Note to Self: Roasted Chicken with Artichokes, Lemon, and Garlic

Here's an impromptu dish from last evening that Ann is raving about and wants me to make again, which I will never do if I don't document it, because it, like so many thousands of dishes I have cooked in the past, will escape the tenuous confines of my feeble mind for the vast ether.

Roasted Chicken with Artichokes, Lemon, and Garlic

Olive oil in the pan, chicken thighs, peeled garlic cloves, salt and pepper, artichoke hearts, lemon slices, Italian parsley, rosemary, olive oil drizzle over; roast 400 until done. Voilà! That's all the recipe a chef needs.

Seafood Supper

Without a doubt, seafood is one of our favorite food groups and last night I made a couple of seafood dishes that I'd like to remember, hence this post. Sadly, I have cooked so many dishes in my life and professional career that I have forgotten more than I remember. Seafood features much less frequently in our diet than we would like, because despite being only 3-1/2 hours from the coast, good seafood is really hard to come by out here in the high desert. Believe it or not, our best source of seafood is often Costco. That's kind of hard to admit for a chef who used to buy directly from the boats, but it's true if a little sad.

John and Heidi came over for dinner last night and we all gathered around the kitchen island to eat. We had really hoped to at least have appetizers if not dinner out in the courtyard around the firepit. But wouldn't you know that it rained, albeit lightly, for the first time since spring? And after some really warm and smoky summer days of late, there was a marked chill in the air and way more humidity than we are accustomed to. Is fall here already on the last day of August? For goodness sake, it just finished snowing on the 19th of June!

Goat Cheese Crostini with Pink Shrimp and Fennel Pollen

Summer here in Oregon is pink shrimp season. Though these tiny shrimp are harvested in the ocean close to shore, they are often called Bay Shrimp. They are netted, then cooked and peeled and are available pretty reliably through the summer. I have been trying to find ways to work with them, an opportunity that I have not had before this summer. Last time, I made them into delicious shrimp cakes. This time, I made them into a quick salad to sit atop crostini.

The crostini are topped with a schmear of softened goat cheese and pink shrimp seasoned with a really great olive oil, lemon zest, salt, and fennel pollen. After I put these delicious appetizers together, I drizzled them with more olive oil, salt, and fennel pollen, then topped each with a fennel frond.

Roasted Steelhead Trout on Fines Herbes Israeli Couscous

I really love the marriage of fish with fines herbes, so I put the two of them together in this dish. Fines herbes is an herb mix used in classic French cooking with seafood, poultry, and other very light proteins. The canonical mix is parsley, chives, tarragon, and chervil, but I use whatever I happen to have on hand. This time the herbs would be Italian parsley, tarragon, and dill. Why is chervil so hard to find? I used it quite a bit at the restaurant, but I had to grow my own.

I boiled the couscous to almost done, then drained and mixed it with a steelhead cream sauce to finish cooking. Just as the pasta was finishing, I added sugar snaps (mange-touts) cut into one centimeter lengths, a big mound of finely chopped herbs, and a quick grating of pecorino romano. The steelhead cream sauce I made by cooking two minced shallots in butter, then adding a quarter cup of brined capers and roughly a quarter pound of diced steelhead trim leftover from portioning the fish. After the fish cooked a bit, I added a pint of cream and let it reduce by half. I made the sauce ahead and rewarmed it before adding to the couscous.

After roasting the fish, each portion went onto a bed of the couscous (which intentionally mimics the look and feel of risotto) and I topped each with a dollop of saffron aïoli and a dill sprig.

Morocco via Marseilles

It's not a big secret that I love the food of North Africa; at the restaurant, my tasting menus often included dishes from or in homage to Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. I find the use of spices fascinating and second only in the world to Indian cooking, another love of mine. North African cuisine also relies heavily on my favorite style of cooking, the braise, in the form of its ubiquitous tagines. Tagines are stews, essentially, cooked in the flat earthenware dish with the conical lid which gave its name to the dish.

Ann and Michelle

And I am a big student and lover of French provincial cooking, the more rustic dishes of the countryside versus the haute cuisine of Paris and the Michelin-starred restaurants. Provence, as a region, really excites my palate with its broadly Mediterranean cuisine, a far cry from the more pan-European cuisine of Paris and the north. I have fond memories of eating exciting and for me at the time, novel, dishes in Aix, Nice, Cassis, and Marseille.

What do these two regions on opposite sides of the bright sunny blue Mediterranean have to do with each other? A lot, as it turns out. People and their food have been coming and going across the water from continent to continent for millennia. And as people and cultures have mixed, each side of the sea has influenced the other in innumerable ways. The second language of the North African nations is French and the second cuisine of the south of France is North African, interpreted through the French lens. Highly spiced tajines, for example, are widespread along the Mediterranean coast of France.

I am always truly fascinated how distinct cuisines meet across political boundaries to inform each other. Think of Tex-Mex or the Polish influence in Pittsburgh and the Rust Belt. The mixing of African and French cooking to form une cuisine afro-française delights me.

We had new friends Andreas and Michelle over for dinner last evening and in the process of brainstorming the menu, Ann was pushing in the Moroccan direction. This naturally had me thinking of a tajine. And then I remembered a subtly spiced chicken tajine that I had once in Provence spiced merely with cumin, garlic, and olives. I would make a version of this tajine but naturally, I would make it my own, adding both saffron and preserved lemons to the dish in my food memory for a subtle, yet complex dish.

What to serve with a tajine? Well, naturally, one would make a very plain couscous to soak up all the delicious braising juices. But a dietary restriction precluded any gluten in the dinner. Ann suggested (she's very good at helping me to focus in my menu-making) panisse, the delightful chickpea French fry replacements from Marseille, the major French port on the Med. Why not panisse? It and other chickpea flour dishes (such as socca from Nice) are so common to Provence though they are likely to originate from another close neighbor, Italy.

That left one more dish for the menu, a side salad. Chopped tomato salads are common across the entire Mediterranean from North Africa to the Levant and back through Turkey, Greece, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, and France. Everyone has a simple salad of chopped tomatoes simply dressed. I thought to make a Moroccan version spiced with cumin until a sachet of fennel pollen arrived in the mail the afternoon of our dinner. Fennel pollen would make a tremendous substitute for cumin. And with that, the menu was largely set: panisses, tomato salad, and chicken and olive tajine.

Any time we have people over for dinner for the first time, I like to set a menu of dishes that I can execute in advance so that I can spend my time socializing rather than cooking. We save guest participation dinners for those who like to cook for future gatherings. However, Ann conveyed to me that Andreas was really into cooking or at least seeing some cooking, to pick the mind of a chef, and so Ann and I did minimal prep beforehand and left much of the actual cooking for after Andreas and Michelle arrived.

Cooking Chickpea Flour for Panisses

Bartender Annie Pre-Mixing a Batch of  Cocktails

About a week before the dinner, I started the process of preserving a lemon, cutting it into lengthwise quarters, coating it in salt mixed with a touch of cinnamon and thyme, and covering the whole with some kalamata olive brine (rather than lemon juice). I used to keep big batches of preserved lemons in the refrigerator, but they take up too much space, so now I just make them to order. They will cure fairly well in a week on the counter, but two weeks is better.

As an aside, we used to make preserved lemons (and dozens of other pickles) in huge containers at the restaurant and pray that the health inspector would not come in during the two-week period that we left them on the counter before refrigerating them. Health inspectors are notoriously bad at overlooking food items that are traditionally not refrigerated: butter, eggs, cured hams, cheeses, and all manner of pickles including sauerkraut and preserved lemons.

Also, I made a batch of harissa, the super spicy chile and spice paste that is ever so common in North Africa, especially Tunisia. I did not know when I made the batch what I would use it for other than as a condiment to accompany the tajine. I have made my own harissa for so long now that I can barely remember the process of reading through recipes for it and trying a bunch of commercial versions to come up with my own version.

One thing I don't like in a lot of commercial versions is a dependence on tomatoes or tomato paste in the sauce. If it's supposed to be a chile sauce, why use tomato as a filler? And so my version came over time to be a mixture of crushed red ripe jalapeños (easily available in the US), smoked paprika, spicy Hungarian paprika, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, a pinch of cinnamon, and spices. For my spices, I add texture to the sauce by leaving half of the spices whole. My spices include roughly equal parts of fennel, caraway, and cumin. The whole spices soften after about a week while all the flavors marry in the refrigerator. In my not so humble opinion, my harissa beats any that I have ever tasted.

Later in the week when talking with Ann about the menu, she clarified for me that her idea was to serve the panisse as a first course rather than as a couscous replacement with the main course. I loved that and immediately thought that we needed a dipping sauce for the crunchy sticks of cooked chickpea flour. Out of seemingly nowhere, the idea of harissa aïoli jumped into my mind and so the sauce issue and how I would use the harissa were settled.

Early yesterday morning, I ground a bunch of cumin and chopped a lot of garlic which I mixed with olive oil to make a paste. I then rubbed this paste into a batch of chicken thighs and put them in the refrigerator to marinate all day until needed at dinner time. Next, I pounded out a couple of cloves of garlic into a paste in my big green granite mortar and made a batch of plain aïoli that I flavored with a bunch of harissa to give a spicy sauce the color of Russian dressing.

After that, I made a batch of batter for the panisses by whisking water, salt, and olive oil into chickpea flour, bringing it a boil while stirring, then cooking over low heat while stirring constantly for ten minutes. Finally, I would spread the super thick batter into a greased dish to cool to room temperature on the counter. My basic recipe is roughly 250g of chickpea flour to a liter of water with a teaspoon of Kosher salt and a drizzle of olive oil. This is the perfect amount to put into a 9"x9" brownie pan.

In the afternoon, Ann mixed up a bunch of her Oaxacan Old Fashioneds (reposado tequila, mezcal, bitters, and agave nectar). She also rimmed four coupes with smoked salt, meaning that all she had to do when Andreas and Michelle arrived was to chill the drinks and strain into the cups. 

Panisse with Harissa Aïoli

When our guests arrived, I fired two frying pans on the cooktop, one for browning the chicken and one for frying the panisse. While the first batch of chicken was browning, I flipped the panisse cake onto my cutting board and cut it into fingers which Andreas and I fried in olive oil to crispy goodness.

While everyone was enjoying dipping these crunchy fingers into the spicy aïoli, I drained the excess oil from the chicken pan and added diced onion, preserved lemon, and saffron. The onions cooked until translucent at which point I added both green and black olives, both pitted, and moistened the mixture with a bit of chicken stock. Once the sauce was boiling rapidly, I poured it over the chicken which went into a 400F oven, covered, until the chicken was tender, about an hour.

Star of the Show: Tomato Salad

Between sips of wine and while the chicken was cooking, I made a quick tomato salad. It is so hard to get decent tomatoes in this part of Oregon, so I rely on grape tomatoes year round. They aren't awesome, but they aren't bad either. After splitting the tomatoes in half, I minced a quarter of a red onion and a big handful of Italian parsley from the farmers market. These I mixed into the salad with the juice of a lemon, some olive oil, salt, black pepper, and a big sprinkle of fennel pollen.

Fennel pollen is something that I used to use frequently at the restaurant, mainly by sprinkling it over a finished dish. There is something special about a big piece of roasted Striped Bass garnished with a slug of great olive oil, a grating of lemon zest, a sprinkle of coarse salt, and a sprinkle of fennel pollen.

Fennel pollen is exactly what it sounds, the dried pollen from fennel plants created by harvesting fennel blooms, letting them dry, and then shaking them to release the pollen. Fennel pollen is wickedly expensive but its unique and inimitable flavor makes it so worth the price. And a very little goes a long way as it is extremely flavorful. At first taste, the flavor is clearly of fennel, like fennel seed. But unlike fennel seed, the flavor is stronger, deeper, richer and finishes with a delightful fruitiness. Get you some today and play with it. You are guaranteed to fall in love with it as much as Ann and I have.

I had not set out to create a salad that would upstage every other thing that we ate or drank, but that was the happy result of substituting fennel pollen for cumin. Everyone was blown away by this simple salad. I will never forget it. The combination of fennel pollen and tomatoes yields a result that is far, far greater than the sum of the two parts. Happy, happy belly!

Chicken and Olive Tagine

Once the chicken was tender, I pulled it out of the oven and placed it on the stovetop where I boiled it rapidly to evaporate and concentrate the braising liquid. The result as you see in the photo above was as delicious as it was simple. To recap, the chicken was marinated in cumin and garlic, browned, and mixed with onions cooked in olive oil with saffron and preserved lemon to which I added green and black olives and chicken stock.

Ann, Andreas, Michelle

Seared Ahi on Mediterranean Salad

Seared Ahi on Mediterranean Salad

Tuna may be the ultimate fish (though in my book, a big slab of Striped Bass is right up there). And it would be a terrible understatement to say that I am picky about my tuna. At the restaurant, I handled a very great deal of very high quality tuna and so most of what I see at the store is several notches below what I used to serve to my customers. Every now and again, which is to say quite rarely, I see a piece of tuna at the store that looks good enough to bring home. As it did back at the end of March.

How to cook tuna is never in question for me. Like scallops, the less cooked it is, the better. If I am going to cook it at all, I will either briefly sear it or lightly grill it, just trying to cook the outer surface. Given that our weather was really cold, I decided to pan-sear this piece rather than to unbury the grill from its mantle of snow.

Here in lovely Bend, Oregon, spring is still a long ways off (with a bunch of snow in our long-range forecast) and yet I yearn for the warmer days. To help put myself in that frame of mind, I thought a really simple chopped salad might just be the ticket.

My so-called Mediterranean salad is grape tomatoes, cucumbers, thinly-sliced red onions, a touch of minced garlic, Italian parsley, and toasted pine nuts. The "dressing" is a simple squeeze of fresh lemon juice, a drizzle of olive oil, and a pinch of Kosher salt.

It's hard to imagine a better warm weather light dinner, even if it is served with snow on the ground!

Meatball Soup

Looking through the refrigerator on a cold March day, I spied a pound of ground turkey, two quarts of homemade chicken stock, and a bit each of baby spinach and arugula that was nearly shot. The cold weather definitely put me in a soup mood and for some reason, I thought to make the meatball soup that is commonly called Italian Wedding Soup here in the US.

Meatball Soup

This family of soups is not known by that name in Italy, however. It is often called zuppa di scarola (escarole soup, when made with escarole) or zuppa di verdure e polpettine (soup of greens and little meatballs). The English name comes from minestra maritata (married soup) from the marriage of the flavor of the greens and the meatballs, a happy union to be celebrated for sure! It's a great soup, but alas, has nothing to do with weddings.

I flavored my chicken stock with diced onions, leeks, celery, and carrots, poaching until just tender. Then I added the meatballs to the simmering stock for about 15 minutes. After poaching the meatballs in the soup, I added a little Mexican orzo-shaped pastina called semillas (seeds), the spinach, and arugula and let it simmer until the pasta was just done, another 8 or so minutes. All in all, this is a very quick and easy soup.

The Meatball Mix

The meatball mix could not be simpler, yet it is super flavorful, flavorful enough that Ann has asked me to make it over and over again as patties and as meatloaf. Many people would add grated cheese to their meatballs, but I was looking for a lower fat meatball, so I did not. To a pound of ground turkey, I added a bunch of finely chopped Italian parsley, four cloves of minced garlic, a teaspoon of dried basil, a teaspoon of Kosher salt, a pinch of pepperoncini (dried pepper flakes), and a slug of white wine.

Poaching the Meatballs

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?

Salmon Burgers

Once again, Ann was the impetus for bringing a dish to the table. The September Oregon Coho season was just open for 24 hours when the quota was met and as luck would have it, our store had a couple of the fish. I came home with a 2-pound chunk of late-season wild Oregon Coho salmon and I asked her how she'd like me to serve it. To be honest, I hadn't even thought of salmon burgers until she suggested it.

Her suggestion was great. Coho is not a very fatty salmon to begin with, not like chinook or king, and adding a bit of fat and flavor is a great thing to do to this kind of salmon. And we had just had some seared Coho earlier, from hatchery fish, so a change would be welcome. I would never put a fat piece of king in the food processor like this Coho. It would get seared or grilled to medium rare and the scrap would become salmon tartare, full stop.

I call the patties that you see in the photo below salmon burgers, made from raw salmon, to distinguish them from salmon cakes, made from cooked flaked salmon. These salmon patties are more akin to hamburgers than to fish or crab cakes. 

Salmon Burgers sans Buns

We used to make similar salmon burgers for our lunch menu at the restaurant, where we would usually serve them seared medium on a grilled brioche bun with cucumber slices, lettuce, red onion, and an herb- and caper-mayonnaise. At home, however, we omit the buns and the condiments.

Salmon Burger Mise en Place

The photo above shows all the ingredients for salmon burgers, starting in the lower left: Italian parsley, shallot, capers, Dijon-style mustard, an egg, Coho, and cayenne pepper. I don't typically add salt because both the capers and mustard are salty; in fact, that's why they are in the recipe: to add salt. To be certain, after I spin the mix up in the food processor, I taste it for seasoning and adjust as necessary.

The egg is not necessary. I add it only because I am working with lean Coho (right, you see no cream-colored stripes of fat in the red flesh) and I wanted to add a bit more fat and moisture to the burgers. If I were making this with fatty farm salmon rather than lean wild salmon, I would omit the egg.

Also, the herb or herbs that I use varies from batch to batch. Although this batch was made with Italian parsley, I more often use dill. If I had it, I would use chervil and in the very early spring before anything else had come up, I would use chives. Any or any mixture of the classic fines herbes will work just fine.

Please note that I only ever use flat-leafed Italian parsley. It is so much easier to work with and more flavorful than curly parsley, so it is all I ever grow. Now that I think about it, I don't think that my grocery store even carries curly parsley. If you ever read the word parsley on this blog, I'm talking about Italian parsley.

Note also that just as you wouldn't think about a binder in a hamburger, you shouldn't think about adding panko or other breadcrumbs to salmon burgers. The raw flesh has plenty of protein to bind the cake into a decent patty without any filler.

Ready to Process

To ready the ingredients for the food processor, pull or cut out the pin bones, if any, from the salmon. Skin the salmon and cut the filet into large cubes. Mince the parsley and the shallot. Add the ingredients to the food processor and pulse until you have a workable paste with quarter-inch chunks of salmon in it.

Four-Ounce Salmon Burgers Ready to Cook

Patty the burgers into whatever size you want. Because I am serving each person two cakes, I opted to make four-ounce cakes. At the restaurant, to have the patties fit our buns, we served one seven-ounce cake. I prefer my patties to be on the thicker side so that I can get a good sear on both sides while still having the center be warm but not cooked, about medium.

Salmon Burgers

Here's a decent starting point from which you can make your own modifications to suit your taste. Makes 8 4-ounce cakes.

2 pounds Coho salmon

1 shallot, minced

1/2 bunch parsley (or other herb such as dill), minced (1/2 cup in total)

2 tablespoons Dijon-style mustard

1/2 cup capers

1 egg

1/4-1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper, to taste 

salt as needed

Bone and skin the salmon. Cut into large cubes. Put in a food processor with the remaining ingredients. Pulse on and off until the salmon just forms a paste similar to hamburger. Season to taste. Patty. Sear in a hot pan until brown on both sides, but warm and uncooked in the center.

Comfort Food

Wednesday August 26, 2020 was a shitty day, shitty even by the standards of 2020, the year that has redefined the term annus horribilis for most of us, perhaps Queen Elizabeth excepted. On Wednesday afternoon, at 91 years of age after years of health struggles, Ann's mother Mary Chiappetta died of natural causes in the ICU at Arlington Hospital Center in Virginia after a three-week stint on a respirator. Although we expected it, our inability because of COVID to travel from Oregon to be there with her made a bad experience so much more horrible for us, especially for Ann.

We feel grief at her loss, torment at not having been able to say goodbye at the end, and guilt born of not being there for her. Compounding these emotions is the question of how we can possibly in good conscience have a real funeral service to honor her life under these pandemic conditions. The adjective shitty that I used above does not even come close to capturing the depth and rawness of these emotions.

For comfort in horrible times, we turn as so many do to comfort food. Tears streaming down her face and between racking sobs, Ann implored me to cook her something comforting. After some discussion we arrived at pasta, a baked pasta with tiny meatballs. Ultimately, I think Ann was beyond caring what I made, but what is more comforting for a good Italian girl than pasta?

As I was going out the front door to the store to pick up groceries for the next ten days, including supplies for the pasta, Ann yelled after me, "Get beer!" "No shit!" I remember muttering to myself. And so in the fog of a stunned mood, I vaguely recall going to the store pretty much on autopilot to get ingredients: tomatoes, Italian parsley, ziti, ground pork, mozzarella, and ricotta.

Baked Ziti and Meatballs

I won't lie and deny that I bought some really good beer, a couple of craft hazy IPAs, and I also won't deny that cooking interrupted the beer drinking at times. It was just that kind of day. Through the fog of grief and beer, I managed somehow to take some passable photos. I also won't deny that writing this is my way of trying to process and come to grips with the hurt. Here's a quick primer on how to make a baked pasta with meatballs.

Meatball Spices

I've been through making meatballs several times on this blog, so just a refresher here. I always start by mixing the herbs and spices with the liquid ingredients so that they get evenly distributed in the the meat. For a pound of ground meat, I would use one egg, about a tablespoon each of basil and oregano, 3-4 garlic cloves, a teaspoon of Kosher salt, and a large pinch each of black pepper and red pepper flakes. To this, if I am doing restaurant-style meatballs, I'll add a half a cup of heavy cream, but at home, I use chicken stock instead.

Meatball Mix

After mixing the spices well into the liquid ingredients, in goes the meat, in this case ground pork, because pork makes awesome inexpensive meatballs. Veal is amazing, but who can afford it or even find it at the store? I don't care for beef meatballs and so I avoid beef and the so-called meatball mix of a third pork, veal, and beef. I made sure to break the meat apart gently before folding it with my hands into the liquid and spice mixture. Then I asked my trusty assistant to sprinkle in a handful of panko. As I mixed it in, I could feel that it wasn't enough to bind the mixture, so Ann added another handful.

I let the mixture stand for a few minutes before rolling it into small meatballs. This rest period gives the panko time to absorb the liquid and firm up the mixture.

Blender Marinara

While the meat mixture was resting, I made a batch of blender marinara, the easiest sauce ever. Into the blender, I dumped two 28-ounce cans of diced tomatoes in juice, two minced cloves of garlic, a tablespoon of dried basil, and a teaspoon of Kosher salt. Ten seconds of blending and presto!

We never kept marinara on hand at the restaurant, even though parents often ordered it for their kids. It was simple enough to whir it up in the blender on the fly and have it to the table nicely warm, but not screaming hot, within four minutes using par-cooked pasta.

I stressed to all my cooks that time was of the essence because no parent can relax with a hungry child at the table. I always sent the pasta out warm, not hot, so that the kids, who invariably shoved their hands right in the plate, would not burn themselves and so they could eat right away without fretting and fidgeting while their dinner cooled. Then mom and dad could relax over a glass of wine while we cooked their food.

If you will indulge me one more aside apropos of marinara, canned tomatoes is something I am really picky about. I will buy store brand or private label of some vegetables (artichokes, beans, chickpeas, etc.), but I will not risk my tomato-based dishes on generic tomatoes. I am brand loyal with tomatoes because I want consistent product in the can, each time that I open one. Sometimes that does not happen with packer tomatoes.

I want consistently ripe tomatoes without green pieces, cores, and skin, and with a consistent ratio of flesh to juice. Back east at home, I used Cento brand and out here, I have settled on S&W, a Del Monte brand. Yes, they cost more, but I won't risk my food for a few cents. It's not the brand name that matters to me; I care only that each time I open the can, I get the same product as every other can that I have opened.

Raw Meatballs Ready for Oven

Cooked Meatballs

Although you can fry meatballs before braising them in sauce, I'm fairly lazy and just put the raw meatballs into the sauce. These small meatballs took about an hour or so in a moderate oven to braise. Larger meatballs take longer. If you are uncertain about whether the meatballs are done, they should be at an internal temperature of 160F, 165F if they contain poultry.

Partially Cooked Pasta, Italian Parsley

Once the meatballs were done, I par-cooked two pounds of ziti to about two-thirds done, then mixed the drained pasta with fresh Italian parsley, the meatballs, about 3 cups of ricotta, and enough marinara (just shy of a quart, so about a quart leftover) to coat everything. After seasoning with salt and a bit more red pepper flakes, I put the mix into a baking dish and topped it with grated mozzarella.

Ziti Before Topping with Mozzarella

Baked Ziti

The oven was still going from baking the meatballs, so it didn't take too long to get a nice crust on the cheese, perhaps 35-40 minutes. After the baked pasta cooled for the better part of an hour, I sliced it into squares as you see in the very first picture above and we devoured it. For the sake of comfort, we ate far more of the pasta than we should have and drank more beer than we should have. But no regrets: what else to do on the shittiest day of 2020, the year that is proving to be the shittiest of our lives?

RIP Mary Chiappetta. You were sharp as a tack, funny, personable, frugal to a fault, direct, opinionated, not one to be on the wrong side of, and as big a fan of me as I was of you. I was privileged to be your son-in-law. In trying to find humor amidst the at times overwhelming sadness, I hope that wherever you are, there are no turkeys and baby goats on your bed. And may 2020 not become any more horrible.