Turkey Soup/Turkey Potpie and the Turkey Crack Whore

This was my first year to host Thanksgiving. This was the first time I cooked a turkey. Not just any turkey, but a twenty-one pound organically fed, no antibiotics given, free-range Whole Foods turkey, kind of Thanksgiving. We have never started small in my family.

Despite all my minor and major freak-outs and stressful moments, Thanksgiving Day went off without a hitch. We ate with in 15minutes to my estimated time, people had seconds, thirds, and M said it as the best Thanksgiving dinner he ever ate (and if he is smart he will continue to have the ‘best Thanksgiving dinner ever’ every year I cook).

I learned two unanticipated lessons from this Thanksgiving. The first being, the one dish I did entirely on my own with no help, prep, from anyone one but myself, was the one that I was most disappointed in. The sweet potatoes. It wasn’t the recipe or the flavors that disappointed me but my own personal mistake. I didn’t have enough olive oil on the roasting pan and the sweet potatoes over browned on their bottoms. Goes to show that sometimes doing something on your own isn’t always the best way. The second lesson I learned was that leftovers, i.e. the opportunity to make turkey soup was the best part of hosting Thanksgiving. The sweet reward to my tired feet and aching back of non-stop cooking on Thanksgiving was rewarded on Friday evening with the slurping of Turkey soup.

Here’s how I made my turkey soup. I can only assume it is basic because it seemed pretty simple and tasty to me.

Take the turkey carcass, and place in pot. In my case the turkey carcass was bigger than my largest pot so I split in half in order to fit it all in the same pot. I added water, to make the turkey stock. Once the turkey was falling off the bone, I let the pot cool. I removed the carcass and strained out all the stock into smaller pot. I picked off all the turkey from the carcass, and removed the stray stuffing that had gotten in the mix. I replaced all the turkey in the smaller pot with the stock and refrigerated over night. On Friday evening, removed the pot from the refrigerator skimmed off all the coagulated fat from the top then placed on the stovetop to heat up. I added chopped onion, celery and carrots to the pot and some additional water and chicken stock. I let everything simmer together till the vegetables were cooked. To give the soup a hearty feel but without adding the typical noodles; I boiled up some dried mini-cheese ravioli. I served the soup topped with a sprinkling of pecorino romano cheese.

The other leftover creation I made from the turkey was a turkey potpie. I followed the guidance in one of the basic cookbooks in my collection. I used a ready-made piecrust (we made all our own pie crusts for the Thanksgiving pies) turkey, chicken broth, milk, flour and veggies I had on hand. It really was a quick and easy way to use up more of the turkey, since it only took about 15 minutes once I popped it in the oven. In the future I would add mushrooms and perhaps red peppers.

All this turkey has made the feline in our home a fiend. She looooves turkey. She craves turkey. She won’t let me open up a container of leftover turkey without whining at me incessantly. Sometimes I feel like her dealer, but mostly I am just grateful for the help with the leftovers.

Turkey Leftovers - Butternut Squash Turkey Curry

First of all, I'd like to know how I wound up with turkey leftovers when we made lamb for our Thanksgiving dinner. And the crazy thing is - there is no lamb in the fridge! Musta just gotten up in the middle of the night and walked out! What gives??

Last night night I accidentally made something pretty tasty with the leftover turkey. It goes like this:

-1 cup leftover turkey, shredded
-1/2 cup vegetable stock
-2 cups of pre-made pureed butternut squash soup (you know, the super-bland stuff in a box at TJ's)
-1/2 of a medium yellow onion, chopped
-4 cloves garlick, smashed
-few tablespoons of olive oil
-1 tablespoon of curry powder, or more if you're into that
-1/2 teaspoon of cumin
-salt/pepper

I started off by sauteeing the onion and garlick cloves in olive oil with a little salt and pepper. Once they got a little soft, I added the curry and the cumin and sauteed for about a minute. I threw in the turkey with a little more olive oil and let it warm up and absorb the tasty flavors. When things started drying up, I threw in the vegetable stock. After simmering for another minute or two, I added the butternut squash soup. When the soup was nice and warm, it was ready to eat. But if you have some fresh cilantro lying around, maybe throw that on top as a garnish.

This soup turned out really thick and hearty. Next time I make it, I might use it more like a curry by thickening it with something and eating it over rice. Flavor-wise, it was spicy and aromatic and very different from most turkey leftovers. And it was a really pretty shade of golden yellow, too. Vegetarians of the world may want to replace the turkey with tofu or something green like bok choy, and maybe spike it with some slivered red chilies or bell peppers for color....oh man that sounds AWESOME!!

Episode 3

Hydrogenated oils, vegan dinners, Global knives, double-frozen salmon, and much more.

Download Girl on Girl Cooking Episode 3 right here.

My Thanksgiving Menu (Maybe)

This year for Thanksgiving, my crew is dropping its pants in the face of tradition and wiggling its behind at it mockingly. After a No-Turkey decree was issued by my significant other this year, I was forced to build my dinner around another dead animal. I chose lamb because it's a meat I don't work with very often, so it feels festive. Oh, and as usual, we'll be cooking on Friday instead of Thursday. This enables us to hit another dinner on Thursday. Hee hee.

My tentative menu is as follows:

-Roasted tomatoes, swimming in olive oil and garlick and herbs, with a nice baguette
-Stripey melons wrapped in prosciutto
-Roasted lamb with pomegranate glaze
-Creamy Stilton mashed potatoes
-Roasted carrots
-Fatush salad
-Pear/hazelnut cobbler
-Vanilla ice cream

We have a whole wine-rack full of bottles we've picked up over the last year, and we'll definitely bust some open for this dinner. I'll post the good ones this weekend, as well as pictures of dinner.

As I said, this is a tentative menu. I try not to plan too hard for these things because when it comes to cooking, I'm more interested in the creative process. That's why I rarely make anything more than once. We'll see how much of the stuff on this menu actually comes to fruition...

Amity this post is for you.

Purple Cauliflower. It’s about as wild as you get in the vegetable world. Apparently, it retains its color when you cook it, unless it is overcooked, in which case it turns green. I roasted it like I do its goodie two-shoed sibling the white one. The results tasted similar. Yet, I would have to say the purple was a bit milder, dare I say tamer. You know what they say about the quiet ones.

Here’s the rough recipe for roasted cauliflower:
1 medium sized head of cauliflower
4-5 cloves of garlic
Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO)
Salt/Pepper to taste (I have a seasoned pepper blend, I like to use here)

Cut cauliflower up into similar sized florets; mix in bowl with olive oil, minced garlic, salt and pepper. Place mix on cookie sheet. Roast oven ~375 degrees for approximately 20 minutes. I usually take it out turn them once. They should have that nice golden brown color on their edges.

Episode 2

Pumpkin dinner wrap-up, including an on-air demonstration of cooking pumpkin dumplings. It's a short episode this week, but stay tuned for another great installment coming soon.

Download Girl on Girl Cooking Episode 2 right here.

Memory Food

Tonight I made food from memory. These are foods that my Mom makes that I don't have written recipes for. They are foods I have learned to cook at the elbow of my mother when I was young and as a helper as I grew. They are now implanted in me like part of my genetic code. Chicken cutlets, was a Sunday dinner meal. It is simply chicken breasts, breadcrumbs, (seasoned Italian style with garlic salt/powder, dried parsley, grated cheese, pepper) egg, a bit of milk, and of course the olive oil to fry them in. The chicken breasts (I pound them out to make them thinner) are dipped in an egg and small bit of milk mixture, and then breaded. Breading was a job for my sister and I. As I make these today I still I hear my mother's voice in my head, telling me to press the breadcrumbs in well, so they wouldn't fall off in the frying pan. The frying was always my mother's job. The accompaniment to chicken cutlets was mashed potatoes. These two are a pair I never split up, as I eat almost every bite of the chicken cutlet with a bit of mashed potatoes on my fork.

One of the other memory foods I made this evening was an autumn butternut squash dish. Butternut squash, with butter, brown sugar, golden raisins and walnuts roasted in the oven. It is a sweet dish, but not super sweet like candied yams. The golden raisins add their own amount of sweetness so you can go easy on the brown sugar and the walnuts provide a nice crunch.

Farmer's Market today - OH MY GOD CAULIFLOWER!!!

Paula and I went to the Farmer's Market on Larchmont Blvd today, and star of the show was definitely cauliflower.



Here are some interesting varieties. On the right is purple cauliflower, regular 'ole cauliflower in the middle, and broccoflower on the left. Broccoflower is a hybrid of broccoli and cauliflower, but purple cauliflower actually appears that way naturally. Cool, huh?



Paula has a great recipe for roasted cauliflower. Maybe if you're nice she'll post it.

pumpkin post

The pumpkin dinner party was all about the flavor of pumpkin itself as opposed to the other flavors that often accompany pumpkin. Pumpkin is a member of the squash family, but for some reason it hangs out with the sweet spices all the time. We challenged pumpkin to break out of its clique and hang out with some savory friends.

We served our guest two appetizers: roasted pumpkin and stilton on polenta rounds and toasted baguettes smeared with pumpkin pesto. The roasted pumpkin with stilton on polenta was created by Rossanna and I when were brainstorming over the menu. We roasted two small pumpkins that had been seasoned very minimally with just some oil olive and Herbes de Provence. After roasting in the oven, I mashed up the roasted pumpkin with a bit of salt and pepper to taste. The polenta rounds were merely sliced from a cookie dough-looking tube (we cheated and used pre-prepared polenta from Trader Joe’s, for convenience sake only, as we both have made polenta in the past). A scoop of the roasted pumpkin and a dollop of creamy Harrods’s Stilton hand carried from London. These turned out famously, they flew off the platter.



The soup was can you guess? Pumpkin. This pumpkin soup wasn’t your simple pumpkin puree with a bit of crème fraiche. It was pumpkin, chicken, and ham hocks. It a hearty soup, that in big portions can be made into a meal. I love this recipe because it was given to me by my dear friend’s mother. I left one of our post-Thanksgiving visits with a homegrown pumpkin and the recipe in one of my goody bags.

We had two main dish items. The first was pumpkin dumplings, which we made while podcasting, yes that was a plug for the pumpkin cast – check it out. The second entree was pumpkin risotto with seared scallops. The pumpkin risotto was prepared by Nick. I prepared the scallops. We served them separately since we were catering to a partial vegetarian audience. The scallops were lovely. They were buttery and flavored with just the right amount of sage, truffle oil, and then the smooth distinct flavor of the pumpkin risotto paired nicely. I have to admit I was a critic of this pairing at first, seafood with a squash that hangs with sweet stuff? It worked. The pumpkin had made new friends and perhaps taken on a few crushes along the way.



The salad was spinach, avocado, pumpkin seeds, pomegranate seeds with a pumpkin seed oil and lime dressing. The salad was inspired from Nigella Lawson’s cookbook "Feast". Pumpkin seed oil was a splurge. Since nut oil spoils quickly, I am taking recommendations for other recipes to highlight this special oil.



For dessert we let the pumpkin hang out with his homies. But not in the standard pumpkin pie, but in pumpkin cheesecake. Rossanna babied this cheesecake baking it in a water bath not required by the recipe. The taste was moist and flavorful. I have to say that is tasted even better left over the next day.

This is why I love the Farmer's Market

These pictures were taken at the Farmer's Market on Larchmont Blvd. in Hancock Park last Sunday.



Incidentally, here's an awesome tutorial about how to bust open a pomegranate.

And this is a shout-out to my mom, who loooooves persimmons:

Infatuation du jour: Trader Joe's Wintry Peppermint Wonders.

Ok everyone run out and try these.

They're crushed chocolate cookies, kinda like Oreos but without anything hydrogenated, and they're covered in dark chocolate, and they're MINTY. These things are ridiculous! And they're like $8, which is a lot for cookies. But they're a helluva splurge.

Adventures in pasta

So the other day, I was looking up a pasta variety on Google. It was a pasta that I'd had at Blair's in Silverlake about a year ago. They made this really sexy macaroni and cheese with truffle oil (which I have since ripped off countless times). What made it sexy was the smooth square tube-shaped pasta. I couldn't figure out which pasta it was. So I looked up "pasta varieties" on Wikipedia.com. They broke the list into several categories, two of which were "shaped" and "tubular". I narrowed the choices down bit by bit, and finally I thought the one I wanted might be ditalini. Just to make sure, I did an image search for "ditalini" on Google, and instead got a page full of women shoving objects into various orifices....Doh!

Eventually I found out that ditalini wasn't the right variety anyway.

I know most of you are gonna run off to go search for "ditalini" on Google now, but for those of you who'd like to stick around, here's my version of macaroni and cheese with truffle oil. Paula (aka The Sparkler), also made some KILLER mac and cheese this week, and I'll leave it to her to post her recipe.

I never name recipes, but this one is an exception. I call it Grown-Up Macaroni & Cheese.

-Any shaped or tubular pasta. I like penne. (I also like pinwheels, but don't tell anyone)
-a LOT of grated romano or parmesano romano mix.
-full-fat milk or half & half or cream. Your choice.
-fresh parsley
-Salt/pepper
-truffle oil

-Cook and drain the pasta, but retain about a tablespoon or two of the starchy pasta water.
-Put the pasta back in the pot with the retained pasta water.
-Keep a low heat, and start sprinkling in the cheese.
-Add a few tablespoons of cream. Just enough to wet all the cheese and make everything stick to the pasta.
-Add more cheese.
-Add more cheese.
-Add more cheese.
-Add more cream.
-Add more cheese.
-Add salt and pepper to taste.
-Now douse the thing with truffle oil until you can REALLY smell it.
-Chop the parsley and throw it over the pasta. It's both for color and flavor, so add as much as you like and mix it in if you want.
-Add more cheese.

This thing has about 6,000 calories. So, like, eat it with a salad or something. Ok?