Thanksgiving 2020: Lasagna

Once again, it is Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday. While this infamous year of 2020 has been terrible for many reasons and thankless in many regards, we should all be able to find something in our lives to be thankful for. Despite all the negatives this year, Ann and I are grateful that we and our kids are well, that the girls have not contracted COVID despite working in healthcare, that Carter has chosen a direction for his life by enlisting in the Army (and is currently at boot), and that we are able to make ends meet, even if times are lean.

Our 2020 Thanksgiving celebration will be truly odd, one spent without friends and family. None of our friends want to risk exposure by coming for dinner any more than we want to by going to their homes. Ditto for family, but our family is all back East and getting together wouldn't have been possible anyway. Still, Thanksgiving is a time to gather and celebrate and we will miss that this year. Damn this virus!

Back in September, Ann and I got to kicking around Thanksgiving and what to do, knowing that hosting friends and family was a long shot. I had, some years ago, proposed doing an off-the-wall Thanksgiving meal: a paella, all the traditional turkey and flavors rolled into one totally non-standard pan of rice cooked over a fire in the back yard. That didn't fly at the time and we shelved the idea for the future, maybe next year. In a similar spirit this highly non-traditional year, Ann asked, "Why not make a lasagna?"

Thanksgiving Lasagna: Delicious!

Why not? Ann and I have cooked decades of traditional Thanksgiving dinners, so really, why not something totally off the wall?

For me, a lasagna will be almost new territory, my experience with lasagna being scant. It's not a dish that I ever eat and the first and only lasagna that I ever made was in 1985! You cannot count those times at the restaurant when we would cook a two-foot long sheet of pasta and weave it back and forth in a bowl, putting a filling between each fold, and rushing it to the dining room. Giant pain in the rear to plate? Check. Cool dish and fun presentation? Check. Lasagna? Definitely not.

After a couple days of imagining what a Thanksgiving-style lasagna could be, I proposed to Ann to do two layers of turkey in gravy, and between those a layer of sage pork sausage in béchamel and a layer of "turkey stuffing" ricotta, ricotta flavored with all the aromatics that go into traditional Thanksgiving stuffing. Ann said, "It needs mushrooms." And so I will add some dried porcini to really amp up the pork sausage béchamel (you know that's a fancy term for what we call sausage gravy and put on our biscuits down South!). Finally, I decided to top the whole shebang with cornbread breadcrumbs to give it a great top crust.

This plan entails a bit of prep work: roasting turkey with our traditional pancetta butter under the skin, making cornbread and cornbread breadcrumbs, making turkey stock, making turkey gravy, prepping and sweating the mirepoix for the ricotta, making the sausage, and then the sausage béchamel. This is all before par-cooking any lasagne and building and baking the lasagna, the fun part in which Ann and I will make a little mess in the kitchen.

Fortunately, almost all of the work can be done in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, leaving just the easy and fun part for the day of. The best thing about spreading the prep out over several days is spreading the resulting dishes out over several days too. There is nothing quite like making a complicated meal requiring hours of work only to be confronted by mountains of dishes afterward.

The results were fantastic. Sometimes dishes that take a lot of effort to prepare are not worth the effort. This was not one of those times. A highlight for the both of us were the super crunchy cornbread breadcrumbs on top.

Monday November 16, 2020

Because of COVID, I have no desire to be out at the grocery store shopping along with the crowds the week of Thanksgiving, so I am doing all my shopping the week before. Everything will keep or can go in the freezer. The turkey parts that I want, necks for the gravy and stock and thighs for the turkey layers, are frozen when I buy them at the store, so they go right back into the freezer once home.

My timing at the grocery store proves to be impeccable. After searching for turkey thighs without luck but having been told that they would be for sale, I approach a man stocking a meat case and ask him about them. As he finishes slicing open the box in front of him, he reaches inside and pulls out a package of frozen turkey thighs for me. I am almost too early to get them. I am so glad that I do not have to make another trip to the store with COVID spiking again.

Sunday November 22, 2020

Thanksgiving prep begins today, five days out from the big event. I take the turkey thighs out of the freezer to thaw over the next couple of days. Today's job is making the stock from which I will ultimately make the gravy. First thing this morning, four pounds of turkey necks that I thawed over the last couple of days go into the oven at 350F to roast. After an hour or 90 minutes, I flip them over and roast them another 45 minutes to an hour. Timing is not critical as long as they brown well on all sides.

Turkey Necks Ready for the Oven

Turkey necks are one of my favorite parts of the bird and are a source of fine and flavorful dark meat. I always make my stock from them and after picking the meat from the roasted necks, the meat goes into my Thanksgiving gravy, as it will this year once again. Besides being great for stock, necks are also delicious eating on their own. One of my favorite ways to prepare them is to brine them and then smoke them low and slow until they are deliciously golden and falling apart, a sinful treat.

Turkey Stock Mise en Place

Great gravy requires great stock and great stock requires a lot of patience. After the necks roast for the better part of the morning, the stock takes the entire afternoon, coming down from a gallon to about five cups, all told.

To make the stock, the roasted necks go into a stock pot with all their pan drippings; the tough outer leaves of a leek; a medium onion, chopped with peel on; a heart of celery, chopped; two of my last remaining sprigs of lovage; a bunch of English thyme; and a sprig of sage. This gets covered in water and left to simmer all afternoon. The house smells like Thanksgiving which is so appropriate because it is gray and 37 degrees and raw and miserable outside. The kitchen should be and is a haven, a pleasant respite from outside.

Turkey Stock and Neck Meat

After cooking at the barest simmer all afternoon, the stock is ready. Ann helps strain the stock and I put it into containers for the refrigerator. Once the necks cool enough to handle, I start picking the meat, a favorite task of mine because it reminds me of picking necks with my mother. It is extremely difficult to pick all the meat from the neck bones with your fingers, leaving delicious morsels to eat for anyone willing to suck on the bones. I helped my mom picked neck bones just for this reason, so that I could snack on the remaining meat. I give Ann a few necks bones to try; they are delicious.

Monday November 23, 2020

Today I just have a couple of things that I want to get done: making the cornbread for the cornbread breadcrumb topping for the lasagna and making the pancetta butter to use in roasting the turkey thighs.

Cornbread Hot out of the Oven

Cornbread is a thing of beauty and I have some locally milled corn that will make delicious cornbread. This cornbread is destined to be crumbled and dried out in the oven for a topping, so I am not worried about making hipster, fluffy, tender, melt-in-your-mouth cornbread by adding a lot of leavening and fat. In fact, I am making old school pioneer-grade cornbread: equal parts flour and cornmeal, a bit of baking powder, a bit of salt, an egg, and enough milk to make it into a batter. I measure nothing: this is how I always make cornbread, by feel. The result is outstanding and Ann and I cannot resist nibbling.

Pancetta Butter

It is tradition now at our house, our 12th Thanksgiving together, to stuff pancetta butter between the skin of the turkey and the meat before roasting it to yield a moist, tender, and flavorful result. Being empty nesters, we no longer cook an entire bird to feed a crowd of friends and family. We switched to thighs a few years back because they are so much better than breasts which are prone to dry out and be flavorless. Even so, our tradition remains and we put pancetta butter under the skin of the thighs. All the resulting pancetta-flavored fat in the roasting pan becomes the base for amazing gravy.

I put four ounces of diced pancetta in the food processor and process until I cannot get it any finer. This ancient Robot Coupe from Ann's mother is not even close to being in the same league as the dual 2.5 horsepower processors we had at the restaurant, but it suffices for the few times a year when I actually use a machine to prep food. Those big commercial machines are just too big for home use, but I do miss the horsepower.

Next I add four ounces of butter and process until smooth. I pull a rock hard stick of butter out of the fridge and set it near the vent for the oven to soften a bit while the necks roast. To process a compound butter, you want the butter pliable but not soft; room temperature is great. In another flash back to the restaurant, I think how weird it is to have butter in quarters. We used to get one-pound solid chunks of butter in 36-pound cases and we'd use several pounds a day. You can imagine what a pain in the neck it would be to unwrap all those quarters which is why the trade uses whole pound or larger blocks.

I put the pancetta butter on a sheet of film wrap, roll it into a log, and put it in the refrigerator for use tomorrow in roasting the turkey.

Tuesday November 24, 2020

I have a few things to do today: roast the turkey thighs, make cranberry sauce, and toast cornbread breadcrumbs. None of these things take a lot of time and in between, I have plenty of projects around the house to keep me busy. 

Turkey Thighs with Pancetta Butter Under Skind

My four turkey thighs weigh 6.6 pounds, exactly 3 kilos, will take 3 hours to roast at 350F, and will yield a 2-liter container stuffed full of pulled turkey. I put an ounce of pancetta butter under the skin of each, give them a sprinkle of salt and pepper, and put them in the oven. Despite not setting a timer, there is no possibility that we could forget them and overcook them: after 45 minutes, the smell of roasting turkey is driving us insane!

Cranberry-Orange Relish

My old standby cranberry relish is a single orange, a bag of cranberries, and enough sugar to bring the relish into balance. Since when did cranberries start being packed in 12-ounce bags? They used to be a pound, but I admit that during my restaurant days, we would buy them by the case, probably 10 or 15 pounds at a pop. It has been a very long time since I handled cranberries in retail packaging.

Cranberry-Orange Relish

1 seedless orange
12 ounces of fresh cranberries
1/2 cup (or more) granulated sugar, to taste

Quarter the skin-on seedless orange lengthwise and then halve each resulting quarter widthwise into eighths. If you see a large core or area of pith, cut it out; otherwise, into the food processor it goes, skin and all. Blitz the orange into small pieces as you can see in the photo above. Then in go the cranberries and a half a cup of sugar. A few brief pulses is enough to create the sauce you see above. Taste and adjust the sugar to your liking. Ann and I like our sauce rather more tart than sweet. This sauce is better after it has worked in the refrigerator for 48 hours, so don't be afraid to make it well in advance.

Cornbread Breadcrumbs

The cranberry sauce made, I crumble the cornbread onto a sheet tray and put it in the oven below the turkey. I turn the crumbs at ten minutes and remove them at 20 minutes. After they cool, I put them in a seal-top bag so that they will not go stale on contact with our rain-laden air.

Roasted Turkey Thighs: That Skin!

At two hours and twenty minutes, I check the turkey thighs. The skin is a little pallid and a knife does not pierce to the center as easily as it should. I go off and do some work in the garage, coming back to remove the thighs after three hours. The smell on coming back into the house is intoxicating. Just look at that skin! I confess that Ann and I did sample a bit. We may be watching what we eat very carefully, but this is Thanksgiving and were we to pass on eating some crispy insanely good turkey skin, you would have to revoke our foodie cards!

After the turkey cools for a couple hours, I pull it off the bone and put it in the fridge. Then I pour all the fat into a container and deglaze the pan with hot water, scraping all the bits up. The water goes in with the fat and the whole thing into the refrigerator. I will pull the fat off the top of the juices when I go to make the stock. The fat and the leftover pancetta butter along with flour will form the roux and the roasting juices and stock I made yesterday will finish the gravy on Thursday.

Wednesday November 25, 2020

With one day left before Thanksgiving, I have a relatively small list of things to get done with most of the work devoted to prepping vegetables and herbs. I knock out two trivial tasks first: rehydrating porcini and grating pecorino romano for the top of the lasagna.

Rehydrating Porcini

Grating Pecorino

Next up is the vegetable prep for the stuffing-flavored ricotta cheese layer. Our stuffing always includes leeks, onions, and celery. For herbs, I go out to the yard and cut parsley, sage, lovage, and thyme.

Veg for the Stuffing-Flavored Ricotta

Once I prep the celery, onions, and leeks, I start in on the herbs by first chopping the parsley and lovage and adding that to the vegetables. I then start in on the thyme and sage, part of which will go in the ricotta vegetables and part of which I will use in seasoning the sausage.

Sausage Seasoning: Garlic, Red Pepper Flakes, Sage, and Thyme

Over the years, I have made a lot of sausage of many kinds. The one that reminds me most of my childhood in Virginia is flavored simply with garlic, red pepper flakes, thyme, and sage. But surely, I use much greater quantities than most people for I love assertive sausage. Garlic is not common in Virginia sausage, which tends to sage and black pepper, but I have to have it.

Ricotta Veg and Herbs and Sausage, Ready for Tomorrow

After all the prep is complete, Ann and I make a run to the wine store to pick up a case of local Pinot that has come in as well as to look for a bottle of Barolo to accompany our lasagna. We drink local Pinot all the time, but for this special meal, we want to drink our splurge wine, Nebbiolo. If we could afford it, we would have a cellar full of Gaja Barbaresco. We can't and rarely can we even pop for a good bottle of Barolo, but for Thanksgiving, we take the plunge.

Ricotta Mix

Back home, I get to sweating the vegetables and herbs and then mix them with the ricotta. After I season the ricotta with salt, I mix in a couple of eggs and put the mix in the refrigerator to await tomorrow. Tomorrow, the ricotta mix will taste twice as good as it does today.

And that's it. That's all the prep that I can do in advance, spread over four days. Tomorrow, I have to make gravy and mix it with the turkey, cook the sausage with the mushrooms and make a thick béchamel, and par-cook the lasagne. After that, Ann and I will assemble the lasagna and put it in the oven.

Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 2020

Ann and I decide that we'd like to eat late afternoon, four or so, which means that we need do nothing in the kitchen before one in the afternoon. After working out in the garage and doing some yard work on the first non-rainy day in many days, I come in, wash up, and get to cooking.

Roux for Gravy

Step one today is to make the gravy which will sauce the pulled turkey meat. The roux (flour) base of the gravy will help set the turkey layers. First, I separate the fat from the top of the container of pan drippings from roasting the turkey. The fat layer is solidified from its stay in the fridge for a couple of days, so it comes out easy enough. I put it on high heat and let it cook for several minutes as it boils off all the congealed stock clinging to the fat.

When the pan stops crackling, I add the flour, two big heaping spoonsful. A word of warning: adding damp flour to smoking hot fat is not something you should do haphazardly. The hot fat will flash the water in the flour to steam immediately and it may erupt violently in a volcano of superheated roux. There is a reason in the bayous that they call roux Cajun Napalm. Perhaps you should add flour to cool or cooler fat.

I cook the roux as I have for thousands of gravies and pots of gumbo until it becomes a pretty brown. When it reaches my desired color, I add all the roasting pan drippings and most of a quart of turkey stock. In no time over high heat, it has become gravy. I season it and mix all but a tiny bit into the turkey. Then, I let my taster-in-chief sample and season the turkey-gravy mix while I move on to the béchamel layer.

I spray my lasagna pan, a standard half hotel pan, with pan spray and smear the remaining gravy on the bottom of the pan to keep the first layer of noodles from sticking and/or drying out.

Pork Sausage, Rehydrated and Chopped Porcini, and Pancetta Butter

To start the béchamel layer, I first must cook the sausage that I made yesterday. I put the sausage, the leftover pancetta butter, and chopped porcini into a large skillet and start it cooking.

I rehydrated the porcini yesterday and first thing today, I drained and chopped the porcini, then started bringing the porcini stock down to concentrate it. Alas, I got caught up in doing errands outside and my flame was higher than I thought it was. I came in just as the smoke detector started blaring, the first time for a good reason, of all the hundreds of times it has gone off. I have a burned pan and no mushroom stock to show for my backyard chores. There's a lesson in here somewhere. I move forward without any porcini stock to add to the béchamel, though I could have made more simply enough.

When the sausage is cooked through, I stir in a spoonful of flour well as it cooks for a couple of minutes. Then I add milk, probably a pint or so, maybe a couple ounces more. I cook the béchamel until it becomes very thick. My official taste tester checks it out and proclaims it awesome. She says, "Make this next time we have biscuits and gravy!" I am proud that a Manhattan-born Italian girl recognizes it for what it truly is, what we Southerners call gravy. The Italians would call this besciamella and the French béchamel. 

Sausage Gravy Cooking

All three of the layer fillings complete, there's only one thing to do and that is cook some noodles and get after it. I count out 22 lasagne, four for each of the five layers, and two spares. I cook my noodles until they just become pliable, four minutes, rather than the 8-10 minutes the package suggests. I cool them immediately under running cold water to stop them from cooking further. I have no fear that the noodles will not finish cooking in the oven: I have cooked literally tons of pasta in my life, one, two, or five pounds at a time.

The noodles done, I build the lasagna. I thought Ann would help assemble, but instead she was filming it all live for her friends on Facebook. The layers went in in quick succession from bottom to top:

gravy

pasta

turkey

scant layer of mozzarella

pasta

ricotta

pasta

béchamel

pasta

turkey

scant layer of mozzarella

pasta

very thin layer of béchamel (to keep the pasta from getting hard)

pecorino romano

cornbread breadcrumbs

The oven preheats to 375F while I assemble the layers and is at temperature just as I am ready to put the lasagna in to cook. I cover it with foil and set the timer for 45 minutes. After 45 minutes, I uncover the pan and let it go for another 20 minutes to brown the top.

Lasagna Ready to Bake

Lasagna out of the Oven

After cooling for an additional 20 minutes, the lasagna is ready to serve. I cut it into 12 portions, each of which is a massive meal for one person. We head to the table, a pretty table that Ann has set for just the two of us, and start in on our pieces of lasagna. After all the work, it turns out so well, but is so filling that we immediately feel the need to walk around the block before dusk turns to dark.

Thanksgiving Napkin Rings

We sip on glasses of Barolo while the lasagna bakes and finish the bottle with dinner. Though we mainly live on Pinot Noir, we are Nebbiolo fiends. We love it for what it has in common with Pinot: light body and high acidity. And we love it more for how it differs from Pinot: firm tannins and extraordinary complexity of nose and flavors. For us, this particular bottle is in the middle of the pack of all the Nebbiolo we have tasted. It ranks even lower on the price-to-value scale. We are spoiled: we judge it an adequate wine, but the unspoken verdict is that we are disappointed. It should be much better for the price we paid. Still, a bottle of Nebbiolo in a sea of Pinot Noir is a breath of fresh air.

Barolo: It's What's for Thanksgiving

And so ends Thanksgiving 2020. Maybe, just maybe, I'll fire up the paellera and do a Thanksgiving paella next year. We'd need a crowd though: one of my paellas feeds 12-16 people. Now where can I get some turkey wings to put in the paella?