Patriot Stew

For reasons we won't go into, I spent much of the Fourth of July making slow-cooker stews. When the sweat dried a bit, I wrote a bit of a story about it. If I were normal, I'd tell you I hadn't turned the stove on since, but Sunday's rendered lard would give that the lie. Still, I think I sweated out my meat cravings for quite a while.

Every year around the beginning of July, I get the urge to roast a turkey. 98 degree days and beckoning beaches be damned; I hear the siren gobble of rich gamey gravy, sweet potatoes, and tart cranberry sauce. The source of these cravings remains shrouded in mystery, but I’ve always assumed it had some connection to the start of the summer vegetable explosion at the farmer’s market--an immediate urge to celebrate the harvest.

Since I don’t work for a major food magazine (the best excuse to roast turkeys out of season), and don’t own an air conditioner, an actual early Thanksgiving is not an option. This ‘Patriot Stew’ is the perfect answer, a celebration of New World ingredients in slow-cooker style.

Cheap and delicious, bone-in turkey thighs shine in the slow cooker. They cook down tender and flavorful without any risk of drying out. Tart dried cherries stand in for cranberries, and sweet potatoes, poblano chiles, and corn play themselves in their traditional roles. In keeping with the American-born theme, I used Six Point Righteous Ale for the braising liquid, but any assertive ale will work.

Just brown the onions, chop a few vegetables, pour in the beer and you’re free to spend all day at the beach. Have a beer for yourself while you’re at it. It may not be the traditional hot dog, but a bowl of this all-American stew with a tart green salad is a sparkling accompaniment to fireworks in the cool of the evening.

Slow-Simmered Sunday Mole Poblano

The weekend was long, sunny, and sweet. Some good friends got married, and many more came in from out of town. I had been so busy for the weeks leading up to this event that I had categorized it in my mind as just one more appointment, one more place I had to make sure to be. From the moment I stepped, covered in flour, into the restaurant where the rehearsal dinner took place, I shifted gears, and found myself in a joyful, emotional, festive place, that carried me through the weekend.

As much as the festivities themselves, I always treasure the slow, sleepy wake of a major holiday or occasion. As Sunday's bright, short afternoon hurried toward its early darkness (oh, the daylight we save), I let all appointments and high heeled shoes and family speeches and sweaty horas and welcome guests just float and simmer in my mind, and at the same time I simmered a batch of mole poblano. I thought about my grandfather, as I always do on marathon day, and his joyous gusto and wooden though enthusiastic palate. My grandfather, who began running marathons after his first bypass surgery, thought no challenge insurmountable and no new friend too far away. I think of living with him his second to last summer in New York, of his laughing face in the fall leaves of his house upstate, and of the late-fall sun filtering through the blinds of his hospital room as my father and I sat with him and watched the marathon pass us by. Now that I think of it, he and my grandmother may have been indirectly responsible for my first taste of mole.

My love affair with the smoky, chocolately, slow-burning black gold that is mole poblano began many years ago, at a touristy but talented upper west side restaurant called Mama Mexico. Recommended to my grandparents by a friend, it was also a good place for any kind of dinner party. I fell hard for their mole enchiladas, garnished with radishes and sesame seeds, their silly mariachi band, and their tall margaritas. Mama Mexico remained a popular birthday dinner spot during college, and since then, I've sampled many moles, but few as elegant as theirs. These days, I take my mole any way it comes, but I've never had much success in making it. To be fair, few people who aren't Mexican grandmothers really give it a go, as it involves an infinite ingredient list and many toasting, blending, frying, mashing, and simmering steps. I remember an abortive attempt in college, involving plantains, that didn't go very well, but I've never tried it since. I've ordered it, bought it in jars, received gifts of it from family members (my father has a particular fondness for Oaxaca, Mexico's debateable mole capital), but steered clear of any real urge to make it again, until this month's Saveur came in the mail.

After brief flirtations with Martha Stewart Living, Bon Appetit, and Gourmet, I decided over a year ago that Saveur was the only food magazine that I wanted to subscribe to. Although I was only occasionally inspired to cook from it, the writing was thoughtful and literate, and the photography overwhelmingly impressive. This, I decided, was the thinking cook's food porn. But, as I said, I only rarely actually cook from the magazine. Something about Rick Bayless's recipe for turkey breast in mole poblano caught my eye, though, and with the solid backing of my overstocked kitchen (make the spice cabinet sit up and take notice), and the promise of a lazy Sunday afternoon, I realized that I had almost everything I needed on hand. Projects that would have intimidated me 10 years ago now seemed well within the realm of possibility. The desireability of mole was never in question, it's the rich dark background to my foodie dreams.

I did make one change to the recipe, which may perhaps actually have nudged it in a more authentic direction. Instead of braising a breast in the sauce, I braised boneless turkey thighs from DiPaola Turkey Farm. I also halved the recipe, which gave me a giant dutch oven full of the stuff (i.e. plenty). There will be leftovers, so I may try braising other things, or making some tamales with the rest of the thighs in my freezer. Mole and turkey are made for one another, and the combination is made for rainy fall days. My father has also requested that a small amount be frozen for him to authenticate, being the final authority on all things Oaxacan.

My hands and kitchen were too messy to take process photos, which is a shame, as it was a process with a capital P. Spices were toasted, ground (in my new mortar!) and pureed with bread, tortillas, onions, tomatillos, and tomatoes; chiles were fried, soaked and pureed, and the two purees, one yellow, one deep red, were mingled, simmered with stock, and then baked with the thighs. Much blending and sieveing was done by all. Many noses were burned by chiles. As per the dictates of the pantry, I used fewer pumpkin seeds than called for, subbed almonds for walnuts, guajillo and mulato chiles for pasilla and ancho, and added a dab of tahini to replace the missing sesame seeds.

The recipe for this Sunday simmer can be found at on Saveur's website. Keep in mind that it makes a great deal, enough to feed all your hungry friends and loved ones, a tribe of starving marathoners, or just yourself after a long, quiet Sunday.

French Fridays with Dorie: Hachis Parmentier and my Beef Block

AKA post number one million about how much I love DiPaola Turkey Farm.

Hachis Parmentier, the French answer to the English shepherd's or cottage pie. Usually made with boiled (simmered! simmered! shouts John Thorne in my head) beef and sausage and vegetables, and freshly mashed potatoes, but seeing that it's a down-home, peasant dish, I felt free to adapt it to what was in the house.

Perhaps because I wasn't raised cooking it, or because of all the problems inherent in buying 'good' meat, I have issues buying beef. I'd like to say I don't easily eat that high on the food chain, both literal and metaphorical. Beef has a kind of weight that birds just don't seem to in the American food imagination, and it kind of scares me most of the time. I don't like to buy it, though I'll happily eat it if it's served.

In this case, the meats became boneless turkey thighs and turkey sausage (from DiPaola, where else? I love you DiPaola Turkey Farm). The pototoes were recycled from a batch of roasted fingerlings that made it to a Sunday dinner table too late to tempt overloaded appetites. I mashed them up skins and all and made it work. Sprinkled with some mixed cheese, it was just the kind of food that Matt often asks to have in the refrigerator, a heat and eat, hearty dish, that didn't last long.

Turkey Carnitas

I do, occasionally, cook things other than bread. Meat!

For reasons political, health-related, and financial, I've been a little more wary about buying meat lately.  We do eat it, but we really don't want to be eating factory-farmed or processed products, for all of the obvious reasons. (We're not perfect, we sometimes buy eggs across the street, or Boars Head turkey, but we are really trying not to.) I won't go deep into what should be well-known by now, nor into the obvious equation that eating more expensive meat means that we eat less of it, but one of the effects of these choices is that the meat I buy most frequently has become turkey from DiPaola Turkey Farm, makers of our favorite sausage and purveyers of affordable, delicious everything.

Actually, I don't know a whole lot about DiPaola's breeds or farming practices, I tend to trust that they're all right because they show up at the farmer's market. Writing this, that seems a little credulous, so I'll look into it and get back on that one, but at the moment, I'm making recipes for everything from chicken to beef to pork with turkey legs and thighs. The man at the market suggested I beat and bread boneless thighs, scallopine-style, but I have yet to do this. Mostly, I've been making stews and braises.

The other night, I used turkey legs to try a recipe for a dish that's been mildly obsessing me--carnitas. I got my general ingredient profile and tips on technique from Molly Stevens' book All About Braising. Stevens' careful, detailed, step by step instructions let me feel free to use what I had in the house and basically do whatever I wanted.

First, I seasoned and browned the legs, and at the same time roasted garlic, a few chiles, and canned tomatoes for a paste. I pureed the blistered vegetables, adding salt, cumin, smoked paprika, quince paste, oil, and a little water. Following Stevens' lead, I then burned some onions and added the paste in to cook with them for a while. Needing more liquid, I added some red wine and a little more water. I poured the sauce over the legs, covered the dish with parchment and foil (which felt wasteful, next time I'll use a dish with a top, and baked in a 300 degree oven for about two hours, turning once halfway through.

The legs, which were still half-frozen when they went in the oven, were fully cooked and easily sliced through with a spoon after the two hours, but to make them carnita-like, I turned up the oven to 350 and continued to cook, uncovered, for another half hour. The result was perfect texture, just slightly roasted, fall-apart moist meat. The taste was also good, though surprisingly mild. Next time I would considerably up the chile quotient, and maybe some of the other spices. Still, we've been eating it all week, over ginger scallion noodles, over potatoes, right off the bone...As you can see from the picture below, the dish also yielded a lot of turkey fat, one of my favorite cooking fats when I can get it, which will make some future risotto or kasha or pot of beans very happy. First carnitas effort a success. And I'm still obsessed with the general technique, so there will probably be more soon.

Doesn't it rest your eyes to see something other than bread and cake pictured? I promise, vegetables abound, and I'll let you see one soon. For now, just go back through all those CSA roundups if you can't wait.

Ben Franklin's National Bird

Ben Franklin, my librarian hero, and the oldest father of our country, was said to have championed the humble turkey as the national bird. Although it lost the official fight, I'd like to honor his wishes and toast to this Independence Day in the true Pilgrim style. As I sit here typing this on Cape Cod, where lightning is striking houses and clam boats all over the place, and simply majestic turkey lives just up the road at the farm, I'd like to take a moment to honor the glorious fourth by telling you about my own turkey triumph.

For a long time now, I've been a fervent fan of DiPaola Turkey Farm, that bunch always grilling spicy sausage at farmers markets all over town. Their sausage is excellent, their soup parts are very reasonable, and they raise their turkeys sustainably.

Last week, I splurged and left packaged wings and necks far behind. I got myself a whole turkey. I was inspired by several things:

First, my love of bigger and better in all forms. Who wants to be un-American?

Second, Kenny Shopsin's book Eat Me, where he speaks lovingly of roasting a daily turkey in the days when Shopsin's was a grocery store. That just tweaked some primal need to turkey-roast in me, and released that need from its usual November time-trap.

Third, the encouragement of friends. Stacey roasted a turkey breast from DiPaola the week before, and raved until I just couldn't be left out. (I actually went planning to buy a breast, but switched the plan when I saw how small the price differential was between bone in breast and full 12-lb turkey, and realized how much I wanted to do the whole bird anyway.

And, fourth, the love of the challenge. Due to the nature of how my family celebrates Thanksgiving, I have never actually roasted a turkey before, or even really been party to any part of the roasting process until last year. My grandmother's garlic infused, apricot-nectar basted turkey is outstanding, but it's usually portioned before I even appear in town. Last year, I helped my mother with her new project, a 'Judy turkey,' named for Judy Rogers of the Zuni cafe, and pre-salted in what has become Rogers' signature approach to meats. By helped, I mean looked at while it was in the oven.

Clearly the time had come for me to grow up and roast my own turkey. I hoped it would be at least reasonably cost efficient as well. I tried very hard to demystify the process, which often gets whipped into a frenzy of complication around Thanksgiving, and which some people regard with the awed fear more proper to the negotiation of international climate change treaties. If this worked, I wanted to feel comfortable roasting turkey on a semi-regular basis, and enjoying it more than once a year. So I tried not to be overly ceremonious about the process, although for reasons out of my control, that didn't entirely succeed.

As for technique. I did salt and pepper the turkey the afternoon of the day before I roasted it. I just rubbed unmeasured handfuls of salt on whatever surface I could reach, laid it on a rack in a large roasting pan, and covered it in the refrigerator. The next day, I uncovered it in the morning and left it to dry a bit in the fridge, still on its rack. There are few kitchen sights more subtly unnerving than a giant turkey uncovered and without any mitigating barriers of plastic or foil, just reposing in your refrigerator. Just before cooking I added a few more garlic cloves under the skin and stuffed most of a large onion and a few withered bits of lemon into its cavity. I also rubbed the skin with a small amount of butter.

When I returned home at night, I consulted a few basic books for helpful turkey methods. As usual in things of this kind (hearty, homey, all-American and slightly out of the way for the average modern householder), The Joy of Cooking was the most businesslike and helpful guide.

They suggested a few basic methods of roasting, some at a low, slow, heat, one at a fast, high, heat. Since I've had a lot of success with the high heat chicken roasting technique (via, who else, Judy Rogers), and since the turkey was small enough to manage the repeated turning that this method requires, I decided to go for it, despite my previous encounters with hot spattering fat, my oven, and our poorly ventilated smoke alarm.

In order to succeed at the high heat roasting method, the turkey is placed directly in the roasting pan, (no rack), and arranged so that one leg is on the bottom and the other faces up. It looks hilarious, like it is demurely reclining. Positioning turkeys is an excellent exploratory investigation into how much, exactly, you want to mock your food.It goes into a preheated 450 degree oven, on a low rack. It roasts for 30 minutes on the first side, 30 flipped right over, and then thirty more on each side, followed by about twenty minutes of breast crisping. I skipped the last 30 minutes of leg browning because it was starting to seem very done, and just finished up with the breast a little early. This was a good instinct, as the final was perfectly done. Holding out for the whole roasting time might have been too much. Very soon in the roasting process, our evil smoke alarm decided to participate very decisively, and since there's no way to disable or turn it off for more than a few minutes, what could have been a leisurely roast became a drill-precision group project. I wielded the scowl and the oven door, rolling turkeys with a mitt on each fist, Matt manned the smoke alarm, and Sophie kibitzed.

Matt took a bunch of great pictures of the finished beast before I dismembered it. Raw or roasted, they're still hilarious (see above), and somewhat lewd. I'd like to think Franklin would have been proud.

Turkey & Bones

Warning, this post contains pictures that may be disturbing to vegetarians. Read on at your own risk.

Ok, so the pictures weren't that risky, but some people just don't like turkey neck, and what I had the other day was a serious amount of just that.
We bought a package of turkey necks from our favorite farmers market vendor, DiPaola Turkey Farm. In attempting to find a picture or a website to link to, I just discovered that they're a pretty popular operation, endorsed by the likes of Ed Levine, but that they have no website so you'll have to make it out to the market to see them yourself. They're usually frying fantastic sausage, so they shouldn't be hard to locate.

In an attempt to wean myself off all sausage all the time, I wanted the necks to make soup. Simmering for several hours with onion, celery, carrots, and bay, I got a couple of quarts of a nice stock (not too rich, should have used less water), and found myself the next morning at 9am contemplating a bowl of boiled necks. Like a good Jewish cook, I can't leave a carcass alone until I've stripped it down, so 45 minutes later I had this:
Now what shall I make? Tacos?