Thanksgiving! (part 3)

What's a gathering without a vegetable tray?

I wanted to make a slightly unexpected vegetable tray this year instead of the typical raw carrots, celery, etc with a store bought vegetable "dip" or ranch dressing thing. One of the easiest yet best things I've "discovered" lately is aioli, which is garlic mayonnaise. I still haven't taken the step of making my own mayonnaise yet--I keep telling myself I will someday. It just doesn't seem that essential when plain old store bought mayo like Hellman's is already so good. But who wants to dip their vegetables in just plain mayo? (Well, I probably would, but I really like mayo.) I learned to make it a million times more delicious and addictive by simply adding some raw garlic (minced/crushed into a paste), fresh lemon juice, and a little bit of salt. Just a few things and it really is amazingly tasty and addictive (the only drawback I suppose). I also wanted to add some vegetables to the tray that might not normally be on a typical veggie tray but would be delicious with aioli, so I choose broccoli, green beans and cauliflower, all of which might be a bit iffy/objectionable completely raw, but taste great when blanched just long enough to be slightly cooked but still crunchy and to lose any offpputting raw taste. By themselves, they're tasty as is. With aioli, they're fantastic, and still relatively healthy, at least. Better dipping green beans in aioli than frites, right?

Thanksgiving! (part 2) / carb time!

What is Thanksgiving if not a time to eat lots of delicious carbs? Part of my contribution to the family feast was gougeres with bacon and gruyere. Gougeres are good. They bake into a puffy pastry with a crispy outer edge and a partly hollow interior. I've only ever made these with bacon and gruyere, but I think they would be just as tasty to experiment with other fillings like gruyere alone, other types of cheeses, or anything that would go well with the texture of the pastry.

I also made some biscuits, because I really like biscuits, but those are again one of those things I wouldn't think to make for a more everyday meal. These are made from the surprising ingredient of cream (recipe courtesy of Cook's Illustrated), which means no need to cut in butter or shortening--yay!--and they baked up nice and high. These are delicious and best straight out of the oven. Unfortunately they seem to lose a little something, let's call it happiness, the longer they sit around.

Thanksgiving! (part 1)

Let's start the Thanksgiving posts with dessert, shall we?

I don't bake pies very often, but in the past few years I've been making them for Thanksgiving. There's just something about Thanksgiving tradition (in general, not my family's) that makes me want to bake pies. The former tradition in my family was that we would have a number of relatives over, and someone would always bring Baker's Square pies for our dessert. When I was a kid we never had pies at home except at Thanksgiving, so oh, how I would look forward to those pies at Thanksgiving (I was partial to the French Silk). These days I'm still all for pie at Thanksgiving, but I've come to prefer the idea of a homemade pie. No one else in my family particularly cares, or at least cares enough to bake the pies themselves, so I take it upon myself to do the dessert baking. This year I made a pecan pie, apple tart, and apple cranberry crumble pie, for variety.

This Thanksgiving was my first time using glass pie plates for baking a pie, which upon doing some research I learned that a number of pie bakers prefer. But glass bakeware scares me. I read and take the warning instructions of things very seriously. Don't get it wet before putting it in the oven/after it comes out of the oven, don't put it in the oven moist, don't let the temperate change drastically and suddenly--these all are obviously helpful, practical points, but served to make me extremely paranoid and gave me visions of taking a pie out of the oven only to have the glass explode into tiny hot shards in my face. This has never happened to me and the sane part of me imagines that if anything, the glass would probably crack in pieces rather than explode into tiny shards and propel itself into my face, but the paranoid visions persist. I blame the combination of my overactive imagination and my fifth grade teacher, who once told my class about boiling water and glass, saying if you pour boiling water into a regular glass, it could explode. She did tell is that tempered glass, like in a Pyrex measuring cup, would be OK with that. Regardless, it was the vision that conjured in my 10 year old head of the glass breaking that's led me to never quite trust the combination of very hot water and glass.

I'm relieved to say that my pie plates emerged intact from the baking process. The pies themselves turned out well. The pecan pie crust ended up majorly slumping on one side and I'm not sure why. The last time I made a pecan pie I used a metal pie plate and that didn't happen. I put the pie plate with crust into the freezer at some point to firm it up before I baked it. When I took it out I realized that because of the drastic temperature difference thing I should not be putting it directly from the freezer to the oven, so I let it sit out for a while. Defeats the purpose, I know. Then of course there was condensation on my pie plate so I had to make sure to dry that off. In any case, I think that has something to do with the crust issues but the pie itself including the crust was quite good.

The next dessert was an apple tart with a crust that was much more like a more buttery pie crust than a puff pastry. It tasted pretty much like the puff pastry apple tart but with a crisper crust. Very simple, quite good, but not the most exciting. Maybe after all the ways I scared myself making the pies, using a safe old metal tart pan was just too anticlimactic.

Finally, I made a totally new recipe, which ended up being my favorite dessert. The holiday issue of Gourmet this year (RIP, even though I only got it thanks to my free subscription from Sur la Table) had a recipe for an apple cranberry crumble pie that looked so good--oozing red filling, crumbly bits on top, both tart and sweet fruit in the middle. I made a different crust than the recipe called for--an all butter rather than a butter and shortening crust. The best part is that this pie is not sickly sweet or overbearingly heavy, something I don't particularly want after one of my family's traditionally overwhelmingly bountiful Thanksgiving meals.

Braised short ribs and mashed potatoes

We've been getting packages of 2 or so short ribs in our meat CSA pickups for a while, but what can you do with 2 short ribs at a time? We patiently bided our time and saved up packages of ribs until they accumulated into a vast bounty of deliciousness, then waited until an appropriately cold evening. If any dish can be considered a Sunday night dish, this is it. Browned on the stove until they each develop a beautiful brown crusty exterior, then braised for hours until the meat gets so tender it falls off the bone, these ribs are rather rich but completely worth both the wait time and calories. Most of the time is unattended, so you just have to have a few hours to stick around at home while the ribs cook. Much of this dish's appeal has to come from the anticipation itself.

Apple tart (part 1)

I made this apple tart as a dry run for Thanksgiving. The recipe called for frozen puff pastry, so from the beginning I felt like I was cheating a bit. I'm actually a fan of frozen puff pastry, but for this dessert it felt too easy. What's both bad and good about this recipe was that it focused almost exclusively on the apples, as the pastry base itself was very thin and unassuming. It also is quite an attractive dessert. I think of it as good, and not heavy for a dessert. But hey, to me Thanksgiving means grand excess, or more generously, bounty. My taster in the family also deemed the base crust as too soft. So this tart did not make the cut for Thanksgiving, but I would certainly make it again for the right occasion.

Lamb and bulgur patties

I got some "lamb hamburger" from my meat CSA and had not a clue what to do with it. Mark Bittman to the rescue! I found a recipe for lamb and bulgur patties and served it with a mint and cilantro chutney (and a yogurt and mint and cilantro sauce). I had some extra Thai basil so threw some in there as well. The patties were good. The chutney was delicious, and a beautiful bright green too. I would eat it with everything if I always had some on hand.

Red cooked pork belly buns

Browsing at the Asian grocery store, I found some thick pieces of "bacon" and they immediately called to mind the wonderful pork belly dishes I've eaten in restaurants. So I decided to try making my own! First, I realized that pork belly dishes in restaurants can be kind of a racket given what they tend to charge (not counting cheap Chinese restaurants). A pound of pork belly was surprisingly cheap at the Asian store! Or maybe it's just me having become accustomed to more Whole Foods type meat prices. More power to the restaurants for bringing the idea of pork belly to the masses, though. So pork belly is pretty much what it sounds like. And what I suspected but hadn't confirmed turned out to be true, what we think of as pork belly is simply a bigger slab of what we usually think of as bacon, just unsliced and uncured. And it can be quite delicious and tender.

I used a recipe for red-cooked pork belly and decided to serve it on buns with some greens. The pork belly simmered long and slow in rice wine, soy sauce, ginger, garlic, a star anise, and sugar, until it was so very tender, then the cooking liquid was reduced to more of a sauce. I simply wilted the spinach, poured some of the sauce over that and the pork, and made sandwiches out of it with the buns. So easy, so delicious, so porky... This particular recipe may actually go better with rice--upon eating the leftovers I realized just the sauce itself is extremely delicious on rice in a way the buns can't touch--but there's something about little sandwiches that is just so appealing.