So... What's cooking?

[Paladin]

Since I just spent a few hours this morning running all over town to get all the stuff I need to cook a standing rib roast for Thanksgiving (Seriously, you'd think you could find a standing rib roast, an electric carving knife, a pyrex dish big enough to hold it, and a probe thermometer in the same store, but nooooo), I became curious as to what the rest of you dolts are cooking. I know you're not being lazy and not cooking anything for the holidays.

I bought a four bone standing rib roast ($3.99 a pound, which is like, select quality price, but the actual cut I got looks damn near prime, so score!), and will probably spend several hours thursday morning cooking it.

What culinary achievements are you lot attempting?

[Fire and Steel]

I'm not doing a thing, but apparently my grandmother is cooking some prime rib and my mother will be going for some ham.

I'll get leftovers from either, so I can't complain I guess.

[Langy]

Well, there's the turkey, the pies, the rolls, and all the other fun bits. Hopefully some corn on the cob and potatos. I'm not sure if we'll be making a ham as well or not this year - probably not, but there's always a chance. Thanksgiving Dinner is always awesome.

Personally, I don't actually cook any of this stuff - my parents are much better cooks than I am when it comes to the kitchen, my skills more lying along the lines of the grill. Now, if the tradition were a thanksgiving steak, I might actually be considered to make it. Sadly, it is not.

[Paladin]

I prefer roasts to steaks :)

Prime rib > all.

[CommodoreKitty]

I want to try to deep-fry our turkey again, 25 gallons of oil and fire baby. It's comparable to kfc chicken in terms of moistness (from what I remember) but only turkey. But it is a little expensive, so we might simply fall back on the cliche dinner plan for Thanksgiving. You know what I mean.

The only question I really have is what kind of pie I should get. Pumpkin is always good, but then again so is apple. Pekan is also good. I could mix it up, but that would just be cheating. Hmm....

[Langy]

I prefer roasts to steaks


I want to try to deep-fry our turkey

Heretics!

[darkelf]

Well, due to some jaw surgery last week, I'm not allowed to chew for the next 5 weeks :(
So no good food for me this year. Which really sucks, my birthday was Monday, dinner: soup, thanksgiving: soup, christmas: most likely soup, if I'm lucky meat.

[**Spetsnaz**]

we always eat out with Christmas Eve. on Christmas day itself, i will make a nice beef roast in the oven i think.

[Harper]

Mom's making pumpkin and apple pie. My family knows better than to let me come near anything more complicated than a grilled cheese sandwich, which in all honesty does't bother me because I'm lazy anyway.

Turkey, rolls, mashed potatoes, noodles, gravy, stuffing... Here's to a healthy holiday season :beer:


Oh man...
darkelf that really sucks.

[Langy]

Make them postpone thanksgiving dinner for you, Darkelf:( That's just not cool:(

[SquidDNA]

Seeing as it's just going to be me, I'm going to make Barcsz (http://wiki.reliccommunity.com/Barcsz), which I normally make for Easter, but I can't be bothered with the whole mess of making 12 dishes just for myself.

[Sethero]

Hmm... well, there's the turkey stuffed with oyster dressing (my mom's recipe), mashed potatoes, a spinach rice au gratin dish (a tradition for my family), homemade dinner rolls (none of that namby pamby bread machine or stand mixer stuff, these are by hand) and pies in pumpkin and mixed berry varieties. Tomorrow will be a busy but delicious day.

Squid, no company this holiday?

[Vaarok]

I found a few weeks ago that shaving about a quarter cup of sweetened almond paste into a pumpkin pie with the sugared bits of a single finely diced apple makes pie to die for. In an hour or so I'll put a few in the oven.

[Lomax]

They were all starved. The final parsley garnish was an exclamation mark
to everything that had led to this point. I released my finger from the pan,
and then it was over.
To make any kind of sense of it, I need to go back three years.
Back to the night the cooking started.
I was still in the force back then.
Waldorf Astoria, Manhattan, Midtown North Precinct.
Hell's kitchen.

No, really - I'll go eat at Mom's on Christmas. Made some delicious chicken ragout half an hour ago, complete with parsley, and me and my friend took turns explaining our cooking with Max Payne's inner monologue style.

[Harmanoff]

I think i'm gonna make some spaghetti carbonara(with halloumi instead of bacon).

[Captain Wicha]

Its my responsibility to make the desert items... im making a Pumpkin Pie, a Cherry pie, and my oh so famous (where i live) Berry Pie...


im thinking of making something original this year (as i always bring one non pie desert.... but this year i havent put any thought into it until... now) if you have any ideas to pass on to me that would be sweet!

[Harper]

Ever tried a cheesecake Captain Wicha? You can add just about any fruit to it spice it up a bit, but the kind my dad always makes has either pineapple or blackberry preserves in it.

[snrjefe]

Turkey's going in the brining bag sometime this afternoon to sit overnight. If you haven't tried this for your oven-roasted turkey, stop reading this post and go to the store right now for the gear. You'll be thanking me Thursday evening.

The family e-mails are currently rife with recipes flying over the ether. I think we're going with great-grandma's yams for the starch this year. The green veggie is either broccolini with pancenta or spinach with prociutto, or both if I have my way.

Roasts are more of a Christmas affair in my family. Sometimes a ham, but that's usually Easter fare. Though the thought of Paladin's standing rib roast made my stomach rumble...

[CommodoreKitty]

Turkey's going in the brining bag sometime this afternoon to sit overnight.

I can has know? This makes it better? Enlighten me!

[snrjefe]

There are any number of recipes and such, just search for 'turkey brining'. Essentially put the turkey in a bag with salt, sugar and ice water (must be ice to keep the turkey below the bacterial danger zone) plus some add-ons. The salt, water and sugar essentially move in and out of the cell walls and make the turkey more moist and flavorful.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Roasted_Brined_Turkey

Ingredients
8.5-14 pound Turkey
2 Tbs. (1/2 stick) unsalted butter to coat skin of turkey
1/2 gallon of water
2 cups kosher salt
1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
2 Tbs. peppercorns
2 gallons of ice water (50% ice)

Brining
In 1/2 gallon of water, combine the salt and brown sugar for the brine and bring to a boil for about 3 minutes. Remove from heat and add to 5 gallon bucket.
Add the remaining ice water.
Remove neck and giblets from turkey and put in 5 gallon bucket. If brine won't cover turkey add a little more water.
Put bucket in a cold area for 6 to 24 hours.
Rub a little olive oil on the skin before it goes in the oven and it will crisp up a bit better. Sort of like deep frying just the skin so it's nice and crunchy.

[CommodoreKitty]

gold

[Mikali]

Well, due to some jaw surgery last week, I'm not allowed to chew for the next 5 weeks
So no good food for me this year. Which really sucks, my birthday was Monday, dinner: soup, thanksgiving: soup, christmas: most likely soup, if I'm lucky meat.
What about smoothies? some of them can be quite nutritious; and they're always tasty! :)

(Turkey smoothie?)


This recipe is for a 16-18 pound turkey. Roughly 2 days are required to prepare the bird...


Ingredients
8.5-14 pound Turkey

Wut?

[Victor Rovial]

Turkey Day! (So called because that's what my mom gets up and screams throughout the house at 6 AM to wake us up.) is an ongoing eating marathon for my family.

Once the screaming stops, we get down to the serious business of thanksgiving breakfast:

Pillsbury cinnamon rolls. Homemade hash browns, bacon, scrambled eggs and sausage. Also, about 2 dozen pancakes. Chocolate milk and whatnot.

Several hours of digesting later and we're ready for the next wave at lunch:

Potato salad with pickles and onions and a dash of seasoned salt, prepared the night before and served with fresh burgers and curly fries, cole slaw and soda.

Obligatory burping contest followed by more digestion.

Now, the gut busting fanalie.

Dinner: One 15 pound turkey AND gigantic hunk of baked ham (we have a double oven) Turkey filled with stuffing composed of fresh baked cornbread and water chesnuts, onions celery and lots of garlic and salt. Ham covered in strange sour cream based sauce of apparently Russian origin (according to grandma), which tastes orgasmic.

About 30 potatoes whipped with four sticks of butter and half a gallon of whole milk, slathered in gravy made from the turkey.

20 or so biscuts to dunk or butter up and eat, and for drinks, some Martini and Rossi Champagne for the adults and Martinellis sparkling apple cider for the kids.

Dessert consists of: Grandmas homemade fudge, covered in carmelized sugar. 3 or 4 pies of various types and one cheesecake and one Mocha and Chocolate Mousse cake from Trader Joes.

Did I mention that I love the holidays! And you all, by extention. *Virtual hug*

[Paladin]

Anyone who watches Good Eats at all should know about brining (And anyone who doesn't watch Good Eats should be flogged).

Also, an entirely unacceptably high percentage of you are apparently of the "I can't cook anything" learned helplessness school of maleness. Get in the damn kitchen and practice until you can cook you slackers!

[Shoota Fodder]

Living across the pond here, so I'll be having my usual un-celebaratory meal. Fish 'n' Chips!

Anyway, what actually is Thanksgiving? It's something I'm sure I should know from all this American TV, but what is it all about?

[Paladin]

It's essentially a harvest celebration, a re-enactment of a dinner the plymouth rock pilgrims shared with the local natives to celebrate having survived their first year, more or less.

[Langy]

It's not even a re-enactment nowadays, really. It's just an excuse to eat lots of good food, and for stores to have ludicrous sales the day after.

[CommodoreKitty]

That is kinds how all holidays have more or less become today. Just another excuse to not work and to be gluttonous. People need no more reason than that to celebrate it. You could get people to celebrate the invention of the pogo-stick if it meant they didn't have to go to work.

[snrjefe]

Oh yeah, don't be afraid to go under the skin with some salt and pepper. Just stay away from injecting stuff. The holes let out a lot of the juices and if you let the bird soak long enough, the penetration is far better with brining than repeated stabs of large guage needles.

Not a big fan of putting stuffing in the bird. I know it's not really stuffing if it's not stuffed into the bird, but you can always pour pan drippings on the stuffing afterwards. Stuffing the bird makes it take a lot longer to cook and typically the bird is overdone by the time the stuffing is done. Turduckens might be alright, but I've never had one and would hate to waste a perfectly good holiday meal on one that turns out shittily.

To second Paladin: You'd be surprised what some culinary skill can do in your efforts with the object of your affections. The way to a person's (not just a man's) heart is through their stomach.

Alton Brown and Good Eats is good stuff, but for celebrity chefs, my money is on Anthony Bourdain. No Reservations is one of the the most enjoyable hours of TV for me.

Mikhail: The volume of the brine isn't as important as the concentrations of salt and sugar; though that would be a shit-ton of butter for a 9 pound bird. Not like that would be a bad thing though. I prefer the olive oil to the butter for ease of application and clean up. A little olive oil is easier to apply than smearing butter all over the place.

[Paladin]

I just like Good Eats because he doesn't simply tell you how to cook something, he explains the hows and whys of every last detail of the cooking process, how a particular method came into use historically, and so on.

Vastly more educational than most shows, and he focuses on a single dish per episode so you really get to understand it.

And yeah, I always tell hetero friends to learn to cook for god's sake. Females are always pleasantly surprised when they find out a man can cook, and consider him a better mate because they won't always have to cook every damn meal.

[snrjefe]

Just the hetero friends? Looking for a leg up on the competition, eh? I'm telling you, cooking is sexy. It's hardwired. I'm no prize pig, but I landed me a lady through precise execution of barbeque skills with not just her but her family. Dad in law is a 1st generation Armenian from Chicago. When I busted out the mustard rubbed lamb kebobs, I was family whether she married me or not.

If nothing else, cooking saves you a bunch of money in the long run. The drawback is when you go to a (most) restaurant(s) and realize you could have made what you ordered for less money and it would have tasted better.

Don't get me wrong, Alton is the best of the cooking shows. It doesn't have the food porn aspects (extreme close ups, mood music, amplified sounds) that most other cooking shows have. I miss Yan Can Cook from PBS way, way back in the day.

[El Russo]

We don't have a holiday at this time of year :(

/me sniffs

[snrjefe]

How about, thankful-to-be-rid-of-those-puritanical-americans day? It could be around the same time of year and celebrate the departure of the Mayflower as opposed to its arrival here in the Americas.

[Timeless]

Yea, I love food shows, but they always make me hungry.

[El Russo]

Doesn't get me a day or two off work though does it! I'm also quite jealous of all this food...

[Shoota Fodder]

We don't have a holiday at this time of year.


Don't be so hard for us.

We just had Guy Fawkes which involved tons of explosions and bombs, so I'm not complaining. You can still get the last ones up here half price, and to say the least, some friends and I had a kick-ass night in the street a day or two ago. ;)