Adulterated piri piri turkey

I'm not sure where I first read about piri piri chicken, but I'm cribbing from Epicurious.com for the overall experience, and for the sauce, About.com for piri piri fish.  It was described as having Portuguese and African roots, and I haven't had much experience with southern/western Mediterranean cuisine, so I thought the time was ripe.

I happened to have dried herbs on hand and a bottle of lemon juice, but except for the fresh lemon juice, the sauce recipe didn't specify.

My approximation of piri piri sauce:
1 T Sriracha chile sauce
5 dried de arbol chile peppers
1/2 c lemon juice
5 garlic cloves
2 T cilantro
1 T parsley
1/2 T salt
1/2 c olive oil

I should have added far less salt, like half a teaspoon, especially considering my choice of chile sauce (original recipe actually called for paste), but live and learn.

I put everything but the oil in my food processor, and when it started to look smooth, I drizzled in the oil while it was still running and let it go until it looked like it wasn't going to get any smoother.

I scooped out a couple tablespoons and put them in a zip-top bag with a turkey breast, not having a whole chicken, squeezed out the air and massaged it a bit, then put it back in the fridge.  The original recipe called for four hours, some of the reviews suggested overnight.  There seem to be different schools of thought on marinating; some say that that there's no point in trying to go past half an hour or a couple hours because the diffusion of the marinade drops off exponentially (more or less--don't ask), others say that you can achieve arbitrarily thorough marinating depending on food preparation and the spoilage horizon.  Whether it's more effective than a couple hours or not, overnight in the fridge is going to be pretty safe unless the meat's already microbially compromised.  So, I left the turkey breast whole and cut it up after marinading overnight.

You know what?  The original recipe called to have a whole chicken marinated, then barbecued, and then glazed with the following:

3 T butter
3 T chopped fresh cilantro
2 minced garlic cloves
2 T piri piri sauce
2 T fresh lemon juice

I don't have a grill available currently, and I don't feel like baking this turkey breast in the oven like it's a whole chicken, so I'm not bothering with that.  Here's what I'm doing instead:

After marinading adequately (or before, if you don't want to wait so long), cut the turkey into pieces convenient for stir frying.  Cook in an oiled wok on high heat.  I fried one serving spoonful of meat at a time to reduce the thermal load on the stove.  When it got about medium well I took it off and put on more meat, until everything was equally cooked.

Then I put all the meat back in with the following and let it stew, rapidly stirring and scraping the bottom of the wok, until I was darn well satisfied:

1/2 c piri piri sauce
3 chopped garlic cloves
1 sliced shallot
1 t white pepper
1 2-inch chunk of ginger root, scraped with a spoon and grated

I let it go for a while, continuing to stir over high heat until everything was just about where I wanted it, and added a sliced red bell pepper.

When it's had enough in your estimation, take it off the heat and serve with as much of the remaining piri piri sauce on top or on the side as you wish.  If you want to be faithful to the idea of barbecuing the meat, you can leave it in until the sauce and solids start to carbonize.  If that's not your thing, the shallot and bell pepper should reach the cooked-yet-firm stage between 2 and 5 minutes, depending on how hot your stove gets.  I like barbecue, so I tried to push it to the far end of the Maillard regime before adding the bell pepper, but not into "bark is just burnt rub, isn't it?"  After I started cooking, it occurred to me to worry about the low smoke point of the olive oil in the sauce, but it was obviously far too late, and didn't end up being a problem.

Yes, I know, stir fry is just about the antithesis to barbecue, but barbecue technically isn't just cooking in your back yard, either, and like I said, I don't have a grill.

Result?  Tangy, and...distinctively bright.  The salt was a bit excessive, as I feared, but it didn't so much taste too salty as it made the ginger and pepper come across as perhaps too citrusy.  Maybe one teaspoon of salt would have been a good balance.  I might have tried serving it over rice with the remainder of the sauce, instead of just drizzling a bit over the top of the meat.  The rice would have taken up the sauce well and might have taken the edge off the salt's effects.

It's a little prettier in person, but more importantly it's delicious.  Change your room lighting if it bothers you.

Labeling this as "proof of concept" since I took so many liberties from the original recipe.  Apologies to any purists still reading.

Tomato-tapenade hors d'oeuvre

I reverse engineered, or closely enough, this snack I first experienced at the wedding reception of a buddy of mine from grad school.

Start with sourdough bread medallions or cut a baguette into approximately 1/4" thick slices.  You can also try cocktail bread; rye or multigrain might be best, but as usual, whatever your druthers.

If you like it crispy, put the bread slices on a cookie sheet and bake in a 300°F oven for five or ten minutes.  The idea is to get them crispy around the edges but still have them chewy enough that it doesn't just shatter when you take a bite.  I've skipped this step and it turns out okay.

Take some tapenade/olive salad mix, either prefab or made yourself, and mix in shredded sun dried tomatoes.  I had whole tomatoes and they were just a little too dry for my taste so I put them in my food processor, first, with a little sesame oil until the chunks were more or less even and fine.  Add the tapenade until your olive:tomato ratio is between 2:1 and 1:1, then blend a little more until the mixing and texture are even.  It should be a little pasty but you should still be able to distinguish some individual tomato and olive bits.

Mix in a finely graded hard cheese like Parmesan or Asiago (preferably without anti-caking agents, but it's tolerable with that cheese in a canister, although then it won't melt), about the same volume you used for the tomatoes.

Smear onto the bread and put back into the oven for five minutes, or eat cold.  Since this time I didn't pretoast the bread, I did seven minutes.  You may want to do the same if your ingredients aren't at room temperature.

I found some sun dried tomato tapenade at the store recently so I tried it to see if it would be a grave miscarriage of justice not to do the tomatoes myself.  Turned out fine, although I think next time I would try holding the baking time down to five minutes and boosting the temperature to 400°F.

A 3.5 oz bottle of the tomato tapenade got me this far.  Turns out it already had a little goat cheese in it, but oh well.

Next time I might try adding finely diced chicken, or prosciutto or bacon chunks, since everything goes better with cured pork.

The dregs of Christmas

Was in the grocery store on Tuesday--yes, the 27th of December--to do the usual shopping and pick over the reduced price seasonal items that didn't find a happy home before Christmas.  I didn't find much of interest, except this:

Note the expiration date on the jug.  Fully twenty days ago.

Yeah, I don't think so.

I don't care how yummy an idea pumpkin egg nog is, unless I know it's been in the freezer for most of that time, I'm not buying a dairy product that's almost three weeks old unless it's billing itself as cheese.  Okay, or yogurt or sour cream.

I've had stuff last in the fridge well past the expiration date--and, I know, it's a "do not sell after" date as much as anything--but ain't no way I'm going to attempt going through that much nog that late in the game.

I was kind of surprised there wasn't a "last minute manager's special, one dollar off!" sticker on the thing, but maybe they were afraid it would just draw attention.

Maybe there was already enough brandy in the nog to stave off lactobacillus and I missed my chance, but then, why wouldn't they have moved the date out?

Modified unnamed drink recipe

Yes, I still have nothing to call this drink.  My brother in law came up with a salutatory modification at Christmas.  Start, as before, with a 2:1:1 mix of ginger ale, chocolate vodka, and Chambourd.

Then, toss in a shot of sours.

Shake and serve on the rocks.

The sour addition brightens up the flavor respectably.  Depending on how thoroughly it's mixed and how exact your ratios are, the chocolate may become a subtone or the sour may just enhance the fruitiness of the raspberry liqueur.  It's all good.

I don't have a name for this drink, but a coworker came up with it while traveling for business.   I'm guessing a bit at the proportions so if anyone tries this and has a better idea, please let me know.

Pour into a tumbler with ice:

4 oz. chocolate vodka
4 oz. Chambourd

Top off with ginger ale.  I recommend Vernor's, just on principle.

The amount of alcohol might be off.  It was about a 50/50 mix but my original impression was of a slightly taller glass, and she held her fingers 3-4" apart and said "about this much alcohol" total.  Could be four ounces total, could be somewhere in between.

Actually, let me amend what I said above.  If anyone who has a good sense for the balance of ingredients in a cocktail, with or without tasting one, please let me know.   Maybe someday I'll tell you about the dangers of empirical reverse engineering of cocktails, but for now just trust me and don't try too hard to find the flaws unless you've got a knack for it.

Crispy Prosciutto Cups

Got the basis of this recipe from Kelsey Nixon's show on the Cooking Channel.  It looked fascinating and easier than some of the other things I've been planning on trying, so...next on the list it got to be.

You can look up the original recipe (and you should) at the link above.  I'll just present the modified version I tried.

1 lb Italian sausage
12 oz package of diced celery and white onion
1 cup of pomegranate arils
4 large eggs, beaten
6 pieces prosciutto
10 oz package of dry stuffing/bread cubes
1 t fennel
1 t dried thyme
2 c juice from a turducken (cooked, of course--how else would you get any water out?  Don't tell me.)

I didn't particularly plan it out.  I saw that fennel sausage was the first thing listed in Kelsey Nixon's recipe and couldn't find any so I thought I was being clever when I opted for Italian sausage and added fennel instead of fennel sausage and various other spices, and was feeling smugly clever until I just now noticed that Italian sausage was also called out in the original recipe.  Well, there was plenty of meat as is; it may have been more like a meatball than stuffing, in my book, if I'd doubled the amount of sausage.

I can't believe I just said "there was plenty of meat as is."

Since I was low on prosciutto I ended up just doing one slice per muffin tin cup and filling a small breadpan with the rest of the stuffing, but it was fine since I still needed something to go with that turducken.


It turned out pretty well, too, although I made the mistake of trying to eat it while watching "Eraserhead" and I just had to stop.  But we're getting ahead of ourselves; I was barely able to get the prosciutto out of the package without tearing it apart, so I ended up breaking each slice in half and trying to work with two rough square of ham tissue, which was a bit easier.  I had foreseen the possibility of this working better, but I sadly failed to honor this prophecy in my own mind.

The arils were just serendipity.  I hadn't read much past the ingredient list when I was shopping so I was half inclined to get fresh cranberries if I could find any, thinking about how the balance against Granny Smith apples would change if I did, when I just saw the package of fresh arils.  Also, they were on sale, and I didn't remember the apples until I was leaving the parking lot  Meh; world didn't end without them.

I admit, I've been going the slightly processed/prepackaged route here and there, but when I'm trying to discern something new, I try to weigh convenience allowing me to focus on the novel aspects of a dish against the superior quality of ingredients prepared freshly and properly by me in the kitchen.  In this case the sacrifice seemed negligible; in other cases, it's usually because I can't even find the best stuff fresh.


On with the cooking!  As I would presume, you turned your oven on to 325°F back when I was talking about David Lynch's ouvre killing my appetite.  If not, there's plenty of time while the sausage is browning over medium to medium-high heat in a skillet.

When the meat was browned, I added the celery/onion mixture and a little under half the arils.  When they started to cook down, I started adding the spices and half the juice (I had just pulled the turducken out of my slow cooker and the bag it was in still had all its juices).  I think I over did the juice a bit, and feared it might not have had as rich a flavor of legitimate chicken stock, so I let it reduce by approximately half before transferring it to a large bowl with the dry stuffing.  Meanwhile, I used the rest of the poultry juice--ugh, it sounds awful phrased this way, doesn't it?--to deglaze the skillet and allow the sausage-bread mixture to cool before adding the eggs and the remainder of the arils.

Oh, I threw in a little red-black pepper mix just before taking the sausage off heat, too, because I couldn't find a jar of black pepper.  Worked fine.

All that being done, I scooped as much of the mixture into the prosciutto-lined muffin tin as I dared and packed the rest into a 7"x3" breadpan.  Into the oven for 20 minutes, then check for doneness.

It looks pretty much like this when it comes out, only the meat is visibly crispy and everything else is slightly darker on top.  I remembered to take a "before" picture but not an "after" one, sorry.

It's not a stuffing recipe like what I normally use, but it was quite good.  The pomegranate's sweet tartness worked with the savory meat just as well as I could have hoped.  It was just a bit crumbly around the edges, but nothing that shouldn't be resolvable by a plate.  Maybe that second pack of sausage would have turned it into a less frangible fluffy meatball like you get in some restaurants, but whatever.

Some variations to consider for the future:  bacon instead of prosciutto, and mini-muffin tins, which would have been more accommodating to my half slices of prosciutto.

UPDATE--The photos should be visible in the published posting of this recipe now, not just in the draft preview that only I can see.  What would have been the good of that?  I was in the room with them at the time; it's not like I need to prove that to anybody.

Pumpkin fluff dip (revised)

I forgot something in the original posting of this recipe. The corrected version is as follows.

1 12 ounce can of pumpkin puree or whatever that stuff is
1 8   ounce tub of whipped cream type stuff
1 box of instant vanilla pudding (typically 1 or 2 packets)

Mix these together with pumpkin pie spices, either the premixed variety to taste or:

1 t cinnamon
1/2 t ginger
1/4 t cloves
1/2 t nutmeg

Once evenly mixed, serve with vanilla wafers or ginger snaps.  Windmill cookies might be pretty good, too, come to think of it.

All quantities are approximate.  Some cans of pumpkin are 15 ounces, which shouldn't make much of a difference; and some pumpkin pie recipes call for no nutmeg or no ginger, so increase or omit any of the spices if you don't want to scandalize the palate.