Planning the Menu
Since I was pressed for time, I thought about doing something simple, like a roast turkey. I actually do know how to roast a turkey, as I was the “guest chef” for several years at the Ardmore House holiday parties. But I decided to check out the options in my Eat Your Books account just in case something interesting came up. And it did! I found an amazing recipe for a spatchcocked roast turkey on the Serious Eats website. I got all excited about it because I had never spatchcocked a turkey before and was really interested in learning the new skill. Basically, spatchcocking requires cutting out the backbone of the turkey and then pressing on the breastbone to open it up flat. Cooked this way, it would only take 45 minutes to roast a 10-12 pound turkey, which would be more than enough to serve the ten guests who I was planning to entertain.
Using the cornerstone of a roast turkey, the rest of a fall-inspired menu fell into place.
• Cheese Tray with Wheat Crackers and Gluten Free Crackers
• Pumpkin Curry Soup
• Salad with Pear, Red Onion, Dried Cranberries and Almonds
• Roast Turkey
• Stuffing
• Kindergarten Cranberry Sauce
• Ratatouille
• Broccoli with Sundried Tomato and Lemon Zest
• White Chocolate Mashed Potatoes
• Dark Chocolate Hazelnut Fudge
However, since I wasn’t certain that I would be able to find a turkey at the grocery store in late October, I also developed an alternate plan if I were to do a roast chicken instead. If I were to do the roast chicken, I would probably forego the stuffing and the cranberry sauce, and offer a side of Tuscan White Beans instead. Everything else could probably stay the same.
Grocery Shopping
As one of the best Army Generals said, “No good plan survives first contact.” Or as others say, “Man plans, and God laughs.” Both scenarios were true when I arrived at the grocery store at 9am on Sunday morning.
Since the roast turkey was key to my menu, I broke with my standard grocery shopping protocol and headed straight back to the meat department to look for the turkey. And there were no turkeys at all to be found– never mind a 10-12 pound one! Fortunately, whole roaster chickens were plentiful because they were on sale. So I settled for two 6 ¼ pound whole chicken roasters instead.
With the two chickens in my cart, I cruised back over to the Produce section to find the ingredients for the salad, the broccoli, the ratatouille, and the pumpkin curry soup. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find some of the items I was looking for. The pepitas that I wanted to top the pumpkin soup were nowhere to be found. Likewise, the leeks that I normally find in the organic section were completely missing. However, I did find bags of fresh cranberries in the organic section, which spurred a search for conventional fresh cranberries because seeing the cranberries sparked a craving for the Kindergarten Cranberry Sauce. I know that normally doesn’t go with roast chicken, but I was feeling unusually festive. Of course, living in New England, I had my choice of varieties of conventional fresh cranberries. Ultimately, I decided against buying them and making the Kindergarten Cranberry Sauce because I didn’t think my little mini prep would be up to the task of processing an entire bag of cranberries, along with an entire apple and an entire orange. Besides, I know it is a staple at Family Thanksgiving, which is just a few weeks away.
The other craving that struck me in the grocery store was the craving for stuffing. I pulled my cart off to the side, thought about it for a second or two, and figured that I could make the same stuffing for the chickens, except bake it in one of my pie dishes or earthenware casseroles. So, with just milk and toilet paper left on my grocery list, I went back through the aisles to find a bag of unseasoned bread stuffing. (Hint: it’s not in the Bread aisle; it is in whatever random nook that the stuffing mixes are in.) I knew I had enough butter at home and enough onion in the cart, so I needed to go back to the Produce section to pick up mushrooms, celery, and shallots. Easy, easy, and impossible. I did two laps around the root vegetables area of the Produce section, and there were absolutely no shallots to be found. Therefore, I decided that I would wing it and do without.
Cooking for the Crew
Of course, I didn’t know how to roast a chicken. So I went back to Eat Your Books to look up a recipe. Entering “roast chicken” as a search term return approximately 425 results, which was far too many for me to sort through. I refined my search terms to include only Main Course recipes that included a Whole Chicken in the ingredients list. That brought the count down to a more manageable 119 results. Right off the bat, the Serious Eats recipe for a French style garlic roast chicken looked really good; however, the chicken was too small, so the timing was irrelevant for my larger birds. Scrolling down a little further, I noticed several recipes from the Cooking Light 1997 Annual Recipes volume. When I pulled that book from the cabinet, I happily discovered that it had an entire section on roasting chicken – and the timing was for a five to six pound bird! The decision I then faced was whether I wanted to prepare both chickens the same, or prepare one simply and go crazy with the other one. Naturally, I chose the latter option, even though that required a second trip to the grocery store after Mass just to pick up a container of plain yogurt and a jar of mace for the second recipe.
Before Mass, I quickly threw together the Pumpkin Curry Soup, which is a traditional Thanksgiving soup at my parents' house. In the absence of leeks, the recipe essentially requires sautéing minced garlic, ginger, red curry paste, and spices until fragrant and then stirring in eight cans of random stuff. Well, maybe not completely random stuff: two cans of coconut milk, two cans of pure pumpkin puree, two cans of vegetable broth, two cans of mango nectar. Because of sales and economies of scale, I actually bought boxes of vegetable broth and mango nectar instead of cans, and then measured appropriately. All said and done, the soup took probably fifteen minutes.
With the few minutes that I had to spare, I set up the double boiler with the bittersweet chocolate and the butter so that I would be ready to go with the Dark Chocolate Hazelnut Fudge as soon as I returned home. However, when I did finally get home, I realized that I had to toast the hazelnuts in order to remove their nasty skins. Fortunately, I found a quicker method to do that than when I made it for the care packages. Then all I had to do was turn on the burner, measure in the Nutella, and stir enough to keep the mixture from scorching. Once that was all melted and smooth, I mixed it up with the condensed milk and the chopped hazelnuts, spread it in the pan, and popped it in the refrigerator to harden for dessert.
Curiously enough, the longest lead time item on the menu were the Tuscan White Beans; the cannellini beans alone required a minimum one hour resting time in hot water and then 1½ to 2 hours cooking time. And then there was the extra time to sauté the onion and rosemary, simmer down the beans in wine sauce, and melt the goat cheese. All said and done, the Tuscan White Beans were easily a 3½ hour project. But I managed to get the wine sauce on the beans just about simmered down before my first guest arrived.
I held off on pulling the chickens out of the refrigerator until 430pm, since they were forecasted to only take 75 minutes in the oven – 30 minutes at 450F and 45 minutes at 400F. After the chicken drama subsided, they sat on the counter until going into the oven at about 515pm, which would result in their being fully cooked some time during our soup course.
It was around this point that I decided that the Ratatouille was definitely not going to happen. Not only because I couldn’t find the proper earthenware dish to bake it in, but also because I was not going to have enough time to prepare the vegetables – never mind cook them. But the vegetables still sat on the counter in everyone’s way until we absolutely needed that space to carve the chicken for dinner.
Serving the Crew
As always, my kitchen was pure chaos by the time my really good friend, the first guest, arrived. In fact, I had just put the chickens in the oven and put the boxes that stored my new-to-me china under the appetizer/dessert table. Of course, she brought a bounty of desserts, including a plate of caramel dipped marshmallows and a huge tray of cookies, that started the dessert table off right.
Within ten minutes of her arrival, the timer sounded for the Tuscan White Beans, and I asked her opinion as to whether she wanted goat cheese in the beans. She said go for it, so I dumped the container of goat cheese crumbles into the pot, stirred vigorously to combine, and then let the pot sit off heat for the cheese to melt into the beans without scorching.
Shortly after I declared victory on the Tuscan White Beans, the remainder of the guests arrived: a lovely couple with their son, my French-speaking friend and her husband, and another good friend. All of us work at the same location of the same corporation, except for the wifely half of the lovely couple who brought their son. She’s such a good friend that she kept us all honest and stopped us from talking about work too much.
Everyone was awesome and pitched in to set the rest of the table, get drinks served, and put appetizers out. My French-speaking friend and her husband brought a Seven Layer Dip with tortilla chips, which was terrific because I all had thought of in the way of appetizers were cheeses and crackers. Although I did get creative and serve the two goat cheeses on the purple and yellow voodoo plates from New Orleans.
After I had gotten a handle on the chaos in the kitchen, but before everyone filled up on Seven Layer Dip and cheeses, we decided to find some soup spoons and serve the pumpkin soup. It seemed like everyone enjoyed it, despite its unusual ingredients.
After the soup was cleared, I took a vote for the salad. My intent was to offer a fancy salad, with Bartlett pear slices, red onion rings, chopped almonds, and dried cranberries. However, the containers of salad greens were still unwashed in the refrigerator. I had bought three cans of Bartlett pear slices, but hadn’t opened or drained them yet. And I hadn’t even removed the almonds and dried cranberries from the breadbox, never mind prepare them for going onto a salad. So it was just as well that the salad was voted down in favor of going straight to the sides and chicken.
When I removed the two chickens from the oven, my really good friend and my French-speaking friend were in the kitchen with me. All three of us quickly realized that I had no clue as to how to carve a roast chicken. While my French-speaking friend thought that this would be a prefect learning opportunity for me, my really good friend made the decision of which chicken to carve first – the simple herb chicken – and took control of the situation. With the chicken firmly under her control, the two of us other ladies took care of finishing the heating, plating, and serving the myriad of sides while she worked her carving magic.
For sides, my French-speaking friend and I brought out the Tuscan White Beans (with rosemary and goat cheese), White Chocolate Mashed Potatoes, Stuffing with Mushroom and Celery, and Steamed Broccoli (without the sundried tomatoes and lemon zest). My friends’ son was a picky eater, so he stuck with the mashed potatoes, broccoli, and chicken. But his mom made hushed us all when we started talking about the making of the mashed potatoes. She thought her son wouldn’t eat them if he knew they were nontraditional. I would have thought the addition of chocolate would have been motivation to eat more mashed potatoes!
Even though I bought Wondra and had Gravy Master on hand, I didn’t make a gravy for the chicken. I opted to pour off the pan juices into a pitcher and serve that alongside the chicken. That seemed to work well enough, especially since one of the guests was gluten free.
Dessert was amazing. Not only did we have everything that my really good friend brought with her, but my other good friend had brought a gluten free “apple pizza” that she had made with apples leftover from her son’s karate class. And my other friend was gracious enough to make a trip to my favorite local chocolatier and pick up my favorite chocolates (pecan turtles for the record). I almost felt bad about bringing out my ugly looking fudge, but I didn’t want all that fudge left in my house. With all that other good stuff available for dessert, my fudge was hardly touched. However, it was a very popular item in the take out kits, which made me very happy.
The Verdict
In the end, I think everyone had a good time, even though we did talk about work on occasion. Everyone took home leftovers, so the food was a success. I’ve been eating roast chicken, stuffing and mashed potatoes for days; I’ve been quite happy with that. I still have a ton of salad greens to eat, as well as Ratatouille to prepare and broccoli to steam. But now that I know how quick and easy it is to roast a chicken, I will do it more often.
The Recipes
Pumpkin Curry Soup II
Just as good as the original, but with simpler ingredients that are available all year
Olive oil
3-4 leeks, finely sliced white and light green parts
6 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
1 tsp curry powder or red curry paste
2 tsp ground coriander
2 tsp paprika
2 tsp crushed ginger paste
2 –14oz cans light coconut milk
2 – 15oz cans pumpkin filling (not spiced)
2 – 12 oz cans mango nectar
2 – 16 oz cans vegetable or chicken broth
1. Sauté leeks and garlic in olive oil in a soup pot over medium heat, until leeks are soft and garlic is translucent.
2. Lower heat. Add curry, coriander, paprika, and ginger. Stir until fragrant and slightly darkened.
3. Deglaze pot with a little coconut milk. Scrape the bottom and sides clean. Add remaining coconut milk once pot is completely deglazed.
4. Increase heat to medium. Bring to boil. Simmer approximately 5 minutes uncovered to thicken slightly.
5. Add one can of pumpkin filling. Smash against the sides of the pot to blend chunks. Repeat with second can.
6. Add mango nectar and broth. Return to a simmer.
7. Simmer 5 minutes more to combine flavors.
8. Serve warm.
Nana's Turkey Stuffing
This has been good since Dad corrected it back to Nana’s original recipe for family cookbook version 8.0
4 sticks of butter
6-8 shallots, finely chopped
2 medium yellow onions, chopped
4 stalks of celery, chopped
½ red pepper, diced (optional)
2 loaves ciabatta, diced
½ cup parmesan cheese
Black pepper Paprika
1 tbsp Bell's seasoning
Dried stuffing crumbs
4 eggs
1. Melt butter in a large skillet. Sauté shallots, onion, celery and red pepper until tender. Season with black pepper. Cool slightly.
2. Place diced bread in a very large bowl. Pour contents of skillet over bread. Season again with black pepper, paprika, and Bell's seasoning.
3. Knead with hands once cool enough to handle. Add dried stuffing crumbs as necessary to achieve appropriate consistency.
4. Add eggs and knead with hands. Add dried stuffing crumbs as necessary to achieve appropriate consistency.
5. Re-season with black pepper, paprika and Bell's seasoning before stuffing into turkey.
Thanksgiving Cranberry Relish
We’ve had this at our Thanksgiving dinners since I was in kindergarten.
12 oz package fresh cranberries
1 orange, quartered and unpeeled
1 firm tart apple, quartered and unpeeled
½ cup white sugar
1. Combine all ingredients in food processor.
2. Pulse until coarse. Add a bit of water if necessary.
3. Refrigerate overnight or longer to blend flavors.
Ratatouille
Before Mom disclosed her recipe, I blended a bunch of book recipes to create my own.
1 ½ tbsp olive oil (x # vegetables + 1)
1 white onion, chopped
5 cloves garlic, smashed
various vegetables, cubed
1 ½ cups vegetable broth
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp dried rosemary leaves
2-3 bay leaves
½ tsp dried thyme
½ tsp ground cumin
14.5 oz can diced tomatoes
Optional: 2 jalapenos or other chiles, seeded and minced
1. Preheat oven to 400F.
2. Heat 1½ tbsp olive oil in large pan over medium heat. Cook onion until translucent.
3. Add garlic. Toss with onion. Lower heat to very low.
4. In another skillet, heat 1 ½ tbsp olive oil on very high heat. Add portion of first vegetable to cover the bottom of the pan. Cook until lightly browned on all sides. Transfer to onion pan and toss with contents. Repeat to finish first vegetable.
5. Repeat Step #4 with each vegetable. Cook chiles with peppers or similar vegetables.
6. When all the vegetables have been browned and added to the big pan with onions, mix in the spices, tomatoes and vegetable broth.
7. Transfer mixture to an ovenproof casserole. Cover and bake at 400F for one hour.
8. Remove from oven. Drain liquid into the skillet and simmer until reduced in half.
9. Add the vegetables to reduced liquid. Toss well to coat and reheat.
10. Remove the bay leaves and serve warm.
♥ Vegetable Combination #1: yellow squash, zucchini, eggplant, red and green bell pepper, jalapeno pepper
♥ Vegetable Combination #2: butternut squash, eggplant, zucchini
Broccoli with Sundried Tomatoes and Lemon Zest
2 lbs broccoli
6 tbsp olive oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp grated lemon zest
15 sundried tomatoes, cut into slivers
1. Discard broccoli stalks. Cut broccoli florets into bite-sized pieces.
2. Steam until tender and set aside.
3. Heat oil in a large skillet. Sauté garlic until golden, about 2 minutes.
4. Add lemon zest and tomatoes. Toss one minute.
5. Stir in steamed broccoli. Toss to coat with oil. Cook until heated and tender.
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