Thanksgiving eats & random thoughts.

Thanksgiving at Chez Law is a simple affair. My in-laws came for the holiday, and my mother-in-law started asking about a pumpkin pie (not on my menu) two or three days prior to their arrival. My father-in-law likes pumpkin pie, but also likes apple pie, which I had already made, and I wasn’t about to make two desserts for four people plus a toddler. My mother-in-law explained, “I just have this thing about not wanting anyone to be disappointed,” which is how we ended up with eleven dishes for eight people in 2004. My response to her philosophy? “I don’t give a shit if anyone’s disappointed, so I tend have a lot less stress on holidays.”

The menu: turkey, dressing, sweet potatoes, green-bean casserole, Irish soda bread, cranberry sauce, apple pie.

I always use Alton Brown’s roasted turkey recipe – half an hour at 500 degrees to brown the outside, then drop the oven to 350 with foil over the breast until the white meat is 159 degrees and the thigh hits 170. I brined it the night before using his brine recipe (same link), but instead of allspice berries and candied ginger, I use whole cloves and a pinch of whole mustard seed. I filled the cavity with half an apple, half an onion, two sage leaves, and two rosemary sprigs. The turkey took about 2:20 to cook, longer than I expected, but aside from the deepest part of the drumsticks, every bit of meat was still moist and juicy, and the white meat (usually pretty bland) had a nice flavor that didn’t require help from gravy. Speaking of which, I had plenty of pan drippings for a simple gravy – deglazed with a mixture of sherry (Amontillado!) and cognac, with a little chopped celery and rosemary in the pan, then boosted with homemade chicken stock and thickened with a flour/butter paste. It was very dark and strongly flavored, but delicious.

EDIT: One thing worth mentioning about AB’s cooking method is that during the first half-hour, the oil from the outside of the bird and some of the rendered fat from the bird itself run off and hit the bottom of the pan, which is at 500 degrees, so it smokes. While not good for the smoke alarm, it does end up briefly smoking the bird, so the turkey gets a little pink smoke ring all over the meat, and the drumsticks in particular have a texture a lot like a fully smoked turkey leg. Definitely good eats.

For dressing, I always use Joy of Cooking’s basic bread stuffing recipe, just adding one cup of chopped red bell pepper for flavor and color:

The keys here are always starting with a good-quality bread – I used the fresh Italian bread from Whole Foods, but any artisan bread would be fine – and using fresh herbs and, if you can, homemade chicken stock to moisten it. I grow parsley, sage, and thyme in my tiny backyard, so I had all three fresh and available, and I grind the cloves and grate the nutmeg fresh as well.

The sweet potatoes were another AB recipe, chipotle mashed sweet potatoes, kicked up with 2 Tbsp of brown sugar and about 1 Tbsp of cream:

I melt the cream and butter together in a small saucepan and dissolve the salt and brown sugar in it, just as I would do for mashed potatoes. You should never add cold butter or cream to hot potatoes of any sort, and using them to dissolve the salt and sugar helps distribute the seasonings more evenly throughout the mash.

The green bean casserole was, sadly, the one from the back of the can, because my wife insists on it:

I did throw about a half-teaspoon of hot sauce in there; it doesn’t make the finished dish spicy, but it adds an undertone of heat that I like and that no one complains about.

I make my own cranberry sauce; cranberries are very high in pectin and they gel pretty quickly. The rough rule of thumb is eight cups of fresh whole cranberries, three cups of sugar, and two and a half cups of water. I kick it up a few notches (sorry) by going with 1¾ cups of water, ½ cup of rum,

For bread, I skipped my usual sponge bread and made the white Irish soda bread recipe from Kevin Dundon’s Full on Irish cookbook:

Great texture, perhaps a bit too much buttermilk flavor for my tastes, so next time I might play with it and try a baking powder/milk combo instead of baking soda/buttermilk. Raglan Road, the Downtown Disney restaurant about which I raved earlier this month, is Dundon’s creation, and they serve a brown soda bread there (recipe also in that cookbook) that’s outstanding.

For dessert, I had already prepared and frozen an apple pie, using apples we picked ourselves in late September. You can prepare and freeze an unbaked pie without too much extra work – I have another one in the freezer for Christmas – and it allows you to get the fruit into the pie while it’s still in season. Baking is simple: don’t cut steam vents or glaze before freezing; glaze before baking; bake 10 minutes at 425°, then cut vents and bake 20 minutes more; then drop to 350° and bake until thick juices bubble up through the vents, about another hour. Anyway, the pie was a bit of a disappointment, as the flavor was bland. I think I used too little salt in the crust, although its texture was perfect (it’s the lattice-dough recipe from Baking Illustrated), and the filling probably needed a bit more lemon juice both for tartness and to emphasize the contrast with the sweetness. Apples are always a bit unpredictable in their sweet/tart ratio, and I missed this one a bit. Anyway, the obligatory picture, although the damn thing fell down between slicing and picture-taking:

I can’t emphasize enough how good that dough recipe is, though. Working with it is very easy, as it doesn’t tear or crack, and it’s flaky and tender when it’s baked.

One last hit is the beverage – every year, we make cranberry daiquiris (don’t laugh, they’re about 60% rum) based on a recipe that I could swear was in Bon Appetit but that has disappeared from epicurious.com. Since they seem to have lost interest, here’s my take on the recipe:

Dissolve 1/2 cup sugar in 1/2 cup water in medium saucepan over medium heat. Add 1 cinnamon stick, two or three whole cloves, and 1/2 teaspoon grated orange peel; bring to boil. Mix in 1/2 cup cranberries and cook until cranberries begin to pop. Cool; discard cinnamon. Pour mixture into jar; add 1/2 cup light rum. Refrigerate until fully chilled. Strain syrup into pitcher; reserve cranberries. Add 6 tablespoons each dark rum, light rum, orange juice, and lemon juice to pitcher. Chill. Serve over ice; garnish with reserved cranberries.

I use Gosling’s Black Seal rum for the dark rum and squeeze the orange and lemon juices myself. They’re very good and potent for a fruity drink, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I like the demon rum.

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A few random observations from the holiday:

• Love the AFLAC commercial using the Rudolph characters. Unfortunately, OfficeMax scooped them a few years ago with their Rubberband man spoof, which was almost as funny as the making-of video.

• More props to TIAA-CREF for using Bob Mould’s “See a Little Light,” one of my favorite songs ever in any genre, in their “Power of” commercial.
• Shouldn’t Les Miles be named Fewer Miles? Does Michigan really want to hire a coach whose own name is a grammatical error?