I love, love, love Thanksgiving. For 12 years, we’ve hosted Thanksgiving at our house for our phamily. All of us spend Christmas and other holidays with our families-of-birth, but this holiday is spent with friends we made in and after college. Folks come in from out of town, everyone takes a turn cooking, and most of the food is from within 50 miles or so. There are even several things I grow specifically for Thanksgiving dinner: rosemary, sage, potatoes, squash.

Here’s how we handle the bird.

1. Wednesday: Have dear friend (aka Turkeyfiend) drop off immense free-range, no-drugs, never-frozen hen at your house in cooler of ice.
2. Thursday morning: roll lazily out of bed, greet houseful of guests, laze around in PJs while nibbling on breakfast. Glance at the schedule which has become a permanent fixture on the fridge and remember that turkey-wrestling begins at 2pm. Remind yourself not to eat the pie yet.
3. Thursday, 2pm:
   1. Assemble seasonings: a bale of rosemary and sage from the garden, and a small bowl with 2-3Tbl of salt and 3-4 Tbl of ground poultry seasoning.
   2. Rinse out bird, set neck and giblets aside. Place turkey in clean roasting pan.
   3. Slide hand between breast meat and skin, loosening the membranes. Take handfuls of the dry seasonings and rub on meat. Evenly distribute fresh herbs between the meat and skin.
   4. Flip turkey over, cut slit in the skin of the turkey’s “hips,” and repeat the seasoning treatment on each thigh and leg.
   5. Place any remaining seasoning inside the cavity.
   6. Wrestle bird into turkey cooking bag.
4. Thursday, 2:45pm: place bird in 350 degree oven.
5. 4pm: First check of bird. Baste, if there are any juices yet.
6. 5pm: Second check of bird. Use thermometer. You want the thigh to be about 185 degrees; the breast will probably be closer to 165. Don’t baste it any more – the skin should be brown and crispy now.
7. When the bird it done, set the pan on the counter and start harvesting juices.
8. 5:30 or 6pm: Eat dinner. Bask in glow of happy Turkeyfiend.
9. 8:30 or 9pm: Figure you’ve finally got room for that pie.

What to do with the turkey juices:

1. Siphon them out with a bulb baster, and fill two or three tall, clear glasses. The fat will rise to the top.
2. Make gravy.
   1. Use some of the fat (enough to cover the bottom of the gravy pan) and an equal amount of flour to make a roux.
   2. Use the bulb baster to pull the juices from the bottom of the glass. For gravy, use roughly equal parts juice and water.
   3. Bring to a boil and allow to thicken.
   4. Adjust seasoning – it might need some salt, but the juices were well-seasoned in the turkey, so it won’t need much.
3. Make dressing.
   1. Use some of the fat to sautee the onions and celery.
   2. Mix juices with water in a large jar (1 part juice to 3-4 parts water; about a quart all together).
   3. Start adding chunks of stale bread to the onions and celery in the pan.
   4. Drizzle the thinned turkey juice over the bread until it’s soaked through.
   5. Adjust seasonings as needed; some fresh sage, rosemary, and extra salt is nice.
4. Now siphon off the remaining fat into freezer containers, and use it later to sautee meats or vegetables. (Remember, fat from healthy animals is waaaaaay better for you than fake fats like margarine.)
5. Put the last of the juices in the freezer, too; a pint of concentrated turkey juice plus water will make a quart or more of stock for homemade soup.

On Friday, break up the carcass and boil it in about 2 gallons of water for 3+ hours with some more salt and a couple bay leaves. Pack leftover meat and trimmings into lunch-sized portions and freeze.

On Saturday, pick the carcass clean, dice it up along with all the meat that hasn’t made it into lunches. Can the meat in pint jars and the stock in quart jars.

Eat the last of the pie.

Savory quick bread

I used a Joy of Cooking recipe for “olive nut quick bread” as the base for a bread to serve with soup tonight. No olives or nuts, just fresh rosemary and sage. It was a little dry and needed more flavor – more herbs, definitely, and maybe more salt. Or maybe it just really wanted to be a biscuit or something. If I get a recipe that works, I’ll share it; so far, it’s not worth sharing.

Pumpkin pasties

This picture is a total lie. It’s not a pumpkin pasty, and I didn’t make it. It’s an apple turnover, and my friend Kat made it from the recipe I linked to. But this is what the pumpkin pasty looked like, before I inhaled it without pausing to photograph it. Bad food blogger! No pasty for you! Um, or…not…

This recipe came from about six places at once. I’d made a version before for a Harry Potter-themed party, and they were good, but tedious (essentially rich sugar cookie dough filled with extra-thick pumpkin pie filling). Then, a week or so ago, a friend and I were musing about why no one makes a pumpkin pop tart. Wouldn’t that be awesome? With cinnamon icing? And I don’t even really like pop tarts. Then my brain flashed on the apple turnovers from October’s Preserving Traditions workshop, and it came to me: make a turnover with slices of butternut squash instead of apples! Not too sweet, so definitely pasty-like, and waaaaaaay easier than making pie filling and dough and assembling them.

I started with this recipe for turnover dough. Rolled it into a long oval. Dropped a spoonful of sugar/flour mix on the dough, then I sliced the neck of a small butternut squash into half-circles and placed them on top of that. Topped with cinnamon-sugar and a pat of butter, and baked for 35 minutes or so.

They were great!Definitely not-too-sweet (each one only had about a teaspoon of sugar), flaky, and yummy. The only thing I’d do differently is to use more cinnamon-sugar and coat each slice with it, so it was more evenly distributed. The version I did definitely had a very cinnamon-y spot and some spots that were just like baked squash.

Cabbage salad

I hate calling this “cole slaw” because that brings to mind such gloppy, horrible stuff. But chop a sweet, juicy cabbage into 1/4″ dice, add a shredded carrot, and maybe some slivered pickled radishes, and dress with a dressing of equal parts cider vinegar, oil, and mustard-horseradish pickle juice (plus some salt and  a squirt of mustard), and you have a thoroughly addictive salad that beats out field greens any day.

I’ve just done a write-up of our pickling event for Preserving Traditions. Follow the link for instructions on how to make old-fashioned, lactofermented pickles. It’s really easy and oh-so-tasty!

I’m starting to think that maybe – just perhaps – I have planted too many cucumbers this year. I’ve never grown them before, and I had no idea what kind of yields, I’d get, so I put 3 “tomato” cages in a 3′x6′ bed and planted 2 cucumber plants (var: Little Leaf from Johnny’s) on each side of the square cages. Not all 24 plants came up, but I’d guess 15 or so did.

We are now harvesting, on average, a quart of pickle-sized cucumbers a day. I only harvest every 2-3 days, so I’m usually getting at least 2 quarts every time I pick. We eat very few cukes fresh, so we’ve been making a LOT of pickles. Here are a few we’ve liked:

• Half-sours – probably our favorite, definitely our “go-to” pickle. Just cukes, garlic, bay, peppercorns, and dill, covered with salt brine and fermented.
• Hungarian summer pickles – not bad, once we added some garlic, but they often taste…fizzy. Literally like there’s carbonation inside the pickles.
• Vinegar garlic dills – first batch had a little too much vinegar and haven’t tasted the second batch yet, but these are closest to Scott’s favorite store-bought pickles
• Mustard/horseradish dills – FABULOUS. Maybe my new favorite pickle…my sweetie hasn’t tried them yet and I hope he hates them.

Weirdo pickles

The following were Pickles of Desperation, made when we just couldn’t think of what else to make. We actually haven’t tried most of these yet…I’ll let you know if they’re any good.

• Curry pickles – these were actually quite good. Fermented in salt brine, with a tablespoon of curry powder and a teaspoon each of whole corriander, cumin, and black pepper
• “Kitchen sink” pickles – faced with too much vinegar brine and too many jars with spices already in them and not enough cucumbers, we frantically searched the kitchen for anything we could pickle. The result? A pint of pickled kohlrabi, and two mixed pints of kohlrabi, cabbage, carrots, and apples. We plan to serve it with pork.
• “Thanksgiving” pickles – fermented with garlic, sage, rosemary, and chives.
• Thai basil-chili pickles – lots of Thai basil, 2 chili peppers, and garlic

Lessons learned

• Cherry tree leaves work better than grape leaves for keeping pickles crunchy
• We like them sized 2-3″ best. At 4″, they can’t keep their crunch, and larger than that, you really have to cut them into “coins.” (I do flavor experiments with these bigger pickles. If the flavor works out, we’ll do it again with tiny premium cukes.)
• If fermented pickles don’t taste fabulous after 3-4 days, just leave them out of the fridge another couple days. The flavors will continue to develop a *lot*.
• Wear sturdy gloves when picking cucumbers!

This time of year, I take most Fridays off to work in the garden and put up the harvest. This helps keep it somewhat fun, and keeps me from getting totally burned out.

Yesterday, I harvested the first zucchini and potato from the garden, so I decided to make these for breakfast. They take some time but are really easy.

Zucchini-potato pancakes

• 1 medium zucchini
• 1 large potato (you should have equal parts zuke and potato)
• 1 small onion
• 2 Tbl flour
• 1 egg
• Salt
• Dill (optional)
• Oil for frying

Shred the zucchini, potato, and onion. Sprinkle well with salt and put it in a sieve to drain for about half an hour. This is really important – if you don’t do this, the pancakes will be too wet and will steam into mush rather than frying up crispy.

After 20-30 minutes, squeeze as much water as you can out of the veggies. It’ll be a funky brown color; no worries – that’s just the potato starch reacting to the air. Put the veg shreds in a bowl, add some more salt, the flour, egg, and dill (or any other herbs or spices you like).

Heat a frying pan (cast iron is the best) and a couple tablespoons of oil. (I used bacon fat I’d been saving in the fridge.) When it’s hot, drop about 1/4 to 1/2 cup of the batter into the pan and shape it into a pancake about 1/4″ thick. Fry until golden on one side (6-7 minutes) then flip over and cook until it’s done (another 6-7 minutes).

The best topping for these, in my opinion, is raw sauerkraut. The plain cakes are a little bland, but the salt and crunch of the kraut makes them shine!

Seven people joined us at the Preserving Traditions event at the Grange last Sunday to learn to make yogurt and granola. Yogurt, as a process, takes time but not much attention once the milk has come up to temperature. Granola is also easy, though you really need to watch the timer once it goes into the oven.

We made half a gallon of plain yogurt and three batches of granola: pineapple/coconut, sesame/currant, and “the kitchen sink” with wonderful crispy walnuts, sesame seeds, and several kinds of dried fruit. Even after our yogurt parfait buffet, there was plenty for each person to take home.

There’s lots of variation in recipes for both yogurt and granola. The instructions below are a good set of guidelines – don’t be afraid to play with them a bit to suit your taste.

Yogurt

1. Heat one or two quarts of milk to 180 degrees. If you don’t have a thermometer, heat it until just before it boils. You want steam and a few bubbles, but not actual boiling.
2. Cool it to 110 degrees – just barely warm to the touch.
3. Take about 1/2 cup of milk out and dissolve your starter. You can use prepackaged starter or existing yogurt.
4. Add the starter back to the big pot of milk and mix thoroughly.
5. Pour into containers and keep warm for 4-8 hours. We used a cooler with a hot pack – you can use any method you can think of to keep the jars at around 90-100 degrees.
6. Once it’s thickened, store in the fridge.

Yogurt notes:

• You can use any kind of milk: skim, whole, creamtop, powdered, ultra-pasteurized, and even soy.
• There’s a lot of variation using yogurt as starter. Best results come from homemade yogurt started with packaged starter, but you can also use Dannon plain yogurt – about 2-3 Tbl per quart of milk.
• The thickening of the yogurt comes from keeping it warm during the incubation period.
• The yogurt will reach maximum tartness (and lowest lactose levels) after 3-4 days.
• It’ll keep at least 2 weeks in the fridge.

Granola

You can mix an match any flavor combination you like, but keep these proportions roughly equal:

• 5 cups dry ingredients: rolled oats, other rolled grains, puffed grain cereal
• 1 cup nuts or seeds
• 1/2 cup oil plus 1/2 cup honey or other sweetener
• 1 cup dried fruit and/or coconut

Method of assembly:

1. In a large bowl, mix together all the dry ingredients and the nuts.
2. Heat the honey and oil until it’s very liquid.
3. Pour the honey and oil over the dry ingredients and stir to coat thoroughly.
4. Bake at 350 for about 25 minutes, stirring every 5-10 minutes.
5. When the nuts start to get toasty, or the oats start to brown, remove from oven.
6. Stir in the fruit and coconut while it’s still warm.
7. Cool and eat!

I’m not going into the details here, because this is not a “dear diary” kind of blog, but oh my, has a lot of Life Been Happening lately. My main task has been to keep my head above water, and if I have any left, those of my loved ones, so blogging…not so important lately.

In lieu of writing full posts on all the things I could be writing about, I give you a List of Stuff. Details may be forthcoming on some of them; if one intrigues you, let me know and I can bump it up in the queue.

Listiness:

• Lentil pie: carrots, onions, and broccoli (pick a different 3rd veg next time) topped with seasoned lentils (not very soupy) and a layer of diced potatoes. Sprinkle top with salt, pepper, paprika, and garlic and a good spray of olive oil. Bake at 400 for 35 mins. Nummy.
• Preserving Traditions continues to rock. We made yogurt and granola today, and it was intensely gratifying when we got to the sampling part of the day that the only noise was the clanking of spoons and the occasional grunted “Mmmm, tha’s good!”
• A local cooking angel will be doing a small fundraiser dinner for PT in June. Details as they become available…
• Found a 17-piece Farberware set for $99 after rebate today. Bought one and will split with the Grange.
• Food allergy testing is a pain in the neck, but going ok.
• I still have candy left from the awesome schmawesome Easter basket I got this year.
• This town is full of brilliant, visionary, hard-working local food entrepreneurs. Soon, there may be local sauerkraut, kimchee, kombucha, and other fermented wonderfulnesses!
• The peas in the greenhouse are up to my HIP. Spinach, lettuce, and a couple leaves of kale have been harvested.
• In 2 hours this morning, I got the screenhouse and the strawberry bird netting up. They both need some tweaking, but they’re mostly ready. The number of garden infrastructure projects is down to 1 necessary and 4 would-be-nice projects, so that’s a huge relief.
• I can plant the rest of the garden (almost) any time now.
• I can now tie a bow hitch knot with one hand, thanks to a workshop at the cool weekend event I went to. It was my first NRA-subsidized event, but I didn’t learn to shoot because all those workshops were full by the time I registered.
• I made my first solar-cook-while-at-work dinner: split pea soup. Just set everything up before work, and it was soup when we got home. Amended with a couple quick sides and dinner took 15 minutes and almost no cleanup.
• There are volunteer squashes growing in the new middle garden. I think they are from the jack-o-lanterns that were composted out there last fall!
• Gonna frost tonight; we’ll see if those Contender beans I’ve been saving are as frost-hardy as they seemed to be two years ago.

This recipe changes several things I don’t like about regular lasagna. I’ve never much liked ricotta cheese, and I’m avoiding most dairy these days, anyway, so this is a dairy-free lasagna. It’s also got a lot of vegetables, and can be made as a vegetarian lasagna. Finally, it eliminates the need to cook noodles before assembly, and it’s way cheaper than using store-bought fresh lasagna noodles. You can even make it a low-carb lasagna by using single layers of noodles instead of the double layers.

Egg Roll Wrapper Lasagna – Makes two 5″x9″ loaf pans or one 9″x13″ baking dish (8 servings total)

Noodles/sauce

• 1 package egg roll wrappers (about 20 wrappers)
• 1 jar or large can prepared tomato sauce (28 -32 oz )

Meat layer, variation 1 (use only one variation per recipe)

• 1/2 lb ground beef (use soy crumbles, or omit and add another can of beans for vegetarian version)
• 1 can (2c) black beans, drained
• 1 small onion, diced
• Dried Italian herb blend (oregano, sage, rosemary, etc.)
• Salt to taste

Meat layer, variation 2

• 1/2 lb sausage crumbles (use soy crumbles, or omit and add another can of beans for vegetarian version)
• 1 can (2c) white beans, drained
• 1 small onion, diced
• Dried Italian herb blend (oregano, sage, rosemary, etc.)
• Salt to taste

Vegetable layer

• 6 c vegetables, including any of the following
  • Shredded carrots (I usually use at least half carrots)
  • Shredded cabbage
  • Diced cauliflower
  • Diced eggplant
  • Shredded zucchini
  • Onion
• 2 Tbl olive oil
• Salt and spices to taste

Assembly

1. Cook all the ingredients for your meat layer in a frying pan. If you’re not using meat, bump up the spices and salt. This should be tasty on its own – in fact, the white bean/sausage stuff would make a meal on its own, or tossed with pasta or rice, and served with a nice salad.
2. Lay out your lasagna pan(s) and sauce. Lightly coat the bottom of the pans with sauce.
3. Add a layer of egg roll wrappers one layer thick. (In a loaf pan, just fold the edges of the noodles over to make them fit.) Top with more sauce.
4. Spread the meat mixture for the next layer, and top with a double layer of noodles* and sauce.
5. Now use the same frying pan to lightly cook your vegetables. Leave them a little crisp, since you’ll be baking this later. And remember to adjust the seasonings so this mixture tastes good on its own – don’t rely on the sauce to give all the flavor.
6. Spread the vegetable layer and top with a double layer of noodles* and sauce.
7. If you have ingredients left, you can make a third layer – perhaps a mixed meat/veg layer. Or, if you must have cheese, add it here.
8. Top with a final double layer of noodles and sauce. If you can, be extra generous on the sauce on top to keep the noodles from drying out.

By some magic, this uses up all the ingredients and doesn’t leave me short…most of the time. YMMV.

Baking

If you made two lasagnas, cover one with foil and put it in the freezer at this point. Bake the other one at 350 for about 45 minutes until it’s heated through. Also works very well in a solar cooker at 250-350 degrees – check for doneness after an hour at 250. If you’re baking a frozen lasagna, best let it thaw 2 days in the fridge first and then bake, or the middle will be frozen when the outside is done.

* Use only one layer of noodles for fewer carbs and calories

Sorry. No photo. It’s all in mah belly! *mmmm*

Last night, I was in a cooking mood. After dinner, I roasted bones and made beef stock, and I made a fruit custard dessert inspired by seeing the beautiful peaches and blueberries from Locavorious in the freezer next to the stock fixins.

A couple times a year, I really crave custard. I wonder if they’re all this time of year? Winter’s been full of starch and beans…kind of low on richness still cold enough that stick-to-the-ribs sounds perfect. So I cruised the Joy of Cooking (mid 70s edition) until I came upon a dessert that combined custard and fruit. It was originally a fruit and sour cream custard pie, but I pulled it apart a bit and got yogurt-based custard with fruit. It was also astoundingly easy to make.

• Beat 3 eggs
• Add 3/4 c yogurt (plain)
• Add 1/2 c sugar (or less; this was pretty sweet)

That’s it for your custard. You can bake this in a water bath and just put the fruit on top, or:

• Make a crust of some sort. I used 1/4 c flour, 1/4c oatmeal, a pinch of baking powder, and enough oil and coconut shortening to hold it together. This was pressed into a baking dish about 10×6.
• Cover the crust with the fruit.
• Pour in the custard. I had a ramekin of custard left over.
• Bake at 325 for 40 minutes. I had to poke the top of mine because the top had cooked solid and the inside was still liquid, probably because I was baking it in the toaster oven and thus too close to the heating element.

It was amazingly good. Custards often taste “thin” to me, and with my dairy issues, I’ve tried using soy or rice milk. (Don’t ever bother with rice milk custard, trust me…). Yogurt’s much easier on my system, and I really like the tang it adds to the custard. At times, I’d swear a spoonful was lemon, vanilla, or maple-flavored, but I hadn’t put anything in but eggs, yogurt, and sugar.

And it’s funny:  I hadn’t thought about this at all, but I had some serious dental work done this morning, and custard was the perfect food for me today! Sadly, it’s all gone now, and I will have to find something else to eat.

Or just make another one… *grin*

Something I read quite often these days is “We really just eat meat as a condiment.” I know, in theory, that this means meat is not the center of every meal, but what I want to know is, what does that look like? If you perceive yourself as “not eating a lot of meat,” how many ounces are we talking about? Four ounces per serving? Two ounces in a six-serving casserole? Six ounces instead of ten, and lots of vegetables on the side? A shaving of prosciutto sprinkled on like parsley?

Tell me – or better yet, show me – what you consider to be “not very much meat.” Actual weights and number of servings would be much appreciated. What kinds of meat work best for this manner of omnivory?