Lemon-Thyme Sorbet

I have problems digesting lactose, so ice cream is verboten in my diet. I hate this because I love ice cream as much as the next person. Unfortunately, that love is unrequited. And so, for decades now, I have concentrated on making delicious sorbets. I made a different flavor each night at the restaurant as an intermezzo in our tasting menu.

It requires little imagination to understand that I became bored and weary of certain flavors, especially single-flavor sorbets with my chef palate running to multi-layered flavors. Thus, I experimented with unusual flavors and herbs in creating something that at first bite tasted of fruit, but yet delivered something else entirely as the sorbet melted onto the tongue. Think: zucchini-dill, apricot-rosemary, raspberry-chipotle, and so forth. In that vein, for our recent Fourth of July celebration, Ann and I chose lemon-thyme as a mouth-puckering acidic punch-in-the-face counterpoint to her delightful summer berry pudding.

Lemon-Thyme Sorbet with Summer Berry Pudding

I am not a pastry chef, so I really do not worry terribly about the kinds of sorbet things that pastry chefs do, such as creating the perfect 28 brix syrup. Yawn, right? At home, I keep it simple, measuring both the sugar and the liquid by volume, a no-no for certain in pastryland. But, easy? Darned straight.

Lemon-Thyme Sorbet

This recipe is really easy as long as you commit to squeezing all that lemon juice. A liter of juice represents the juice of probably 24 lemons and with a hand squeezer like mine, it is a work out. If you cannot commit to squeezing lemons, find some other flavor to make, because any substitute for fresh lemon juice will taste off.

This recipe makes two liters of sorbet, the size of my machine; quarts are fine substitutes. This recipe scales up or down just fine. Although a machine gives the best results (I have a professional machine that is muy cara), you can freeze this sorbet in a flat container in the freezer, raking the ice crystals apart periodically with a fork. Adding a shot of vodka will help prevent big ice crystals from forming.

1 liter granulated sugar

3/4 liter water

1 bunch fresh thyme

zest of 6 lemons

1 liter freshly squeezed lemon juice

In a 2-quart sauce pan, heat the sugar, water, and thyme and let it bubble gently for about five minutes to start infusing the thyme flavor.

Turn off the heat, and add the lemon zest to the cooling mixture. Stir well and let stand for a couple of hours to infuse.

Strain the syrup and the lemon juice into a bowl or container and mix well. Refrigerate until cold.

Freeze the sorbet once the base is cold.

Split Pea Soup

It's a kind of miserable day here in Oregon just five days before Thanksgiving, a drippy, bone-chilling kind of day. It's not terribly cold, in the low 40s, but we are socked in by a fog that makes it gray and raw. It's a day on which I just cannot seem to get warm. In short, it's a perfect soup day. Good thing I have split pea soup on the menu for this evening.

Split Pea Soup in the Slow Cooker

Split pea soup is comfort food to a lot of the world. You'll find beloved versions by various names all over the northern hemisphere in the North America, Scandinavia, Europe, Russia, and probably a great more places as well. Its popularity no doubt stems from being cheap, delicious, and almost trivial to prepare.

Split pea soup is a very old dish, an ancient peasant food, well documented by Romans. If you think about the northern British dish pease porridge or pease pudding, the word pease dates back to Middle English, to the 15th or 16th century. As an aside, the word pea is a false singular back derived from the word pease, which was a mass noun with no singular. The dish is probably in our DNA now, being far, far older than that: read more here.

Pease porridge, a thick purée of yellow split peas cooked with ham (or salt pork), is clearly the progenitor of our American split pea and ham soup, a much thinner version made with green split peas. My version for a quick dinner is made without any meat at all. For company, I might include a ham hock and/or some country ham in the soup.

Moreover, no longer living in the country ham capital of the US (Virginia), I wouldn't even know where to find a good ham bone out here in Oregon. We always saved the bones from our Thanksgiving and Christmas hams with which to make a great pot or two of split pea soup. And in the days when we used to boil our country hams to cook them, we would save the ham stock to make split pea soup. But these days when Ann and I are eating meat only sporadically, we go without.

Although I love the soup now, it was not love at first sight. You must admit that the drab green lumpy soup is at first glance pretty off-putting. And off-putting I thought it in about 1970 when my mother first made the soup (she may have made it prior, but I had no memory of eating it prior). I would eat anything (and I still will) to the point where my siblings called me the human vacuum cleaner. But balk I did at olive green soup.

My mom did try every trick in her book to get me to taste it, for the entirety of an afternoon after school. In the end I relented, though I am not sure what persuaded me to try it other than simple hunger, and split peas have taken their rightful place on my list of favorite soups.

Split Pea Soup Recipe

As for a recipe, it is soup. That means nobody cares about exact amounts or an exact list of ingredients. This version was two pounds of green split peas, two medium onions, two large carrots, two stalks of celery, six cloves of garlic (minced), a bunch of silver thyme from out front (leaves plucked), two bay leaves, a couple teaspoons of Kosher salt, a big pinch of black pepper, and a gallon or so of water. In the crockpot on high for four hours and voilà!

For me, I crave the flavor of thyme in my split pea soup. It is missing something if I don't pick up a background hint of thyme. And so I always go out to the garden and bring some in for my batch of soup. I have many thyme plants in the yard, but my favorite with the best flavor is a variegated thyme called silver thyme.

Thanksgiving 2020: Lasagna

[Updated December 20, 2025: Since the inaugural lasagna of 2020, I find myself making this lasagna most Thanksgivings. Naturally, each year, I forget exactly how I made it the preceding year. I added more details and clarification this year to help with next year. I am also sketching out recipes for others who want to recreate this dish.]

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.

Despite its appearance, this dish is not a simple one. It entails significant prep work spread over days: roasting turkey with 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.

The following post outlines how I make the dish over five days. You could certainly do it in fewer; four is easy and three is not bad. Two days is pushing your luck and stamina. The following recipes are scaled to fit a standard restaurant half hotel pan with rough interior dimensions of 11.5"L x 9.25"W x 2.5"D. This will yield up to 12 portions of lasagne, though I often cut it into eight.

You will need the following equipment for this lasagna:

half-hotel pan or other similar sized baking pan
food processor (for pancetta butter)
sausage grinder (for sausage)
stock pot (for stock)
roasting pan (for turkey thighs)

Shopping Day (was 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.

Shopping List

Produce

Orange, seedless, 1 (for relish)
Cranberries, 12 ounces (for relish)

Onions yellow, 2 large (1 for stock, 1 for ricotta)
Leek, 1 large (leaves for stock, remainder for ricotta mix)
Celery, 1 head (for stock, for ricotta mix)
Garlic, 1 head (for sausage)

Italian parsley, 1 bunch (for stock, ricotta mix)

Sage, 1 bunch (for stock, for ricotta mix, for sausage) dried also works well)

Thyme, 2 bunches (for stock, ricotta mix, rillettes, sausage)

Meat

Turkey necks, 4 pounds (for stock and rillettes)

Turkey thighs, 6-7 pounds (for lasagna)

Pancetta, 4 ounces (for pancetta butter)

Bacon, 1/2 pound (for rillettes)

Fatty pork shoulder, 1 pound (for sausage)

Spices

Nutmeg, whole, 1 (for rillettes)

Sage, dried, to taste (if needed, for sausage, ricotta mix)

Salt, to taste

Black pepper, to taste

Crushed red pepper flakes, to taste

Dairy

Ricotta cheese, 1 pint

Butter, 4 ounces

Pecorino romano, 4 ounces
Milk, 1 quart (for cornbread, béchamel)
Eggs, 4 large (for cornbread, for ricotta mix)

Mozzarella, grated, 2-3 cups (for lasagna)

Pantry

Sugar, granulated, 1/2 cup 

Porcini mushrooms, dried, 1 ounce

Cornmeal, 2 cups
Flour, all purpose, 3 cups (for cornbread, béchamel, gravy)

Lasagne, 22 each (2 boxes)

White wine, 1/2 cup (for sausage)

Vegetable oil or pan spray

Sunday (was 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. 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 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 a quart and a half, 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.

Turkey Neck Stock

This recipe will yield a quart and a half of stock, enough to moisten the turkey neck rillettes and to make the turkey gravy. In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, I often collect miscellaneous scraps in a bag in the freezer to augment the stock. This might include chicken bones/skin, thyme stems, parsley stems, onion peels, leek leaves, and so forth. The list below is the bare minimum for making stock.

4 pounds turkey necks

1 cup water, chicken stock, or vegetable stock for deglazing

outer leaves of one leek

1 medium onion, cut in 1/8ths with peel on

1 heart of celery or three outer stalks, roughly chopped

1 small bunch of fresh thyme

1 bundle of parsley stems

1 sprig of sage

Water to cover, several quarts

Roast four pounds of turkey necks, rubbed with oil, in a moderate oven, say 350F. Flip them when they are well browned, after about an hour. Continue to roast, about another 45 minutes, until well browned all around.

Remove the turkey necks to a stock pot. Deglaze the roasting pan with the cup of water or stock, scraping well to incorporate all the brown bits from the bottom of the roasting pan.

To the necks in the stock pot, add the pan drippings and all the aromatics. Cover with water and simmer for 3-4 hours.

Strain the stock and refrigerate to solidify any fat on top of it. The fat will be the base for the gravy later on.

While the turkey necks are still warm from the stock pot, pick meat and reserve for rillettes.

Turkey Neck Rillettes

Rillettes are a happy by-product of having about a quart of turkey neck meat from the stock. Naturally, the neck meat would make a great soup, but it is the holidays and I like to celebrate with rillettes. Rillettes are hard to describe, but let me offer the phrase "meat butter."

Turkey Rillettes with Cranberry Relish

Rillettes are finely shredded meat moistened with stock, butter and/or fat (lard, bacon grease, duck fat) and seasoned with herbs and spices. Rillettes are most frequently made from fatty cuts such as pork shoulder or duck legs slowly cooked (or confited) in their own fat. Turkey necks are lean, so they take additional fat to become an unctuous meat spread.

I like to make rillettes a few days in advance of serving them; they improve in flavor in the refrigerator. They need to come to room temperature so that they are spreadable. We serve them on crackers or crostini, topped with a dab of cranberry relish.

4 cups turkey neck meat

1/2 pound bacon, rendered

1/4 pound butter, at room temperature

turkey stock, up to 1 cup

Fresh thyme leaves, to taste

Salt, to taste

Nutmeg, freshly grated, to taste

Unlike pork shoulder, turkey neck meat can be a bit stringy and tough, so mince it finely with a knife to make it easy to eat.

Render the bacon and use it for something delicious; this dish only needs the bacon grease. Let the grease cool. By all means, if you have duck fat, use that.

Bring the butter to room temperature so that it is spreadable and mixable.

Mix the turkey and the two fats. Add enough stock to make a spreadable paste. Season to taste with fresh thyme, salt, and nutmeg. You can use any spices and herbs you like and some people add a shot of Cognac or Armagnac to their rillettes. 

The rillettes will probably take more seasoning than you expect. Fat dulls the taste buds and so rillettes will benefit from being slightly over-seasoned and served with a wine with good acidity.

Monday (was 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.

Old-School Cornbread

This recipe yields a 9x9 pan of cornbread, about three times too much for this lasagne. This is a good thing; it leaves two healthy portions to eat when it comes out of the oven, say with a good pot of beans.

2 cups cornmeal

1-3/4 cups all purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

2 large eggs

enough milk to make a batter, start with 1 cup and add more as necessary

Grease a 9x9 pan, pour in the batter, bake in a preheated hot oven (450F) until golden brown on top, 25-35 minutes.

After cooling, reserve a third to a half for crumbs to cover the lasagna.

Pancetta Butter

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 breast 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 that we put pancetta butter under the skin of the thighs. All the resulting pancetta-flavored fat in the roasting pan becomes the base for the amazing béchamel layer.

4 ounces pancetta, cold, finely diced

4 ounces butter at room temperature

Pancetta and most fatty meats work best when cold. I suggest that you finely dice cold pancetta, then put the dice back in the refrigerator to chill before processing. Process the pancetta in a food processor until it cannot get it any finer.

Add the butter and process until smooth.

Put the pancetta butter on a sheet of film wrap, roll it into a log, and put it in the refrigerator for use in roasting the turkey. You do not have to roll it into a log, but it makes it easy to slice off a coin that will slide easily under the turkey skin.

Tuesday (Was Tuesday November 24, 2020)

I have a few things to do today: roast the turkey thighs, make cranberry relish, 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.

Roast the Turkey Thighs

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. There should be a couple ounces of pancetta butter left over; you will use that in making the sausage béchamel.

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! The timing will be shorter if you use say 6 smaller turkey thighs rather than 4 larger. Your nose and eyes will tell you when they are done.

6-7 pounds turkey thighs

6 ounces pancetta butter

vegetable oil

salt

1 cup of water or stock, for deglazing the roasting pan

Cut off a quarter of the pancetta butter (2 ounces) and reserve it for the béchamel step. Divide the remaining pancetta butter into equally sized pieces, one for each thigh.

Loosen the thigh skin with your fingers. Slide a piece of pancetta butter under the skin and massage it over the meat as well as you can.

Rub the thighs with a little vegetable oil and season with salt.

Place in a 350F oven until the skin is brown and crispy, 2 to 3 hours. It is not necessary to baste the thighs (I do not), but it may help the skin to brown.

Remove the turkey from the pan and let cool enough to pick it. Reserve the meat for lasagna assembly.

Pour the grease from the pan into a small storage container. While the pan is still warm, deglaze it with up to a cup of water or stock, scraping up all the brown bits. The deglazing juices go into the container with the fat and the whole thing goes into the refrigerator. The fat and roasting juices will go into the gravy.

After the turkey cools to the touch, pull it off the bone and put it in the fridge. I save the bones in a bag in the freezer for my next batch of soup or stock.

Turkey Thighs with Pancetta Butter Under the Skin

Roasted Turkey Thighs: That Skin!

For the four huge thighs you see above, I checked them at two hours and twenty minutes The skin was a little pallid and a knife did not pierce to the center as easily as it should. I went off to do some work in the garage, coming back to remove the thighs after three hours. The smell on coming back into the house was intoxicating. Just look at that skin! I confess that Ann and I did sample a bit. We may be watching what we eat 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!

Cranberry-Orange Relish

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 of loose cranberries at a pop. It has been a long time since I handled cranberries in retail packaging.

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

Quarter the skin-on seedless orange lengthwise. If the orange has a large core or area of pith, cut it out. Slice each quarter crosswise into 3-4 pieces and put them into the food processor it goes, skin and all. Blitz the orange into small pieces as in the photo above.

Add the cranberries and a half a cup of sugar. A few brief pulses is enough to create the sauce in the photo above.

Taste and adjust the sugar to your liking. Ann and I like our sauce rather more tart than sweet, especially when paired with fatty rillettes. This sauce is better after it has worked in the refrigerator for 48 hours, so do not be afraid to make it well in advance.

Cornbread Breadcrumbs

Cornbread Breadcrumbs

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

Wednesday (Was 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. The porcini will go in the béchamel. I save the porcini soaking liquid for another use, often added to a pot of beans.

Rehydrate Porcini and Grate Pecorino

Cover an ounce of dried porcini with water, cover, and leave on the counter overnight. Tomorrow, drain and chop them for the béchamel.

Grate four ounces of pecorino romano, sufficient to put a thin layer on top of the lasagna.

Rehydrating Porcini

Grating Pecorino

Ricotta Mix

Next up is the vegetable prep for the stuffing-flavored ricotta cheese layer. Our stuffing always includes leeks, onions, and celery. For one pint of ricotta, one large onion, one large leek, and two stalks of celery is plenty. For herbs, I go out to the yard and cut parsley, sage, lovage, and thyme. [Oh how I wish I could still go out in the yard and harvest herbs! Not happening here in the high desert.]

Veg for the Stuffing-Flavored Ricotta

1 large yellow onion, finely chopped

1 large leek, finely chopped

2 stalks celery, finely chopped

1 bunch of fresh sage, augmented as necessary with rubbed sage (half for sausage)

1 bunch of fresh thyme (half for sausage)

1/2 bunch of Italian parsley

1 pint ricotta

Salt, to taste

2 large eggs

Finely chop all the vegetables. Destem the herbs and finely mince them. Reserve half of the sage and thyme for the sausage. 

To a large skillet over medium heat, add butter or oil (your choice) and then the vegetables and herbs. Cook until the vegetables are limp and translucent, but do not brown. As I am cooking the mix, I taste it and adjust the herbs. I often find myself wanting more sage and thyme. Be aware that dried sage is much more intensely flavored than fresh.

Add the vegetables to the ricotta in a large bowl. Stir to mix well. Add salt to taste. Stir in two eggs and refrigerate.

Ricotta Mix

Grind the Sausage

I will not hold it against you if you do not make your own sausage, but I do it out of tradition. 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. One pound of sausage is plenty for this dish.

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

1 pound fatty pork shoulder (or combination of meat and fat)

1/2 cup white wine

1/2 bunch fresh sage leaves, finely minced

1/2 bunch fresh thyme leaves, finely minced

1-1/2 teaspoons salt

1/2 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper

1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

6 cloves garlic, finely minced

Cube the pork shoulder (or pork and fat) into a size that will fit in your grinder. Before grinding with the small grinder plate, I like to put the cubes it in the freezer for 20 minutes to make them easier to work. I do not double grind this sausage; one pass is enough.

In a bowl, mix the white wine and the seasonings, then mix in the pork. Check the seasonings by cooking a tiny bit and adjust as necessary. Refrigerate.

Ricotta Veg and Herbs and Sausage, Ready for Tomorrow

After all the prep was complete, Ann and I made 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 cannot and rarely can we even pop for a good bottle of Barolo, but for Thanksgiving, we take the plunge.

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.

Thursday (Was 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. The final prep and assembly takes an hour and the lasagne takes 65-70 minutes or so in the oven. Allow an additional half hour or so for the lasagna to cool; it will be far easier to slice and serve when not scalding.

Make Turkey and 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.

Roux for Gravy

fat from top of container of pan drippings from roasting turkey

2 big heaping spoons flour

roasting pan drippings

1 quart of turkey stock
pulled turkey

Separate the fat from the top of the container of pan drippings from roasting the turkey. Turn on the flame to medium and let the fat cook for a couple minutes until it boils off any congealed stock clinging to the fat. It will stop popping.

When the pan stops crackling, 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.

Cook the roux, stirring well and fairly constantly, until it becomes a pretty brown. When it reaches the desired color, carefully add all 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, saving that bit to smear in the bottom of the lasagna pan.

Sausage Béchamel

To start the béchamel layer, I first 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. When the sausage is cooked through, I stir in a spoonful of flour and cook it for a couple of minutes. Then I add milk, a pint or so, maybe a couple ounces more. I cook the béchamel until it becomes 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.

Pork Sausage, Rehydrated and Chopped Porcini, and Pancetta Butter

Sausage Gravy Cooking

2 ounces pancetta butter

1 pound sausage

rehydrated porcini, drained and chopped

1 heaping spoonful of all purpose flour

1 pint milk

In a large skillet, cook the sausage and chopped porcini in the leftover pancetta butter.

When the sausage is cooked, stir in a spoonful of flour and cook for a couple of minutes.

Add milk and cook until the sauce is thick. Season to taste.

Par-cook Lasagna Noodles

All three of the layer fillings complete, there's only one thing to do: 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.

Cook 22 lasagne, four each for five layers, two spares until just pliable, four minutes.

Cool immediately under cold water.

Assemble the Lasagna

Preheat the oven to 375F. Spray the half hotel pan with pan spray (or smear with oil or butter).

Reserve a little gravy and béchamel for the bottom and top of the lasagna.

Mix the turkey and the remaining gravy. Divide (just mentally is fine) the turkey into two portions for two layers. Remember that the mozzarella is just a little neutral glue that you will use in thin layers, perhaps a cup per layer.

Smear the reserved gravy on the bottom of the pan to keep the first layer of noodles from sticking and/or drying out. Build the layers in the following order from bottom to top:

thin layer of gravy

pasta

half the turkey in gravy

scant layer of mozzarella

pasta

ricotta

pasta

béchamel

pasta

the other half of the turkey in gravy

scant layer of mozzarella

pasta

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

grated pecorino romano

cornbread breadcrumbs

Cover the lasagna with foil, put it in the oven, and set the timer for 45 minutes.

After 45 minutes, 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?

Roasted Rockfish with Herbes de Provence on Ratatouille

"You've never made me ratatouille."

A statement, not a question, from my wife, a request really, disguised.

Ann hinted that I should make ratatouille, a dish that I have never made throughout a lifetime in the kitchen. "I don't really like it," I responded. Like is the wrong verb, because I do not dislike it. I just would never care to make it for myself. Ever.

There's a bit of backstory here. We grew up without a lot of money, one small income, three ravenous kids. We were not poor, but going out to eat was never an option. Our cars seemed to be third-hand. Luxury foods were not in the cards and during the summer, we ate largely off our garden, my dad being an inveterate gardener.

Those of you who garden, you're probably already beyond the punch line. You know.

Our garden was a good quarter of an acre if not a half, at least three times the size of our current lot here in Oregon. And my dad was an exuberant planter. If three squash plants would feed our family, why not plant a 100-foot row? Ditto for tomatoes. Why not have 50 plants? Peppers. How about four dozen plants of seven or eight varieties?

We kids were free labor to work this massive garden and I foremost, being the oldest and strongest. Our Saturdays were given over to picking vegetables in the morning and prepping and preserving them in the afternoon.

We ate well because of this all year. One wall of our farmhouse basement was reserved for shelves of jars from canning: tomatoes, tomato juice, ketchup, relishes of all sorts, all manner of pickles, peaches, green beans, yellow wax beans, beets, and so forth. Bins of potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, and apples lined another wall. Our freezer was jam packed with gallon bags of corn, peas, lima beans, and black-eyed peas, the vegetables that did not can well. I learned to put up from day one.

But back to late summer. Those of you who garden know well late July and August when after a trickle of vegetables during the early summer, the garden gods kick things into hyperdrive and bestow an unceasing bounty of tomatoes, peppers, squash, and eggplants. Ready or not, here they come!

My mother's answer, clearly in self-defense from this onslaught, was ratatouille. Ratatouille three to four nights a week. The first couple of times were OK, but by night three, I was ready to vomit at the mere smell of the stuff. Ratatouille for weeks was what we ate with little variety.

Ann, now you know why I have never ever made ratatouille since.

Roasted Rockfish with Herbes de Provence on Ratatouille

I relented of course. How can I not make something for my wife when she asks? How could I disappoint her? One of the things I always disliked about my mother's version of ratatouille is that it would be stewed nearly to death. I wanted to freshen it up a bit and serve a simple piece of roasted fish with it.

Herbes de Provence

It's hard to make a typical Provençale dish without their classic herbs, the soi-disant "herbes de Provence." Everybody's mix is varied. Mine is what I gathered from the garden: rosemary, thyme, oregano, lavender, and basil. These I destemmed and chopped fine.

I do have a quasi-love affair with these herbs and fond memories as well. I remember in great detail driving with Aimé Guibert, the owner of the famed Mas de Daumas Gassac in Aniane, from his home at the winery to dinner in nearby Montpellier. Excitedly and quickly once we climbed to a ridgeline just after dark, he pulled the vehicle to the side of the road and urged a swift exit. "Sentez!" he urged with typical Gallic passion, eager to show off the bounty of his native land. Smell, he insisted.

The warm breezes wafted up the hillside bringing along the fabulous aromas of the garrigue, the scrubland that is common to the Mediterranean coast, be it in Greece, Italy, Provence, or in the Hérault as we were. I could smell the wild rosemary and lavender, but above all the low-growing wild thyme. I could not resist rubbing my fingers through that thyme and then inhaling the amazing aromas.

I have been hooked ever since and thyme is undoubtedly my favorite essential woody herb.

Roasting Roll-Cut Zucchini, Squash, and Eggplant

To create a fresh and lively version of ratatouille, I wanted a base of roasted vegetables. This intentional caramelization and concentration of the vegetables was no doubt a reaction to the overly stewed quality of my mother's version with its mushy, disintegrated vegetables.

Although ratatouille is a peasant dish at heart, many chefs prefer that each of the vegetables be cooked separately and then mixed. This cuisine soignée approach flies in the face of the cuisine pauvre origin of the dish in which all the vegetables would be stewed together. But I like it.

I took a modern approach by roasting the zucchini, squash, and eggplant together after tossing them in the herbs and salt. I roll-cut these long vegetables in the Chinese style so that they would all be in similar-sized pieces and roast at the same time. Once the vegetables were roasted, I sautéed a chopped onion with a bunch of garlic, then added the roasted vegetables, roasted and sliced piquillo peppers, and halved grape tomatoes.

My Ratatouille

I warmed the vegetables through after mixing them, but only just. I did not want the tomatoes to break down at all. I wanted them to retain their freshness and sweet acidity to brighten the dish.

While I was finishing up the vegetables, the herb-covered rockfish, a local species of white fish, was in the oven roasting. Just as it set in the center, I pulled it out and plated it over the ratatouille.

I quite enjoyed it, my first ever foray into making ratatouille. It only took a half a century to get over my instinctual dislike of the dish.

Rockfish and Asparagus

Last weekend, a bunch of trophy-sized (15 pounds and up) rockfish from the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay were landed and I got a couple of them, one 18 pounds and the other 16 pounds. While all rockfish (what the rest of the world calls Striped Bass) is delicious, I love this size fish because I can take thick, meaty pieces out of it. Pieces this thick take longer to cook, but they look better on the plate and I like the texture better.

After breaking down these beautiful fish, I brought home three pieces, one for each of us, and decided to roast it with asparagus for dinner last evening, a quick dinner that could be put on the table in less than 15 minutes.

Roasted Rockfish and Asparagus

I preheated the oven to very hot with the convection fan on and then while a large pan was heating on high flame, I prepped the asparagus, tossed them in olive oil, salt, and pepper and put them on a sheet tray. Once my pan was very hot, I filmed it with oil, seasoned my fish and put it show-side down in the pan.

The tricks to crispy fish are simple: heavy pan, high flame, and leave it the f*ck alone. Once the fish goes in the pan, resist the urge to mess with it. Leave it be until you can see that beautiful crust forming before you flip it.

Rockfish Arrosé

I decided to go classic French in cooking this fish, basting it in butter while it was searing in the pan. Arroser is a very handy French verb meaning variously to water, to get wet, to toast/drink someone's health, to sprinkle, to drizzle, and if you are a chef, to baste. More particularly, it means to baste with the oil or butter in the pan while sautéing.

While the fish was browning on the show-side, I added several sprigs of fresh thyme and four whole cloves of garlic to the pan to start infusing in the oil. Once the fish had browned and I had flipped it, I added a bit more oil and a couple of tablespoons of butter to the pan and proceeded to baste the fish liberally while the bottom side browned.

After this, the fish went onto the sheet tray with the asparagus and I poured the butter, thyme, and garlic cloves over the top. Into the oven with the sheet tray for six minutes at which point the asparagus was perfect and the fish cooked through. I let everything rest for three minutes before serving.

First Local Mesclun of the Year

While I was cooking the fish, Ann made the salad from the first local greens of the year. This was a wonderful, simple dinner, ready for the table in under 15 minutes.

Pease Porridge

Depending on who you ask, we've been on borrowed time for anywhere from three days to two weeks. Our luck ran out overnight on Saturday: our first frost of the year followed by a 28F freeze the following evening. Earlier in the week in preparation for the coming cold weather, I picked all the basil and made pesto and Ann asked if I would make a pot of split pea soup on Sunday to accompany the chilly weather and a loaf of her delicious bread.

I've never really considered split pea soup and by considered, I mean in an academic nature. [Cue groaning noises from my wife.] Been making it all my adult life, but I never considered from which culinary tradition it has come. I didn't know anything about the history of the dish.

I certainly did have a guess that since we have a nursery rhyme about the dish ("pease porridge hot/pease porridge cold/...") that the dish is very old. And that it is, the rhyme is first recorded in the early 18th century but the dish is mentioned by Aristophanes and that was nearly 2500 years ago. Split pea soup is downright ancient on a human timescale. Further reading leads me to believe that cooked dried peas and pork is common to most of northern Europe; it certainly is extremely common in many militaries and all throughout Scandinavia. That it appears across such a broad swath of the world tells us that this dish is so old that it predates our modern notion of cuisines and international boundaries.

And its antiquity probably explains why we love it so: at this point, love for the soup is probably recorded at some level in our DNA. All joking aside, it is one of the few dishes that I, the ultimate omnivore, came to kicking and screaming. When I was a youngster of about 8 or 9, my mother made for the first time in my reckoning a nasty looking green soup which she assured me was delicious. I've never really balked at foods, but I bet it took her a solid half an hour of cajoling me while she was cooking it to get me to try that damn green stuff. I guess the color put me off. But once I finally nerved up enough to taste it, I was hooked.

[The only other thing that I came to balkily was sushi. At 25 years of age, I had never seen raw fish before. These were the days before you could buy sushi in any town anywhere. Four or five beers it took to get into the raw fish, but after that, I was likewise hooked.]

My split pea soup is always made with green split peas, a ham hock, an onion, a couple of carrots, some garlic, a bay leaf, and some thyme. Except this batch.

Not My Usual Split Pea Soup Mise

I was fresh out of carrots, so I grabbed a sweet potato for color. That's the only reason carrot is in the soup: for contrasting color. And I grabbed a few small pork sausages because I don't have a ham in the fridge and I didn't feel like getting one out of the back and unwrapping it. The secret weapon in my soup is what we call "pork goodness," the juices that congeal in the bottom of the pan after we have roasted our pork belly. I added about a pint of that at the very end. Because it is so salty, I add it at the end instead of salt.

Ann's roasted garlic loaf was incredibly delicious. Alas the photos did not turn out. The short day did not afford enough daylight and the picture quality was awful. Pictures or no, the soup and bread in front of the fire was a great way to temporarily chase away our first taste of winter.

Mother's Day Risotto



Morel and Asparagus Risotto

How paradoxical is it that I buy and cook so many rare and wondrously expensive foodstuffs and yet never eat them myself? I guess I save all the really good stuff for the paying customers. For Mother's Day though, I decided to surprise Ann with some morels. We are getting fantastic local morels now and this heat is bringing the season rapidly to a close. If we are going to partake of these super-expensive foraged treats, now is the time.

Knowing that I would be out in the yard for the better part of the day mulching all of our flower beds, I needed to come up with a dish that would be simple to execute, not take more than a half an hour, and would be delicious.

I decided on risotto because I know how much Ann loves risotto and because of a really not so good version we had last weekend at a local restaurant. I can't tell you how deflating it is to really anticipate a dish at a restaurant and then to have it come to the table poorly made. I decided to make exactly the dish I expected to be served and to make it correctly.

Fresh Herbs! Love!

To go with the morels, we have tons of local asparagus now (I have been stuffing myself silly on asparagus for two weeks now, eating nearly a pound a day!) and the herbs in our garden are in full swing. In fact, the herbs look so great now that I almost don't want to cut them. Almost.

Pilferage

While I was out in the garden, I pulled the last leek from last year and added it to the risotto along with a few ounces of Surry sausage from our good friends at S. Wallace Edwards in Surry, VA. Ann helped stir the risotto while we both sipped a little wine. Happy Mother's Day!


Potato, Leek, and Bacon Soup with Pepperjack Cheese

Saturday night, I was given my marching orders. "We have a bag of red potatoes; I want potato and bacon soup." So, all right then, I guess we're having potato and bacon soup on Sunday. I'm kind of kidding about this. 98% of the dinner battle for me is deciding what to make. If I know what I am making then it is all down to the easy part, execution.

Potato, Leek, and Bacon Soup with Pepperjack Cheese

The final product was delicious, creamy, chunky, warm, spicy, and herbaceous. In short, it was a wonderful soup, but it took a good long bit of effort to make this seemingly effortless soup taste so good.

Leeks Just in from the Garden

I don't guess too many people have seen leeks as they grow in the field. They're easy to grow and easy to prepare, but the roots, the big root clusters trap a lot of dirt and rocks. It's best if you can wash them in a bucket of water outside, but when it's below freezing as it is now, that's not exactly the best plan. We're very fortunate that the ground is thawed enough to dig leeks. Many years we cannot dig leeks in January.

They Look Very Different When Cleaned



Yum!

After prepping the leeks, mincing some garlic, and dicing the bacon, I rendered the bacon in a big sauté pan, then transferred just the bacon to the slow cooker, leaving the grease in the pan for cooking the sliced leeks and minced garlic until they were translucent. Once the leeks went into the slow cooker, grease and all, in went a small bouquet garni of rosemary and thyme from the garden.

Rosemary and Thyme Bouquet Garni

Then I diced about 5 pounds of potatoes and put them in the slow cooker along with a half a pound of diced pepperjack cheese, a cup of grated orange cheddar cheese (for color), two minced jalapeños that I pickled last summer, one brunoised carrot (also for color), a bit of salt, two cups of fat-free lactose-free milk (I'm lactose intolerant) for the illusion of creaminess, and a quart or two of water.

After about 4 hours in the slow cooker, and after skimming the fat a couple of times, I blended one gallon of the one and a half gallons of soup to a thick, super creamy consistency and added that back to the remaining chunky portion of the soup so that at the same time it would be silky yet have good texture.

This is a great cold weather soup!

Mother's Day 2013

I asked Ann some days ago what she wanted to eat for Mother's Day dinner and she had to think about it for a little while. She hasn't been feeling all that great of late and so I wanted to make sure that she would be up to eating whatever I made. She emailed me a recipe for a smoked salmon, asparagus, and lemon pasta that appealed to her and so I planned to make something similar.

We planned to spend this Sunday at home, an increasing rarity. With it being the dreaded trifecta weekend at the restaurant (Mother's Day, two high school proms, and Shenandoah University graduation), we were swamped and we knew we would be swamped for months in advance. This weekend is historically about our frost date too and is the weekend that we typically set out our tender plants, tomatoes, peppers, basils, and the like. So we planned nothing except a lazy day of gardening and sitting on the patio.

And a good thing too. After getting home very late and going to bed later still, I awoke in a zombie-like state. Actually, awoke is the wrong phrasing. I was awakened is more to the point: the dogs decided it was time to get up and the brown one nuzzled me until I got out of bed and took them out. Black-and-white just whined. Ann made coffee while I lay on the sofa and finally, I got myself motivated and outside, cup of delicious coffee in hand, about 10am.

Proud Mama

Year Five for the Wisteria



New Calibrachoa Hanging Baskets

Ann Might Have Found an Orphan Digitalis to Bring Home

This Salvia is Stunning

We managed to weed a lot and plant some new perennials, but ended up not planting the vegetable beds. The National Weather Service has issued a frost advisory for Monday night. Of course. Oh well, better safe than sorry.

Wildflowers for Ann on Mother's Day

After gardening all that I could or wanted to garden, we took avantage of the sunny cool weather to sit out and have a glass of Albariño, our last bottle of 2011. What a great, light, crisp, and lemony wine, perfect for patio drinking!

Albariño! Love this Wine Outdoors!

While we were outside, I picked one of the few remaining leeks, planted at this time last year. What a beautiful specimen this guy is!

Leek from the Garden; Big as the Chair!

Pasta Mise

And then once inside, I started on a 15-minute dinner, all I was up to after getting killed all week at the restaurant. The ingredients for the pasta from the blanched asparagus clockwise are lemon thyme, heavy cream, smoked bluefish, lemon zest, leek, pappardelle, and sliced shallots. I've done dozens of riffs on this pasta at the restaurant over the years, mostly with smoked salmon, but I just happen to have some awesome smoked bluefish on hand right now.

Happy Mother's Day, Ann!