Turkey Tales: Part One

So Thanksgiving has come and gone, the house is empty and all is quiet. To properly recount the holiday weekend, I will have to go day by day.

Wednesday: I got home from work feeling rather frantic and did some manic cleaning for a couple of hours. First order of food business was brining the turkey. I put it in a cooler, it was 20 pounds after all, with coarse salt, brown sugar, ice water, lemon and bay leaves. Then I got started on my sweet potato kahlua cheesecake. I kept seeing recipes for pumpkin-bourbon cheesecake but since I was making pumpkin pie, I thought I'd swap that for sweet potato. I'm not a huge bourbon fan, nor do I have any in the house. So this cheesecake was born. It was delicious and definitely my favorite dessert of the weekend. I got the inspiration from the smittenkitchen website and she got it from Gourmet magazine.

Crust:
Half a box of vanilla wafers
1/4 c. packed light brown sugar
1/4 c. granulated sugar
1/2 stick (1/4 cup) unsalted butter, melted and cooled

Filling:
1 can of sweet potatoes, drained
3 large eggs
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
2 tablespoons heavy cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 T. Kahlua
1/2 c. granulated sugar
1 T cornstarch
1 1/2 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 t. ground ginger
1/2 t. salt
3 (8-oz) packages cream cheese, at room temperature

Topping:
2 c. sour cream
2 T. granulated sugar
1 T. Kahlua
1 T. vanilla

Dominick arrived and I quickly enlisted his assistance as my sous chef. He started making tembleque, which is a coconut pudding; light, not too sweet and an old favorite of ours. While I hollowed out onions, which served as containers for the stuffing, Dominick put together the filling for the pumpkin pie, nothing out of the ordinary except that we added cardamom.


Let me talk a bit about these onions. I was expecting 10 people or so for dinner and scooping all those layers of onions while trying to preserve the outside and simultaneously weeping, was no piece of cake. But I stuffed the onions and they were so dainty and cute that I forgot all about it.



Another guest arrived, the wine was opened yet still I had pie crusts to roll out. Of course, halfway through the process, I realized I was short on flour. I'm not going to elaborate but needless to say, the crust really didn't go the way I was hoping. I cobbled together bits of dough and pressed them into the pie plates, making Dominick and Jessica promise not to tell anyone about the debacle.

At this point, my cheescake was out of the oven, the turkey was brining, the stuffing was ready to go in the oven and two pies were underway. I had some more wine and went to bed. I'll have to tell you all about Thursday in the next post, this is exhausting!

From Knucklebones to Chocolate Cake

I was invited to have pho over at 15th Street Heights today (that's what we call Dom's brother and sister-in-law's house, it's so classy). When I got there, Domma had beef knucklebones cooking down with charred ginger and onion, star anise, cinnamon and black pepper. The recipe he had called for oxtail or beef knucklebones, and at $3.99/lb vs. $1.49/lb respectively, the choice was obvious. I have never eaten knucklebones before but the smell was intoxicating. Dom strained the broth and ladled it over bowls of rice noodles, bean sprouts, basil and cilantro leaves and chili peppers. To top it off, Dom's brother added slices of grilled flank steak, marinated in chili oil, brown sugar and other goodies, as well as shrimp skewers in the same marinade. I've had more food on the grill in the past few days that I did in the whole month of August! I am really kicking myself for not having a camera to capture this beauty. It was amazing; complex and rich, mulit-layered and well-balanced, a kind of Vietnamese surf and turf.

As a side note, my family is proud of their succu recipe (that's red sauce or pasta sauce for those non-Italians who aren't in the know). It's typically made with three meats: pork ribs, Italian sausage and meatballs. When my mother started dating her boyfriend, who does not eat pork, we were all aghast. However will she make sauce for him, the ultimate expression of our love? My mother decied to use oxtail as a substitute and we were scandalized to find we preferred the oxtail sauce to the traditional. Anyway, these knucklebones got me thinking. I'm going to use them next time I make sauce, with meatballs of course.

After the pho, Robin pulled out a piece of birthday cake that she had made for her son but saved a piece for Dominick and me to savor. I normally don't care much for cake. I love sweets but I'm more of a pie, cheesecake, brownie kind of person. I think cake is often just too dry for me. Not this cake. Robin said she put a pound of butter in the cake and another pound in the frosting. Ridiculous but delicious. It was just a simple chocolate cake, but with all that butter and buttermilk and almond extract, it was far from the dry, tasteless Betty Crocker mix cakes.

Since the cake was just a little something for us to taste, Robin then brought out the real dessert. Ciao Bella has an outstanding Blackberry-Cabernet sorbet. I might not have tasted the wine had I not known, but I do think that it added richness without excessive sweetness. I have had sorbets and ice creams with wine before, with what I guessed was very cheap wine and too much of it so it was overwhelming in a bad way. This was subtle. Served with the sorbet were tiny coconut macaroons and chocolate-covered bananas. The dark chocolate, of course, complemented the sorbet beautifully.

Robin made us pomegranate martinis and we watched the game. By 5pm, I was pretty much in hypoglycemic shock, Robin was preparing her pizza dough and I thought I should make my escape. Well-sated and several pounds heavier, I made my way home thinking about how else I could use those luscious knucklebones.

Weekend Roundup

I've been eating some mighty fine food this weekend, although cooked mostly by other people. Friday brought me to Rochester for work. My co-worker, who joined me, used to live in Rochester and she was dying to go to her favorite Thai place, The King and I. No sooner had we ordered than two cups of steaming, chicken soup, redolent with lemongrass and fish sauce, were brought to the table. The only thing I didn't love, weirdly, were the small pieces of chicken in the soup; it kinda got in my way of the real deal. Then I had a chicken dish in a red curry-coconut sauce that disappeared quickly.

You'd think since I had a late, and very filling lunch that I wouldn't have been keen on going out for a fish fry-that hallowed, Friday evening tradition. But pops had a hankering and I happily agreed to join him. I'm still trying to figure out where my favorite fish fry in Buffalo is. As a default, we go to the neighborhood joint, which is pretty good but this time the fish was a bit tough. But it's fast and cheap and they now serve REAL french fries, not those awful crinkle-cut ones.


(This is not my picture, nor my fish fry and sadly, not my martini)


And finally, I was invited over to a friend's house for banana-cream pie and coffee. Interestingly, my hosts are lactose-intolerant, so the filling was made with soy milk (delicious still) and instead of whipped cream, we had unbaked meringue on top. I have never had meringue that wasn't baked on top of a luscious lemon pie and I was surprised by how much I liked it, not too sweet.

Saturday night, I went to a party that featured green chili and roast pork on an outdoor spit. Yes ma'am! We could hardly believe we were having an outdoor party in Buffalo in November! With a fire, some mulled cider and that steaming chili, full of tender chunks of beef and pork, tomatoes and fresh, plump corn kernels, we were perfectly content.

This afternoon, I have a date with D. to make Vietnamese pho. I do love that rich broth of beef shank, lemongrass and star anise but I've never made it before so I'll report back later on that. Cilantro, bean sprouts, lime and recao, mmmmm. I'm ready for lunch and I haven't even had breakfast!