The turkey leftovers are done, and for once, without soup. I judged that we’d cleaned so much off the carcass that it wasn’t even going to be good for broth—it was down to a bit of skin and some bones, more or less. Plus the leftovers are otherwise done with a couple of exceptions that I don’t think are going to get eaten for various reasons. Definitely one of the best Thanksgivings in terms of maximum efficiency.
But how did we get there?
Almost everything in the last week’s cookery came from the NYT Cooking app, modified as I saw fit. I have to say that I’ve come to find it profoundly useful but it took a while for me to fully grasp something important about it, which is that most of the recipes are from somewhere else. It’s essentially a curated collection of published cookbook recipes, including some published in the Times before it had a fully digitized publication platform. As a result, the app didn’t become really useful until it interoperated with the main NYT app but also became easier to search and curate. (It’s still not perfect in that respect—it can be difficult to do certain kinds of facilitated browsing through the now-quite-large collection of recipes it has available.)
So I started pre-Thanksgiving with a recipe for “hot and numbing” potatoes from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt that I quite liked but that wasn’t a big hit with anybody but me due to the strong effects of Szechuan peppercorn on palates that hadn’t had it before. A bigger hit the next day, just before the main event, was some strip steaks with a little gratin of leeks and potatoes.
My one regret this year with Thanksgiving is that I came up with a plate that had a lot of good complementary tastes but that was texturally and visually fairly monochrome: white beans with bacon, mashed potatoes with brown butter, roasted brussel sprouts with harissa and lemon, roasted carrots on ricotta over puff pastry, mushrooms and farro, turkey and gravy: a lot of white and brown, with even the sprouts looking a bit brown due to the roasting.
The basic challenge in a multi-course menu if you’re like me, a control-freak in the kitchen who basically wants to do the whole thing, is to debug the entire prep sequence so that everything can be done in a relatively sane set of stages and so that there’s space in the oven for everything to cook at the proper temperature for the proper amount of time.
The only thing I screwed up was the roasted carrots and ricotta on puff pastry, and it was because of a failure of planning. I think that needed to be in the oven before the turkey so that the pastry could rise enough (without burning on the bottom) to hold up to a brief heating with the cheese mixture, and that the carrots needed a very high-heat quick roast by themselves, with the assembly and final heating to happen for a very short time just before service. As it was, the result was just too soggy, even if it tasted and looked good.
Like I said, a good plate in terms of tastes, but really boring to look at. There was a colorful little salad on the side but it got overlooked until everybody was mostly full.
Leftovers were easy this time. I’ve often made a kind of “enchilada pie” but the NYT app had the good suggestion of layering some leftovers of sides as well as turkey. So I put mashed potatoes and beans in alternating layers with turkey, with some of the gravy in each layer as well as cheese, and then with a spicy red salsa on top.
Round #2 was a hash with a barbecue bechamel sauce—I used some mushrooms, some potatoes (not leftover), a garlic-onion-bell pepper sofrito, and the rest of the turkey. That also worked really well—often I’m insanely bored by turkey by day #3 but not this time.
The beans got their last hurrah last night, along with the mushrooms and farro and some lamb loin chops marinated with rosemary and garlic. I have to say that for whatever reason on their last goodbye, the beans visited their trademark flatulence when they didn’t before, maybe because they were more central to the overall meal. Or maybe that was just a multi-day dose making its presence felt.
Our guests brought a delicious apple pie and cookies, so the relative failure of my contributed desserts also wasn’t that big a deal. I tried making the NYT pumpkin empanadas (failed because I didn’t put enough filling in them, which I think is a tricky technical problem) and a lemon-turmeric cake that was pretty good but we were all full so it’s only been nibbled away at since.
Who knows? Maybe next year is the year where I do something really different. Always possible.
Amazing you can do all of this so efficiently and well in our little kitchen. Great meal. Thank you.