Pandemic Thanksgiving

 We have been very careful during this pandemic, at least to the degree that health care workers can be careful.  We work in a hospital and one of us works directly with sick COVID positive patients, so there is that.  Outside of that, we do very little that has any risk at all.  We mostly go home and see only our bubble.  Over the summer we saw people outdoors at a distance or indoors at a great distance apart.  People like our grandchildren and our closest friends, and not often.

We had hope for a physically distanced but possible Thanksgiving with our children, which consists of three separate bubbles.  We set up small tables ten feet apart in a very large room in order to do so.  But now, because so many people cannot be bothered to wear a mask in public we just cannot do it.  The hospitals are overflowing with COVID patients, so because some people cannot be safe, we all pay the price.  It is both incredibly sad and infuriating.  Literally thousands will die and have died because of this selfish and willful ignorance.  I am thankful today that I have been careful and I hope that we can eventually all agree to protect others because in the end it protects us and those we love.  It is also the first Thanksgiving in 32 years that I have been a parent that I will not be celebrating with all of my children.

Turkey Soup

8 c. turkey stock
2 c. celery diced (use the leaves too)
1 medium onion, sliced thinly
1/2 tsp. cumin
4 garlic cloves, sliced thinly
2 c. leftover turkey (cut against the grain of the meat, about 1/2" thick)
1/2 c. rice, cooked (optional--can use white or brown, long grain or short, or substitute some white beans if you want more fiber)
1/8 c. lime juice (more if needed, to taste)
1/4 c. chopped cilantro
Salt and pepper to taste
Saute celery and onions in a small amount of olive oil, add in cumin and stir. Add stock and garlic and bring up to simmer--add rice, turkey at the end--just to heat them up, then take off heat and add lemon juice and cilantro, salt and pepper. You can add other vegetables too Avoid carrots, but green peppers, frozen corn, or frozen peas work well. Bok choy is another option that adds a nice green. A slice or two of jalapeno pepper also works if you like a little heat.
When I was a child I had a real aversion to the post-Thanksgiving soup. I have come a long way since those days (I don't think I ate vegetables that weren't an ingredient in a garden salad at that point, and I went on to become a vegetarian for a decade) but I do believe that simple soups require attention to the balance of their flavors. It is not hard, but you have to think about it.

Mark Bittman is the current master of this approach to cooking. For the beginner, The Minimalist Cooks at Home is a good introduction to this cooking style, which comes with some tips on how to start out a dinner meal, and what you might serve with an entree. His masterpiece, in my opinion, is How To Cook Everything, which is the cookbook I would choose if I had to go to to a deserted island with one cookbook. But it doesn't really teach you this philosophy, which is a good perspective to have in your cooking armamentatium. You can also learn a lot about how to cook more simply and what goes together by reading his blog: http://bitten.blogs.nytimes.com/

Let Them Eat Stock

I agree with Martha Rose Shulman--after Thanksgiving it is imperative to make stock, and then to relish that accomplishment by making soup and risotto with it for days if not weeks to come. Her recipe for stock is a reasonable approach, and her idea for "what to do with leftovers" is a good one. Unfortunately we do not have enough left over food to be dismayed about this year (the ratio of great food was correctly balanced by number of guests, so while the equation ended up being in the positive, the leftovers were not enough to even fill a refridgerator shelf).

At our house, we cooked 2 turkeys this year. We are going local, so they were born and raised in Wellman, Iowa, had a free range life, and were neither injected nor were they particularly able to be compactly arranged after death. Something about those Butterball turkeys is that they end up in a neat little bundle at the end of their lives--not so with ours. More like limbs akimbo. The good news about that is when we took them out of the freezer, we created enough space to accomodate the stock.

My spouse is so enamored with making stock that we also collect carcasses from friends and neighbors--if someone is going to throw their bones away, we encourage them to bring it to our house instead--we are a home for unwanted bones. If we can't manage to store all the stock in our freezer from collected bones, we freeze the bones in a ziplock bag, providing for future stock. Our rainy day bones. We have 4 turkey carcasses this year, and may get a fifth one if we are persistent.

The idea of turning last night's dinner into tomorrow's soup is a time honored one at our house. However, the post-Thanksgiving soup this year is lentil soup. It can be made in a slow cooker or on the stove. This one is adapted from Staff Meals at Chanterelle by David Waltuck and Melicia Phillips (which is a rich resource for delicious, simple to prepare comfort food recipes):

LENTIL SOUP
2 c. diced onions
4 carrots sliced
2 c. diced celery
4 cloves of garlic, crushed then chopped
2 c. French green lentils (this is a must--no brown lentils, no red lentils--this is the secret ingredient, along with the thyme)
8 c. stock
1 tsp. dried thyme crushed between your fingers as you add to the soup
salt and pepper to taste.

It can all be added at once in the morning or evening into the slow cooker and harvested 6 or so hours later, or it can simmer on the stove top for a couple hours covered. Sometimes a cup or two more stock needs to be added at the end. Makes about 3 quarts of soup.

Ode to Corn Pudding

There are several dishes that if I don't have them with turkey at least once a year, I feel I haven't had a proper Thanksgiving meal. Corn pudding is one such dish, so I made it for my pot luck today. In keeping with the original holiday perhaps (although their corn was likely to have been quite a bit different, more of a grain than a vegetable), there were quite a number of dishes on the table revolving around corn, and all in all the meal was a success.

So what is is that makes this dish so terrific?
I think it is a combination of textures and simple flavors that makes it magical--the crunch of the corn, the creaminess of the pudding, the sweetness and the savoriness properly balancing each other out, the nutmeg and the chive. It is a dish that dances well between the turkey and the tartness of the cranberry sauce.

This corn pudding is another easy to multiply ratio recipe:
1 egg
1 c. milk
2 c. corn
1/2 c. cracker meal
dash of salt, freshly grated nutmeg, and a handful of cut chives.
Bake at 350 degrees for 45 min.

Thanksgiving

I turned 50 this year and I read a book that spoke to me. The combination of these two seemingly unconnected events led to the birth of my first blog. I believe that Thanksgiving week is as appropriate a time to start as any. It is consistently my favorite holiday, and while life to date has been far from perfect, I really do have alot to be thankful for. Today is the first of what I hope will be four Thanksgiving meals this week. We are having a pot luck at work, and I have made two of my favorite dishes as a contribution to the meal.

The first is apple crisp. We have two apple trees and our neighbor has four, and so every fall we have a veritable plethora of not-so-attractive apples that we collect up and store in a cool dark place for later use. "Organic" in our house means "pay no attention to it and hope for the best", but also includes some more standard definitions, like "no pesticides" and "organic fertilizer only for years on end". The realistic possible options for use of these apples are applesauce, apple cider, apple butter, apple cake, and so on but by far the most popular option at my house is apple crisp. As I was preparing the topping this morning, and trying to figure out how much to multiply it by to cover the pan I had filled with sliced apples, and I realized that the recipe is really a ratio of the main ingredients. There are equal parts brown sugar and oats, with half that much butter and flour. So I could make as small or as large a recipe as I wanted--I tossed the apples with less than a 1/4 c. each of flour and sugar, sprinkled cinnamon freely and for the topping:
1 c. butter
2 c. oats
2 c. brown sugar
1 c. flour
dash of salt and cinnamon
Bake uncovered at 350 degrees for 45 minutes.

I read Mark Ruhlman's book 'Ratio' this fall and loved it, and the above recipe's proportions are a direct result of what I took home from reading it.
Check out his blog: http://blog.ruhlman.com/ruhlmancom/2009/04/ratio-the-simpl.html
And now I see everything within this framework. How do the ingredients relate to each other by ratio. It makes increases in recipes that I used to get my calculator out to make simple, something that you can do in your head.