decided to make the alternative cake. I grabbed yet another cake mix and some candy for the landscaping. Baked it, cut it decorated it (after spending a few minutes trying to figure out why the original didn’t feel quite right: take another look and tell me where that tunnel is coming from? Bespin?) and ended up with this:

Choo choo!

Not too shabby, right? Zack was okay with it but not thrilled (I didn’t realize he’d already had a “landscape” Thomas cake at another birthday celebration or I would’ve figured out something else to do), but then it wasn’t really what he — or I, for that matter — was hoping for. Still, I’m not ashamed of it, and I got lots of compliments. The larger “stones” are Milk Duds, the smaller ones are Raisinets, and the patches of flowers are Nerds.

 

In case you didn’t know, yesterday was National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day. Thusly inspired, I popped this into the toaster oven last night for a quickie open-faced grilled-ham’n'cheese:

Fast, easy, delicious. How can you argue with that?

Bet you’re wondering what that dark layer on the bottom is…that would be raspberry jam, my friend, evoking the flavors of a Monte Cristo with none of the labor. Win!

Quick, but still tasty

Hello, there, my long-neglected blog. I promise to try to get back into the swing of things here, and to start that off here’s a quick tip on pie crust that only just occurred to me to try last night but turned out quite successfully:

Pretty, I think, if a bit rustic.

Instead of trying to do something pretty and decorative with the edging (and wasting a lot of delicious crust in the process!), I just grabbed both layers and folded them up like a galette. Fast, easy, and delicious!

Baking cakes ain’t like dusting crops, boy!

I’m working on a new recipe to give you next week (I’m in the testing stage, because I overcooked it while I was writing it down the first time. Oops.) so this week’s Tasty Tuesday is a rerun.

Originally published April 25, 2010 on  the A Frayed Knot Knits blog:

Somehow, my daughter Becky has become a huge Star Wars fan. I know, right, how could this possibly have happened? She has recently:

- cried when watching Darth Vader’s body burned on a pyre at the end of Jedi
- told me that I shouldn’t be watching Fanboys because “We don’t watch other Star Wars movies! Only Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi!“
- declared that she wants Darth Vader to be her father instead of Luke’s because “Luke is a bad boy and doesn’t deserve him.”
- announced that she wants to be Han Solo when she grows up
- requested demanded a Millennium Falcon cake for her birthday, with Han Solo, Darth Vader, Chewbacca, and Princess Leia, but not Luke, “because Luke is too whiny.” Because I’m a sucker for the Millennium Falcon, and a challenge, and my little girl, I said, “Sure! How hard can it be?” And then I found out:

The party was Saturday at 4pm. Giant props to Kit for handling every detail of the party, from scheduling the space (Build-A-Bear) to taking care of the invites to greeting the parents and filming the party, leaving me free to concentrate fully on the cake.

I had originally thought to do gum-paste figures, but the tiny little sane part of my brain said, “Hey, dummy — they make perfectly good action figures, and then the kid will have a bonus birthday present, too!” So I went out and got everything but a Leia (because the Toys’R'Us I was at didn’t have one, but she was not terribly missed, so it’s okay). I had already ordered the most awesomest birthday candle EVAH for her: Darth Vader holding as his lightsaber a red candle.

After some hemming and hawing, Becky settled on both chocolate and vanilla for the actual cake. I do not particularly enjoy actually baking cakes, which means I don’t do it often enough to get really good at it, which means I bought mixes. My mom’s in town (hi, Mom!) and she helped me get the mixes all, well, mixed and into the oven. One large (13×9) chocolate rectangle for the bottom, and two 9″ vanilla circles for the top + accessories. They came out fine, and we were ready to carve them Friday.

Now that I think about it, perhaps “ready” isn’t the right word…I wasn’t quite prepared for the reality of carving cake, and got pretty frustrated, especially with the cockpit. I finally ended up with something I thought would work, but it was clearly unstable and would need to be attached just prior to putting the fondant on, which I had planned for Saturday morning. Here’s what it looked like Friday night when I was done:

Bright and early Saturday, Kit took the kids for a walk, and I started putting it together and getting it ready for frosting. I had done the carving on a board, but wanted to transfer it to the actual presentation board before frosting. This necessitated planning the layout, so we opened up all the action figures and the candle, which promptly broke at the ankles. All attempts to repair it failed, and actually broke the base even further. Lacking the time to panic, I decided to just set it aside and deal with it later.

We decided where the ship should be on the board, and I commenced frosting it (in case you’ve never worked with fondant before, you put a thin layer of regular frosting on to “glue” the fondant). This meant it was time to attach the cockpit, which promptly disintegrated. You can see in the picture above that I had originally carved the cockpit piece out of the vanilla cake, and as it turns out, the chocolate cake holds together a little better. So I quickly re-carved it out of a piece of chocolate cake that was in my big bowl o’ cake scraps, and skewered it on. And then the bottom fell off, and I panicked.

While part of my brain was panicking, the other part was applying frosting and considering the situation. I finally came to the conclusion that the solution was to cheat. So I went upstairs and got some styrofoam and carved my third cockpit. This one didn’t fall apart, and I moved on to the actually fondanting.

There were a couple of tricky things about applying the fondant, mostly because the shape has a lot of nooks and crannys and this is only the second time I’ve ever used fondant, so I’m not particularly well-versed in manupulating it. But I got it on the cake with no real problems, and despite some cutting errors and a little bunching on the back, I thought it looked pretty good. It was, at the very least, the right shape:

Oh! Before I did the big fondanting bit, I decided it would be a good idea to practice a little and remind myself of how the fondant moves and acts. So I built the sensor dish, which ended up being my favorite part of the cake:

Now that I had the fondant on, it was time for the decorating. I cut out the dots that are a recognizable part of the top of the MF, with the plan of spray painting them with the black frosting I’d purchased for the dual purposes of painting said dots and also dirtying up the finished ship. It turns out that the “black” spray frosting is really more of a “light silver gray,” even after several applications. So it was off to Michael’s for emergency black frosting coloring…and where I found food-safe markers, including black. Win!

Back home, I set Mom to the task of coloring the dots, while I began applying the details with white piping. Then I changed my mind and decided most of the lines should be scored, with a very few details sticking up. So I scraped it down and started over, and let the sane part of my brain convince the panicky part that we had plenty of time as long as we didn’t get too carried away. Applying the blue of the engines to the back was considerably less stressful than I had thought it was going to be, and it improved the lines of the back of the cake quite a lot.

Now, Becky had specifically requested that we included the red/rust detailing — it’s on the real thing, and it’s on one of her toys but not the other — so I used the red marker to color that in, and then went back and piped in a few details here and there, using her two MF toys for reference (incidentally, I highly recommend having a 3D model on hand when doing something like this — much better than trying to find pictures with the right angles on the internet). I redid the cockpit a couple of times, and never was quite happy with it, but finally I had to declare it finished. I took it outside and gave it a quick spritzing with the “black” spray frosting, just to scunge it up a little.

I have to say, I was pretty pleased with the end result. It’s not the best looking Millennium Falcon cake I’ve ever seen, but I think I did a pretty good job for someone who doesn’t really decorate cakes:

I was a little annoyed about only having the foil for it to sit on, but then I had an idea while I was in the shower (yes, I finished in enough time that I was able to shower and even iron my skirt before we had to leave for the party!)…on the way I grabbed a couple bags of brown sugar and when we set the cake up, I think it looked a lot like it was parked on the sands at Mos Eisley:

And look! I solved the Darth Vader problem and the gun turret problem (at some point I realized that I should have guns up there and I wasn’t sure what the hell I was going to do) in one fell swoop! Yay me!

Next time, I’m going to make someone else cut the cake — it was a lot harder than I expected it to be. It took about 5 minutes to go from the above to this, and I really felt like I needed a good lie-down afterwards:

(Incidentally, when you stack cakes on top of one another, don’t forget to put a layer of frosting in there — you’ll thank yourself when it’s time to serve.)

I have to give tremendous thanks to Kit and Grandma Tedi for all their help and encouragement and keeping the kids out of the kitchen/dining room/my way. And especially thank you to Becky, who told me at every stage how awesome her Millennium Falcon cake looked, and made me remember why I was doing this even when I was so frustrated with the cockpit that I was seriously considering sending Kit to the A&P for a plain old sheet cake. Love you all!

We Have No Banana Today

It's so good I failed to take a picture until we'd already eaten most of it. I was busy stuffing my face.

Even Wikipedia doesn’t know why it’s called Monkey Bread. It’s not made of monkeys and doesn’t contain bananas or anything else monkey-related, but it’s definitely delicious. Also, it’s kinda fun to make and totally fun to eat. I used to not make it often, because it’s a yeast dough so it takes a couple hours to make the dough and then another hour or so to prep and bake the bread. And it’s really best fresh out of the oven. So it’s really not particularly convenient to have for breakfast, though it’ll do for second breakfast or elevenses, if you get up early enough. I discovered a few years ago, though, that you can actually bake it the day before, leave it in the pan, then heat it back up for 10 minutes or so (long enough to make the sugar gooey again) in the morning. Everybody wins! Except for the monkeys, because I’m not sharing.

Recipe

(adapted from AllRecipes.com)

Ingredients:

• 2 1/2 tsp active dry yeast
• 3 c all-purpose flour
• 1-2 tsp ground cinnamon, to taste
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/4 c white sugar
• 2 Tbsp butter, softened
• 1 c water
• 1/2 c butter
• 1 c packed brown sugar

Set bread machine to Dough. Put yeast, flour, cinnamon, salt, sugar, butter, and water in machine in the order recommended by the manufacturer. When dough is complete, turn out onto well-floured board and knead 10-20 times.

Preheat oven to 375°F. Butter bundt pan. In a small saucepan, melt together butter and brown sugar. Cut dough into 1″ cubes. Dredge cubes in butter/sugar mixture (Yes, it’s hot. Be careful.) and drop evenly into prepared bundt pan. Bake at  375°F for 20-25 minutes (until golden brown).

To serve immediately, place a plate over the top of the pan and invert them together. You may need to give the bottom of the pan a thump after you’ve got them flipped.

To serve the next morning, leave in pan and reheat at 375°F for 10-15 minutes (until butter/sugar mixture is gooey again). Serve as directed above.

It Finally Happened

This is one of those posts I mentioned that’s been hanging around for awhile, just waiting to be finished. Here it is, finally, and you can look forward to a recipe (mostly) every Tuesday as part of a new feature called “Tasty Tuesdays”. I haven’t forgotten about Found It on the Internet Fridays — I’ve just gotten behind on taking pictures, but it will be coming back this week as well.

I have been wanting to make a turducken for years, and been wanting to eat one for even longer than that. This year was finally The Year of the Turbaducken (the “ba” is for “bacon”, obviously).

So much nom. Not shown: cranberry sauce, because I like it out of a can as opposed to homemade. Though it occurs to me that I would be just as happy with homemade raspberry jam, like with a Monte Cristo, so I might do that next time.

Let’s start with the easy/boring stuff: the green salad is just a bag of Romaine mixed with a bag of “spring greens” and topped with some grape tomatoes. I buy bagged salad because I hate making salad, and if I have to make it myself, it won’t get done. And really, I should eat more salad since it’s one of the few ways I actually like veggies. The bread sticks were easy but blah — I shan’t be making them again.

Now on to the good stuff (recipes below): first up, let’s talk about the Mustard Glazed Green Beans and Potatoes.

Seriously, are those not the cutest little potatoes you ever saw?

I had this idea just last week to toss some beans and potatoes with butter and mustard, and it is the easiest, most deliciously appetizing way I’ve ever had green beans. Even Becky agrees that they are not the most inedible vegetable she has ever tried, which from her is high praise indeed. Trader Joe’s sells these wee little potatoes that work perfectly in this recipe, but you could use fingerlings or new potatoes as well — if you use larger potatoes, you might want to cut them into 1″-ish chunks before serving.

Next, the Mac’n'Cheese.

Yes, those are penne noodles. I forgot to get elbow mac at the store and sure as hell wasn't going Wednesday night when I remembered I needed them.

It’s a no-bake, which makes it a great recipe for a big dinner like this — anything you can put together on the stovetop makes it a little easier to coordinate things. When I got my first apartment, my Aunt Valda gave me one of my very first cookbooks: Best Recipes, which is a collection of label recipes. I made either Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner (it’s been more years than I care to say so memory’s a bit foggy there) in that apartment for myself and my boyfriend that year, almost entirely out of that cookbook. There were cornish game hens, stuffing, rolls, two types of pie, and this mac’n'cheese, which was really the only keeper in the bunch. It’s also how I learned to make a roux, long before I knew what a roux was. To this day, following the instructions given in this recipe is the only way I can successfully make a roux.

I'll admit, there's a lot more "pie" than "sweet potato" to these.

The Sweet Potato Pie was always on the table of the Thanksgivings of my childhood, courtesy of the aforementioned Aunt Valda. I’ve simplified the recipe a tad (and actually screwed it up this year, due to an epic inability to count to three), but it’s still the same rich delicious dish it’s always been.

The stuffing was one I found online…I needed a stuffing for the turducken, and I thought a cornbread stuffing would hold up best to a couple of hours of having meat juices soaking into it. I decided to add sausage to the stuffing because, well, I like sausage in my stuffing. I went with plain ol’ breakfast sausage patties instead of the more traditional Italian sausage because again, I like the one better than the other. I ended up with a bunch left over after putting the turbaducken together, so I decided to serve the extra as a “dry” stuffing on the side. Delish.

So yummy, both in and out of the bird(s).

A couple of quick notes on the recipe itself: the cornbread you will get out of this recipe is blah, so don’t get excited about using just that part of the recipe. The version below has my modifications; the original recipe calls for a bunch of veggies, which I left out, and I only ended up using maybe half of the broth called for. Definitely pay more attention to the moistness of your dish than the measurements called for in the recipe.

Finally, the pièce de résistance: The Mighty Mighty Turbaducken!

Aw, yeah.

A couple years ago I had this genius thought: what if I made a turducken only with just breasts, thus avoiding the whole poultry boning issue. (I boned a chicken once, because I figured I should know how. Now I know how, and I also know I’d like to avoid doing it again if possible.)  It turns out I am not the only person to have had this genius thought: there are quite a few recipes out there, which worked out well for me, as I was able to gather some ideas about how long and at what temp I should cook it (as for the temp you should cook it to, it’s the same as any other poultry: internal temp of 165°F, taken at the thickest point, which in this case is dead center).

I had also heard tell of people replacing the traditional stuffing between birds with bacon. Now, we all know I dig on bacon, but I figured why replace when you can add? Also, a lot of the breast-only turduckens had bacon just on the outside. In fact, the main recipe I referenced for construction/cook time suggested that after cooking, you should remove the bacon layer before serving (emphasis mine). What the –? Are these people insane?!?! I decided to go ahead with my breast-only plan, putting both bacon and stuffing between each layer, and wrapping the whole thing up with a bacon lattice.

Look! Weaving *and* bacon. Maybe next year I should knit it.

Issues I encountered: I spent A Good Long While(tm) searching for a duck breast (I was originally going to do this as a birthday present for myself. My birthday is in February. You do the math.) with no luck. Finally, I could wait no longer and decided to just buy a damn duck and filet the breasts off. I got two nice size filets that way, but even together they were much smaller than the mutant chicken breast I had.

The duck is in the upper right hand corner (two breasts); the chicken is at the bottom right (a single breast). The turkey has been flattened and rolled up in this photo.

So I had to switch up the order a little there, but since it all gets rolled up like a jelly roll (in theory; keep reading), it’s really 6 of one, half a dozen of the other.  Also, the turkey I got was a “breast roast”. This apparently means large bits of it are dark meat, which I actually didn’t mind. What I did mind was that the whole thing was so lacerated by the string net they put around it to hold the different bits of meat together that it was practically falling apart.

See the scoring the arrow's pointing to (click to embiggen)? The whole damn turkey "breast roast" was like that.

This caused most of the lack of structural integrity you see in the final picture.  I will absolutely be doing this again, but I think next time I’ll consult with an actual butcher and see if I can get a whole turkey breast…or I could just filet it like I did the duck.

The biggest problem I had was that I couldn’t actually “roll” the whole thing once I got it together, in spite of having pounded all of the breasts to a 1/2″ thickness as directed. I just barely got it to fold in half.

I stuck some skewers into it to hold it together while I contemplated what to do next.

But I slapped some more bacon on it and maneuvered it onto the parchment, at which point I was able to roll that around the whole thing and hold it together.

"What to do next" = "more bacon" of course.

After that, I rolled it up in some foil, slapped it in a pan and threw it in the oven for a few hours (deets in the recipe).

Least exciting turbaducken pic EVAH.

Once it was within about five degrees of done, I ripped open the parchment/foil and let the bacon crisp up for half an hour or so (which was long enough to come all the way up to temp).

I cannot even begin to describe how delectable this smelled.

I let it rest for 20 minutes (It wasn’t long enough. Give it a little more time, hard as it is. Trust me.), then sliced me off a piece. And then I had a mouthgasm. Because O. M. G. So. Freaking. Good.

Turducken

(Based on the instructions here and here)

Ingredients:

• 1 Turkey breast
• 1 Duck breast
• 1 Chicken breast
• 2-3 lbs bacon
• 1-2 c Cornbread-sausage stuffing (see recipe, below)

Pre-heat oven to 350°. Line a 9×13 baking pan with foil, then parchment, leaving enough of both hanging over the sides to completely cover your meat. Pound breasts to 1/2″ thick (each, not total). On top of a piece of plastic wrap, make a lattice from strips of bacon (see above). Lay turkey breast on top of lattice. Cover with a thin layer of stuffing, then a layer of bacon strips (you do not need to lattice the interior bacon layers). Repeat layering with duck/stuffing/bacon, then chicken/stuffing/bacon (NB: I had a huge chicken breast and a relatively small duck breast, so I reversed this order. It’s okay to use common sense here.). Roll/fold everything up as tightly as possible: this is why I built my original lattice on plastic wrap — it’s a lot easier to maneuver everything into position when you have that outer layer that cover everything and keeps it in place. If necessary, add more bacon to cover exposed meat/stuffing. Skewer as needed for stability. Move into prepared pan and remove skewers. Close foil and paper, making sure turbaducken is completely enclosed. Bake for 1 1/2- 3 hours, until internal temperature reached 160°. Open foil/paper and bake for another 30-45 minutes or until internal temperature reaches 165°. Let rest for 30-40 minutes. Slice and serve.

Cornbread-Sausage Stuffing

(adapted from Allrecipes.com Cornbread Stuffing Southern Style)

Ingredients:

• 2 (8.5 ounce) packages dry corn muffin mix
• 1 (8 ounce) can cream-style corn
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1/2 c plain yogurt
• 1/4 c milk
• 8-10 sausage patties
• 1/2 c butter, melted
• 1 – 3 c chicken broth

Pre-heat oven to 400°. Grease a 9×13 baking pan. Combine muffin mix, corn, eggs, yogurt, and milk; stir just enough to moisten. Pour batter into prepared pan(s). Bake for 20 minutes or until lightly brown. While the cornbread is baking, brown and crumble the sausage patties. After cornbread cools, crumble it into a large bowl. Add sausage and butter, mix thoroughly. Add broth slowly, stopping when you have reached the desired texture. (NB: For layering in turducken, you want the stuffing to be pretty moist.)

At-Ease Macaroni & Cheese

(from Best Recipes)

Ingredients:

• 2 Tbsp butter
• 2 Tbsp flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 c milk
• 1 1/2 c shredded extra sharp cheddar
• 8 oz sour cream
• 2 c cooked macaroni (1 c uncooked)

In medium saucepan, melt butter. Blend flour and salt into butter. Stir in milk, then cheese. Continue to cook over medium heat, stirring gently, until thick and smooth. Stir in sour cream and combine thoroughly. Add macaroni, toss until completely coated and heated through.

Mustard Glazed Green Beans and Baby Potatoes

Ingredients:

• 1 pt snap beans
• 1 pt wee little potatoes (you can use new potatoes or fingerlings, but you should cut them into 1″ chunks before tossing)
• 1/4 c butter
• 2 Tbsp honey mustard

Bring 2 2qt saucepans of water to a boil. Cook potatoes in one for 7 minutes until fork tender

Sweet Potato Pie

Ingredients:

 Er, I seem to have misplaced my only copy of this recipe, but I promise I’ll find it (or get it from Aunt Valda or my mom again) and post it up soon. But this has been hanging around too long and needs to be published already.