Thanksgiving: Help me! Barefoot Contessa

Thanks to the Barefoot Contessa, I really was able to assemble a pretty stress-free Thanksgiving dinner. Aside from the desserts I posted and my favorite creamy Brussels spouts, I followed the recipes for:

A mushroom and leek bread pudding.
This is a nice alternative to stuffing, but I might just serve the sauteed leeks and mushrooms with tarragon as a dish by itself. Once it was baked with the bread and eggs, the flavors became a bit muddy. Before, the mushrooms were super good.

Spinach Gratin
A tasty dish and a bit more elegant than creamed spinach. Very very rich. I might add an egg or two next time so that it comes together a little better.

Some friends brought the Mashed and Sweet potatoes, as well as a bunch of steamed vegetables, and a fabulous Cranberry Orange Sauce from Martha Stewart.

As for the Turkey. Its not so easy to get good fresh turkey here. I've occasionally seen organic ones from France, but more often than not, these have been frozen multiple times and don't taste very nice.
I usually just go with a butterball, better cold chain-consistency.  I brined it overnight with allspice, ginger, sage, cloves, garlic, and onions and roasted it at 170 for 20min per pound. It was nice and moist, but definitely left me craving a 'closer to the ground' bird.

Thanksgiving: Brussels Sprouts Alfredo

Its not shaping up to be a super-healthy meal so I thought I'd break the bank with these delicious Brussels Sprouts.

2lbs Brussels Sprouts, cleaned and quartered
1/2 cup whole milk
1/2 cup cream
1/2 cup Pecorino Romano cheese (you could use Parmesan, but I like the stronger flavor of Romano here.)
3 cloves garlic finely chopped
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper
6 or 8 sun-dried tomatoes (chopped)

In a large bowl toss all your ingredients except about 2tbsp cheese and the sun-dried tomatoes. Pour them into a 10"x2" pan (are you sensing a theme here?). Bake at about 350 for 30 min uncovered (to get some brown on them) and 30 min covered. Uncover and top with tomatoes and cheese. Let bake 10min more or until cheese is thoroughly melted and just beginning to brown on top.

Thanksgiving: Pumpkin custard

Baby Chuck and I just made pumpkin custard.

2 cans pumpkin puree
1 roasted sweet potato
4 eggs
1 cup milk
1 cup cream
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup maple syrup or (date syrup if you are in the UAE)
1 tsp cinnamon

1 cup whipping cream
2 tsp sugar
1tsp vanilla extract or (rum if you are in America)

1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1/4 cup maple syrup or (date syrup if you are in the UAE)

Mix your walnuts and syrup in a small bowl- set aside
Whip the whipping cream with the sugar and vanilla until it holds firm peaks. Refrigerate

In a blender, combine the pumpkin, potato, eggs, milk, cream, sugar, syrup & cinnamon. Pour into well greased 10"x2" baking pan. Bake at 350 for approximately 40 minutes or until top is browned and custard is pulling away from sides. Serve cold with whipped cream and nuts in syrup.

American supper

We had our good-bye America supper the other night. Suddenly, my boys love mashed potato. They were never very interested in eating it before, but they are now. (Except for baby Chuck who says it 'looks like paste', impeccable logic that one...)
The menu:
A roasted chicken. In keeping with my pesto turkey idea from Thanksgiving, I made a paste of caper, lemon, garlic and olive oil (use a knife or mortar and pestle, don't go electric, capers get bitter) and rubbed this under the skin of the chicken, I also spatchcocked it to cut down on cook time (cut out the backbone- there's a link under ~food blog fun~ to Gwyneth Paltrow showing you how to do this).
Mashed potato. Just steamed them until fork tender and mashed them up with some butter. Ok, a lot! of butter, a bit of milk and some garlic powder. I can't wait to make mashed potato with garlic cream here in Dubai...
Steamed green beans. Topped with a dash of sesame oil, some sesame seeds and a bit of soy sauce.
Salad of AMERICAN golden raisins (which I forgot to pack for Dubai, DARN!), apple chunks, almonds and some maytag blue cheese over romaine. With a vinaigrette.
And APPLE CRUMBLE for dessert.
Now its time for me to be in Dubai and repeat over and over that I will do Yoga every day and eat mostly vegan food and attend mass regularly and be generally sound in mind and body.... until Christmas or until I am completely seduced by siren song of the 4lbs of cured meats, 10 bottles of wine and 3lbs of cheese my DH ported over here from Venice and Milan....

Easy Thanksgiving Turkey

Thanksgiving is a mixed bag for me emotionally. Suffice it to say that yes, the holidays are the worst, especially the further out you get.
Still made a Turkey though...
Skipped the small, scary Syrian ones (now with extra feathers and blood!) and went for a shiny clean frozen Butterball. I know, I know, not regional, not carbon friendly, probably filled to the brim with the hormones but yeah, it was damn delicious.

For the turkey: Once you have washed it, slip your hand up under the skin on the breast to separate it from the meat. Then take generous handfuls of basil pesto, I used about 1/2 cup total for an 18lb turkey, and rub it into the meat. Do this on the legs and anywhere else you can get up under the skin without tearing it. Then cover the outside skin with a generous rubbing of butter.

For the stuffing: Saute one onion, two cloves of garlic, a chopped carrot (or two), two stalks of celery in one tbsp olive oil and one of butter until beginning to brown. Add one chopped green apple, and about 1/2 cup golden raisins. Pour over your stuffing mix (I used Paxo sage and onion flavor, at home I use Pepperidge Farms), add two eggs and mix by hand, stuff into your bird.

Tent the bird with aluminium foil and bake at 350 for about 4 hours. Use the Butterball hotline (1-800-BUTTERBALL) if you have questions about time. I usually cook a turkey for 30 minutes per pound if it is stuffed, 20 min if not. But there is a lot of wiggle room here. Go by the smell and look of the turkey too. Slightly underdone can go back in the oven, overdone and you are done, nothing grosser....

If you've got a good amount of pan drippings, then you can make gravy. I just take all the pan drippings, bits of stuffing, bits of meat and skin, and throw them in the blender with a bit of flour and then cook it down until it thickens. This only works if you have washed and salted the turkey well beforehand...

Happy Thanksgiving all!

Failed Vegan

I'm a flop as a vegan. I really want to be into it; own eco-friendly everything and get that wan vegan look... But truth be told, I'm just doing it to avoid certain physical discomforts, and since they went away so quickly with the vegan program, its hard not to think I can just go back to eating 'real food' again. It's doubly hard because none of the men around here are going vegan anytime soon and its triply hard on a night like tonight when I made them a DELICIOUS meat loaf.
I haven't made it in probably a solid year so it seemed special, but it was objectively really tasty too.

1/2lb ground beef
1/2lb ground lamb (if you are in Dubai, use the lamb kofte meat)
1/2 cup frozen chopped spinach, thawed
1 egg
1 tomato (chopped)
1 small onion (also chopped)
1/2 cup breadcrumbs
parsley
garlic
salt
pepper
1 tbsp Katchup
1 tbsp Mustard

Mix it all up, shape it into a loaf, bake it at 180 C for around 40min. Let it sit for 10 min before serving. Served it with french fries and some vegetables.

Simple Roasted Supper

The supermarket has an excellent house-brand here, with all kinds of products from canned tomatos and beans to toilet paper. Recently, because we are such an on-the-go dynamic Dubai family (haha), I've taken to making simple roasted dinners in my oven. I have now figured out how to turn it on without popping every breaker in the apartment (so much for super-fast construction...), its very exciting. These usually consist of a vegetable, starch and meat so the kids are happy as long as I dont add any sauces...

I added their frozen mixed roasted vegetables to a baking pan, topped them with some olive oil and garlic and cooked them for about 20 min at what I guess was around 300 degrees. I served them over some basmati rice with a little leftover lamb. The children actually ate it. It was delicious.

Then we went out for ice cream so I actually dont know if they liked their dinner. I know that ice cream is good bribery to get people to eat their vegetables...

Yogurt pork loin

The temperature is back down to a normal 75 degrees so I can cook again. Hooray!!

I've got a pork loin that I've slathered in yogurt cheese, (take some yogurt, put it in a coffee filter, suspend it in a strainer over a bowl and wait a day- mix with salt & pepper) and sprinkled with garlic and some fresh rosemary.

I'm going to cook this on the grill after letting it sit for about a day.

Dinner will be the pork, some grilled corn, organic spinach that was on sale, and either bread (If I get out of CT today) or maybe a pasta salad.

-VS-

'Nuff said

Turkey with bulgar stuffing

My husband leaves town today for a little while so I decided to make a big deal Sunday-dinner type meal. I didnt have stuffing for the turkey and didnt want a really bready one anyway, so I made stuffing from bulgar wheat. Very tasty!

1 cup bulgar

11/2 cup boiling water

1 egg

1 apple

1 garlic clove

1 carrot

1 shallot

1/2 cup golden raisins

1/4 tsp each sage, rosemary, thyme, parsley if fresh 1 tsp each

salt and pepper

1 tbsp each olive oil & butter

Melt the olive oil and butter together. Saute shallot and garlic until turning translucent. Add chopped fruits, herbs and saute until fruits are softened.

In a large bowl pour water over bulgar wheat (let sit for about 20 min). Add egg, plus saute pan contents, being sure to scrape butter & oil into the mix, to the bulgar.

Stuff Turkey as you normally would. You probably dont need to extend the cooking time quite as much with this stuffing as you do with a bread stuffing.

Served it with sauteed broccoli rabe and sweet potatoes.

Very satisfying supper indeed.