Thanksgiving: The Return

And so it begins again. The holiday. Actually the poultry that really started this blog in the first place, is rearing its ugly (but often tasty) beak again. Yes... Thanksgiving is around the corner. As Thanksgiving has gone, I have battled turkeys countless times. I've wet brined. Dry brined. No brined. I've slow roasted. Fast roasted. Both roasted. I've started breast up. Breast down. Breast flipped more than Pam Anderson on a trampoline. And yet still, I've come to no other conclusion but this:

Turkeys were not meant to be roasted in an oven.
Period.

I'm convinced that when I hear my friends say, "My mother's turkey was SO moist! She didn't have to do anything, " that they are merely referring to the oil and salt injected poultry in the neighborhood grocery, which, while state of the art at the time, is the Thanksgiving equivalent of reading the last page of a brainless Candace Bushnell book first: it certainly saves you time, but can't be good for you.

Either way, this year the bird is getting braised. Yes you heard me: BRAISED. There will be no Norman Rockwell moment (but there never, in all honesty). Mark Bittman's braised turkey recipe is the recipe of the year if you must know; made ahead of time in all likelihood. And this year I will not get drunk and burn the brussel sprouts. And I won't give myself carpal tunnel ricing potatoes. No this year, will be a fun, injury free Thanksgiving. This year I'm putting this bird (and this battle) to rest.

Momofuku Cookbook

Last Friday, after wandering around the Greenmarket, I bought myself the Momofuku Cookbook. I bought it as a gift to congratulate myself. I'm not sure what I was really congratulating myself for. Making it through another week? Remembering to put on my sunscreen? Gaining 5 pounds while I'm trying to lose 10? Either way, I felt that I needed congratulations, so I bought it.
It is 5 days later, and I've read 80% of it straight through. I'm obsessed. I think what I like best about it, is that it is not a self-congratulatory tome. I've read a number of cookbooks. One, by a famous French chef, stands out in particular. The chef had another author write the prose and the intervening stories read like a seafood Harlequin novel.

"The tides roar in and Chef SoandSo decides he wants to make us all fish for dinner. As we all turn to go to the car, Chef SoandSo rolls up his pants and dashes into the water. He momentarily disappears under the angry gray foam. We gasp for a moment and then breathe a sigh of relief as he stands, victorious, with a 10 ton tuna in his right hand, shirt ripped open by the currents."

Okay, I know I'm exaggerating. But in my mind, despite the fact that Chef SoandSo is extremely talented, the dramatic stories overshadow the real star: the food.

David Chang's book, on the other hand, really comes off as a humble collection of recipes and the story of his restaurants is a super compelling mixture of luck, temper, hard work, and trial and error. Dropping a mixture of F-bombs, kimchee, and menu brainstorming into one book is pretty cool. Like Thomas Keller, he pays tribute to some of his amazing food sources: Bev Eggleston and Allen Benton. To dispel misconceptions about foie gras, he dedicates a couple of pages to his foie gras source, paying particular attention to the animals' wellfare. His true respect for the talent of Marco Carnora (Hearth, Insieme), Andrew Carmellini (formerly A Voce, now Locanda Verde), Wylie Dufresne (wd-50) and many of his own partners comes off as sincere deference.

Credit is given where credit is due.

My Smart Wine Friend (SWF) thinks that many of the ingredients are inaccessible as are the times and techniques which is true. These certainly are not Rachael Ray's 30-minute meals (thank goodness) and would be a challenge to put together on a weekday. But as a weekend project they are utterly tempting. I truly appreciate Chang's "ghetto sous vide" method. And though many cookbooks do not tell you what can be made ahead of time, Chang's book seems to recognize that while life may be "a la minute" not all cooking can be.

I totally recommend this book. Stay tuned for a demi-glace blog... yup had a major demi-glace triumph this past weekend!

New Year, New Lobster

Every New Year's Day, my best friend, whom I refer to as SWF (Smart Wine Friend) and I have a lobster dinner. This started 8-9 years ago, though the origins are somewhat unclear. Legend has it that there was an old ogre named ... eh. Screw it. The real beginnings were more like this:

SWF: Hey Courtster. Wanna come over for lobster tomorrow?
Me: Uh Duh. Yes.

That first dinner was pretty slamming and since then the tradition has kept up, hangovers not withstanding. Every year we have been getting a little more hardcore culminating in our rendition of Thomas Keller's Butter Poached Lobster on Sauteed Leeks with Pommes Maxim and a Beet Reduction last year. Now smart wine friend is the pragmatic one. He is organized, neat and always insists on impeccable presentation. I, on the other hand, am over-ambitious, under-skilled and not the least bit organized.

But this year, we kept it simple. Neither of us were feeling up to butter poaching, or stacking Portale style, a lobster claw on top of its tail, on top of a puree and underneath some fried thing, much less leaving the warm confines of our apartments with our significant others in tow.

Canneloni was the initial thought weeks ago, before New Year's Eve reveling got in the way. But neither of us could agree on a sauce and on the day of, neither of us wanted to drag out the pasta maker.
Plain old boiled lobster or roasted lobster would have been simple but neither of us could fathom boiling something and just throwing it on a plate.

There were emails. Recipes. Arguments. Smoke Signals. Mom Jokes. And finally we settled on:
http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/spicy-lobster-noodle-salad

Jean-Georges Vongerichten's Spicy Asian Noodle and Lobster recipe it was. Light enough to satisfy the requirements of most New Year's resolutions, spicy enough to get your taste buds going, yet hearty enough to fill us all up. The only subs we made were using Bean threads instead of cellophane noodles and Elderflower syrup instead of Elderflower Cordial (the latter being much thinner than the former, but an equivalent amount of syrup was fine in this recipe.)

The final product:

Looks a little weird in the picture, but was beautiful in person (my mom used to say that about me a lot when I was a kid). And delicious. Hopefully 2010 will continue to be just that: delicious, light, beautiful and a little spicy.