The Thanksgiving Chronicles, Part 2: The rest

I'm finally getting around to part 2! I have been busy growing cobaltous chloride hexahydrate crystals and such, but today is Friday. Fridays are good.

 This is the pumpkin pie after being assembled and before entering the oven. Admire the smooth custard: it was achieved through much effort filtering (and eating the filtrand, aka anything delicious that did not pass through the sieve).

 The onions and celery for the stuffing with parsley and other herbs.

The beautiful roasted turkey. We did in fact cook the stuffing inside the turkey because turkey juice is what makes stuffing taste so amazing.

 Mashed sweet potatoes! No, there is not a volcano inside the potatoes, I just happened to take the picture while my dad was mashing them.

 The marshmallow crust on top of the sweet potatoes.

 The carved turkey meat.

 My favorite: the chestnut stuffing! We made it with chestnuts, celery, onions, staled herb slab bread, 2 apples, turkey liver, and some of the turkey stock I had made the day before.

My plate. Noteworthy items are Virginie's garlic-sautéed green beans and cornbread, as well as my brother's orange-cranberry sauce.

Unfortunately, I did not get pictures of the desserts, but we had pumpkin pie, apple tart, and some pumpkin flan my dad made by adding milk to some pumpkin pie filling that didn't fit in the crust. All were delicious!

The Thanksgiving Chronicles: Part 1 Turkey Tail stock and Pumpkin pie filling

It's Thanksgiving (tomorrow)! The wonderful American celebration of eating one's weight in food!
Anyways, in my family, the cooking started today to maximize stove-top space efficiency.

Turkey Stock:
This is my first time making stock! Hopefully it will turn out well.
Originally, we were going to use turkey necks, but the store only had tails. Raw turkey tails look quite unappetizing, but flavor is flavor. I put the tails on a baking sheet with 4 peeled carrots, 3 not-peeled onions, and 3 stalks of celery.

I roasted all of it for 45 minutes at 450F.

And then flipped over the tails and vegetables to roast them 20 more minutes.

I put everything in a large stockpot half filled with water, making sure to scrape as much flavor as possible off of the baking sheet. I added another celery branch for my mom (she loves celery) as well as some fresh thyme and parsley and about a tablespoon of ground pepper. I only added a little salt because a lot water will evaporate, and so it is safer to add salt once the desired concentration of flavor is achieved.

At 6pm, the stock has been simmering for 5.5 hours. As I am at high altitude, the stock should cook longer because water boils at a lower temperature.


I also made the pumpkin pie filling and crust. The filling is according to Cook's Illustrated recipe, and the crust is my usual pâte brisée.

Pumpkin pie filling:
Cream, milk, eggs, and vanilla

Interestingly, this recipe uses a combination of canned pumpkin and canned "yams" (see my post on sweet potatoes vs. yams). It also cooks both vegetables on the stove with sugar and maple syrup to remove water and caramelize the naturally and unnaturally present sugars.

Then the pumpkin and cream mixtures are combined to form a delicious custard.

I will cook the pie crust tomorrow to save the bottom from sogginess.

Happy Thanksgiving Eve to all of you!

Extra Pastry Dough

Do you ever make a tart and have extra dough left? What do you do with it?
I made an upside-down apple/pear tart, and then I went a little crazy with the extra dough :)

Pastry Dough Craziness:
Materials:

• Left-over flaky pie crust (or other pie crust)
• Edible stuff.

Procedure:

1. Make a ball of leftover raw pie crust.
2. Roll it out.
3. Mooch around the kitchen to find edible stuff (fridge, freezer, and pantry are good bets)
4. Put edible stuff in the middle.
5. Let your creativity guide your hand! Add random spices, salt, sugar, food coloring, etc... The sky is your limit! Unless, of course, you can fly a rocket, in which case your limit is bit farther than that.
6. Bake until cooked (time depends on size).
7. Eat.

Data:
A ball of leftover pastry dough sat in front of me. I looked through some cupboards and found a 3x4 MINI muffin pan and MINI muffin cups. MINI tartlettes it would be. I got some frozen blueberries and raspberries out of the freezer and made three tartlettes of each. I found some baby carrots in my fridge (there are always baby carrots in my fridge) and sliced them, microwaved them, and made three more tartlettes. Three slots left. Hazelnuts are tasty, so hazelnuts I would use (with a pat of butter of course). I decided to sprinkle a little curry and ginger on the carrot tarts at the last minutes, and then I put the pan in the oven.

I looked back at the counter.
A small ball of pastry dough sat in font of me. Well, I still have some baby carrots left, but no more mini muffin pans. Then, I remembered that bakc when I was little my cousins and I used to wrap pastry dough around mini sausages. Baby carrots and mini sausages aren't that different, right? I microwaved five baby carrots to soften them, sprinkled them with salt and curry powder, and wraped them in the last of my pastry dough.

Results/Discussion:
Everything was quite tasty. My family was at first sceptic of the "carrots in a blanket," but, even though the spices were not really perceptible, the sweetness of the carrot was well-complemented by the buttery crispness of the crust to form a yummy little appetizer.

For dinner we had Costco's famous duck confit (quite good, actually), roasted tomatoes from my aunt's backyard, garlic-sautéed chanterelles, and packaged fries. Yum!

The tart and tartlettes were served for dessert (though the carrot tartlettes were not very popular, they would be better as part of a savory meal)

Conclusion: Extra pastry dough is an excellent source of yumminess.

San Mateo Farmer's Market

Last Saturday I went to the San Mateo farmer's market to show my French cousins what United-Statsian markets are like. Ironically, I had never been to the San Mateo market. In fact, my family and I almost never go to any farmer's markets (even though there are a bunch in my area) because by the time we think about grocery shopping, the markets are closed :(
But now that I have my license (YAY I FINALLY GOT MY LICENSE!!!), if I wanted to, I could go to a farmer's market on my own. Of course, I am only saying this because I FINALLY GOT MY LICENSE!!!

Anyways, I was supposed to talk (write) about visiting the San Mateo market. As expected, the sky was rather gray. About half the stalls were for produce and half were for processed goods, such as bread, candy, jam, etc...

Red and Golden Beets

Green and purple beans and peppers

Swiss Chard

Blueberries

Rotisserie Chicken :)

Rainbow peppers

Daikon and Bok choy

"Italian Bitter melon" according to the label, but I think it may actually be Indian Bitter melon

There was a lot more of course :) We ended up buying some pluots, some chicken, some tomatoes, some fudge, and some beets. I also tried a delicious sample of a middle-eastern stuffed bread thing with sauce.

I roasted the beets and tossed them with a very garlicky vinaigrette to make a salad. We found that the red beets and white/pink beets were similar in taste, but that the yellow beets were different and much less sweet.