Happy Thanksgiving!

Hope you have a good holiday!

Tim and I got a head start on the festivities by cooking a turkey and mini-Thanksgiving meal this past Sunday to ensure that we had leftovers.  We've also got a pot-luck party coming up on Thanksgiving itself with a bunch of folks we met here in Jakarta. 

Here's how we did our turkey... it was a bit of free wheelin', so bear with me:

• cleaned the bird up, salt and peppered the cavity
• stuffed it with half an onion (cubed), half a head of garlic (cut in half), half a lemon, a carrot (rough cut), a handful of fresh thyme, rosemary and sage
• rubbed it and stuffed the skin with a compound butter made with minced rosemary, sage and garlic, lemon zest, salt and pepper
• tied up the legs with a strip of foil, tucked the wings in
• put it in our pre-heated mini oven (adopted from Ben and Erin), which was at approximately 375 F, give or take
• let it brown a bit, then loosely covered it in foil
• let it cook for about 3 hours, taking off the foil again towards the end to brown it up again
• let it rest for 20 minutes while 

It came out pretty tasty!  Definitely not overcooked, definitely moist, definitely delicious.

We also had some great leftovers concoctions:

1. The most delicious leftovers sandwich ever: toasted bread spread with mayo on one side, cranberry sauce on the other, a thin layer of stuffing, mixed white and dark meat turkey, lots of lettuce and two pieces of bacon.  Awesome.  Like a Thanksgiving turkey club.

2. Turkey and white bean chili, made loosely based on this Martha Stewart recipe, with the addition of 2 chipotles in adobo, 2 cloves of garlic, and a handful of leftover stuffing to thicken it up.  I also left out the water because it looked far too liquidy already.  Pretty good, though!

Thanksgiving Part II: Overly-Optimistic Apple Pie and Biscuit Success

For our second Thanksgiving celebration here in Jakarta, I decided (in a very overly optimistic moment) that my contribution would be to make homemade apple pies, despite having virtually no kitchen equipment to speak of.  I also promised biscuits, which were a little bit more realistic.  The whole process was, shall we say, a learning experience, for several reasons.

The pies: 

I read about this method for making a fool-proof apple pie in the Washington Post last week, and, entranced by the article, I decided to make it without having read the recipe itself.  Oops.  Always read the recipe first.  This might be the most complicated recipe I've ever made: make the crust, let the crust sit, roll out the crust, freeze the crust, bake the crust... saute the apples, refrigerate the apples, put the apples in the crust, top the apples with the other crust, bake the whole pie. Soooo many steps.  After getting this complicated process started, I was having a lot of trouble getting the pie crust dough to stay together; it was so crumbly that it was unmanageable.  Sigh.  Ultimately the pies came together but the crust was ridiculously thick.  Not the best.  Some of it I blame on the recipe, some I blame on the kitchen conditions, such as:

1. The oven: temperature not so accurate, only heats from the bottom so the top doesn't get brown (and then when you turn on the broiler on the top, the top gets too brown).  Plus the timer on the oven is super fast (compared to Tim's iPhone, it was 3-4 minutes faster over the span of 10 minutes). 

 2. Counter space: I rolled out the pie crust on the dining room table.  Voila:

3. Cooking equipment: like I said, not ideal.  I bought disposable pie plates, but they could barely handle the weight of the pie, and the sides were a bit steep as well.

The biscuits:

Did you know that the KFCs in Jakarta don't have biscuits (or mashed potatoes, for that matter)?  Instead, they serve rice.  Ben and Erin were telling us how they miss biscuits, so I decided to make them for Thanksgiving.  The biscuits went much better than the pies.  

I had planned on using a recipe I'd used in the past, but when I went to the grocery store, the only flour they had was (inexplicably) specialty flour like whole wheat, bread flour and self-rising flour.  I bought the self-rising flour in the hopes that I could find a biscuit recipe that called for it... success!  I made the buttermilk version of this recipe from Gold Medal (no buttermilk to be found, but I used the old milk plus lemon juice trick).  Worked like a charm.  Also, I used butter rather than shortening.  I like buttery biscuits.

New Favorite Thanksgiving Dish: Pineapple Ritz Casserole

Erin cooked my new favorite, shamefully delicious Thanksgiving dish this year: pineapple Ritz cracker casserole.  

It's a total throwback, Americana dish in the same vein as, say, green bean casserole with crispy onions on top: butter, cheese, crushed Ritz cracker, canned pineapple.   It's sooooooo good- salty, sweet, buttery, crunchy.  I couldn't get enough (and my stomach is not happy about that).  

My new favorite dish... just above the turkey.  Not much to look at, but tastes so good.

I'm not sure exactly which recipe she used, but there are a million out there and they all seem to use the same basic ingredients.  Give it a try!

Thanksgiving Extravaganza: The Soup

Again, another traditional Thanksgiving ingredient done a slightly different way to keep it interesting, yet not freak people out: Thai-style butternut squash soup, care of Mark Bittman, The Minimalist.

Bittman advertised this soup as one of his make-ahead Thanksgiving sides, and while I didn't make it all ahead, I definitely did the time-consuming butternut chopping ahead. Super easy and really tasty... people seemed to like it, and the leftovers were good for lunch today!

Bittman's recipe read: "Simmer cubed winter squash, minced garlic, chili and ginger in coconut milk, plus stock or water to cover, until soft. Purée if you like. Just before serving, add chopped cilantro, lime juice and zest, and toasted chopped peanuts."

I did pretty much just that: equal parts ginger, garlic and chilis (about 3 TBS each), 2 butternut squashes, 2 cans of coconut milk, about 1- 1.5 C veggie broth, plus salt and white pepper. I squirted in some Sriracha at the end because I decided it wasn't quite spicy enough. I bet this would benefit from some fish sauce, but I left it out because of the vegetarians at the table. The garnishes are key though. Lots of lime!

Thanksgiving Extravaganza: The Appetizer

We weren't starting Thanksgiving too early in the day since Chuck and Mark were working, so I had to throw at least one appetizer out there to satiate the drunken/drinking masses. I saw this sweet potato "hummus" from Kim O'Donnel and thought it would be fun to serve a traditional Thanksgiving ingredient in a different way. We served the dip with pita chips.

Pretty good, although I think maybe it needed something else. Garlic? That would definitely bring it closer to true hummus. Perhaps roasted garlic. I shall try again sometime. Mark loved it, though, and that's enough for me.

Thanksgiving Extravaganza: The Turkey

So, here is the first of several recipes served at our pot-luck Thanksgiving: the main course was, of course, the turkey.

Our turkey was a farmer's market find, a broad-breasted bronze from Groff's Content Farm. We had a little bit of a panic earlier this week, when, after picking up said 19 pounder, our fridge crapped out. Luckily, Chuck and Tim were home and were able to scramble to transfer the turkey and our other perishables to Barbara's fridge, and the responsive folks from Trust appliance repair came to our rescue ASAP and fixed it up.

I used this dry-brine recipe from the New York Times Dining & Wine section... it appealed to me because of its simplicity and its lack of messy, sloshy brining liquid. Several other reliable sources also advertised dry brine recipes this year, so I figured it was worth a try. In the end, I may have overcooked the turkey a bit, but nothing a little gravy couldn't fix.