All atwitter (no, not that Twitter) with Tim's impending return from Armenia, I had big plans to greet him with a fancy meal of turkey roulade stuffed with swiss chard, pancetta, gruyere and arborio rice, using a recipe highlighted in the Thanksgiving issue of Food Network Magazine, complete with handy-dandy step-by-step photos. Despite the hand-holding and spoon-feeding provided by the magazine, in my incompetent hands, this recipe went very, very wrong.
I found boneless, skin-on turkey breasts at Whole Foods on the way home from the airport, but not one 3-4 lb breast like the recipe required. Instead I found two 1 3/4 lbs breasts, and figured I would make 2 roulades instead of one, no problem. However, when I got them out of their packages at home, they were strangely shaped, and one of them was actually in 2 pieces.
"Never fear!," I said to myself (actually, it was more like, "what the f%*$?!!!"), "we'll just make 3 mini roulades (roulettes?)" And I proceeded to begin flattening the turkey breasts so they could be wrapped around the tasty filling...
However, these proved to be unflattenable turkey breasts. After approximately 10 minutes of beating them silly, they were still 38-triple Ds, unwrappable, unrollable, un-rouladable.
So, after a few more choice 4-letter words about how much I hate turkey breasts, I made the executive decision (with Chuck's sage advice) to slap the roulette filling on top of the now misshapen turkey breasts, shove them in the oven and call it a day. This is how we ended up with open-faced turkey and swiss chard roulades.
It was supposed to look like this (Food Network's photo):
Ultimately mine looked like this:
Served with purple smashed potatoes and roasted broccoli.