Xmas turkey feast part 2

12:30:2002
Time for the trimmings, sauces and peripherals...

Cubed roasted potatoes with Rosemary
This is my personal favourite recipie for roast potatoes because it doesn't require pre-boiling or peeling the potatoes and still tastes great.
For 8 people:
3 Kilos potatoes
rosemary (leaves stripped off the branch)
vegetable oil
salt
Cut the potatoes into small cubes- about 3 cm on each side and dry them on a tea towel. Pre heat a lightly oiled baking tray, then scatter the potato cubes over it, making sure you don't put too many on there. For 3 kilos of potatoes you'll need at least two baking trays, maybe three. The potato cubes should be in one even layer per tray. Add a good amount of salt and bake the trays on a high heat (220 degrees C should do it) , turning the potatoes every 10 minutes or so. When the potatoes are starting to go brown, add the rosemary. You have to do this towards the end because otherwise the stuff burns.
When to take the potatoes out of the oven is up to your preferred level of crispiness. I generally take them out when the darkest ones are a dark brown. If you haven't fucked up you'll have a load of cubes that are evenly crispy and not sticking to the tray. (Insufficient turning is the most common cause of this recipie going wrong. It doesn't hurt to make sure the cubes are oiled on all sides)
Roasted sweet vegetables
1 kilo parsnips
1 kilo carrots
1 kilo butternut squash
1 kilo onions
oil, salt.
It is a little known fact that in medieval Britain parsnips were the sweetest vegetables available. This was before sugar beet, sugar cane didn't grow in Britain and going after a bees nest was a life threatening operation. And if you're interested in botanics and chemistry, root vegetables get sweet when cooked because they store lots of starch which gets broken down to sugars when cooked. Onions and butternut squash aren't root vegetables but still go well in this dish.
Anyway, this one's piss easy. Peel the carrots, parsnips, onions and squash. Cut the carrots and parsnips into finger sized strips and the butternut squash into bigger blocks. The onions you can leave whole. Put them onto a baking tray (or two), drizzle oil over the lot, toss them around to spread the oil and sprinkle with a little salt.
The rest is like the potatoes above- just do them a bit longer and slower- say 180C for half an hour. You'll see the strips sweat and shrink. Turn them over before they stick to the tray. They'll be ready when they start to go light brown- take them out before the burn. note the vegetables may cook at different rates. Keep an eye on the buggers. This year I mistook a variety of pumpkin for butternut squash which was a big mistake. It was really bland and no one liked it.

Cranberry sauce
Once you make this you'll never go back to the sweet shit that comes in jars....
400g fresh cranberries (Ocean Spray sell them in plastic packets. Look for it at a well stocked greengrocers)
1 orange
sugar
300 ml water
Boil the water with 100g sugar. When it is boiling and the sugar is dissolved add the cranberries and simmer, stirring occasionally. The cranberries will start to burst. Grate the orange peel and add the zest to the cranberries. Then squeeze the orange juice into the mix as well. When all the cranberries have burst taste the sauce. It may be very tart (fresh cranberry juice is more sour than lemon juice. I've been to the Ocean Spray processing plant in Henderson, Nevada, USA so I know what I'm talking about).
Add more sugar if desired and keep stirring (add only a little sugar at a time so you don't overdo it). When it tastes right, remove from the heat and allow to cool. It will get all mushy and delicious. Goes great with turkey sandwiches. Make loads of it.
Turkey gravy
Remember the giblets you removed from the turkey prior to stuffing? You didn't throw them away or played practical jokes with the penis-shaped neck did you? Good. Boil the neck and the heart in a small saucepan as soon as you get hold of them. I honestly don't know about the liver. I don't think it would improve the gravy. You could stick it in the turkey pan during the last half hour of roasting or alternatively you could do what I did and throw the fucker in the bin.
The neck and heart will boil away for hours and look pretty nasty, but when the turkey's done all you have to do is strain the whole mess and keep the water they were boiling in. You have just made turkey stock, which is a perfect base for your gravy. With extreme care, remove the turkey from the roasting pan and pour all the juices and fat into a bowl. Then pour the stock into the pan and swish it around. The aim here is to dissolve all the sticky brown gunk that is stuck to the pan. This gunk is bloody delicious. Try some. If you have a couple of stovetop hobs free, switch them on and stick the pan on them as you swoosh the stock around. The heat helps to shift the brown gunk though take care not to burn anything.
When the gunk has dissolved in the stock pour the whole lot into the bowl with the rest of the juice and fat in it. The fat will rise to the top. Carefully pour the fat away- either into another bowl for future use (don't kid yourself. You'll never use it) or down the sink with hot water and washing up liquid to stop it solidifying and blocking your drain. Use the turkey baster to remove the last of the fat from the top of the juice. Now taste the juice and add salt if necessary. If you want it thicker add some cornflour. You could even try a little red wine. Personally I like it as it is. There ye go. Turkey gravy.
Brussels sprouts
Somehow these are part of the Xmas dinner tradition though they are no one's favourite. Maybe there needs to be something green on the plate if only as a concession to a 'balanced diet'. Well at least they're easy to prepare.
200g Sprouts per person
Peel the outer leaves off and trim the base off every single sprout. You have no idea how long this takes. It nearly fucked up my entire schedule this year. Luckily Stig was around to peel parsnips and carrots while I did this. Stig turned out to be a bit of an authority on sprouts for some reason. He said it's better to steam them than boil them and that the worst thing you could do with them is over cook them so they go all mushy and smell like shit (good advice). He also said his mum cuts a little cross in the base which makes them cook faster (I always wondered what the 'cross in the sprout base' was all about.)
When you're done, steam the sprouts for half an hour, checking them every so often to make sure they're not overcooking. It may even take longer than half an hour so be warned.

Sausages
I didn't do enough of these this year so they became the subject of much fighting and covetousness at the table. Just get some regular pork sausages and chuck them into the turkey pan during the last half hour of cooking. They should go all brown and soak up some of the turkey fat and juices. Bloody fantastic. If your turky pan is a bit flooded in juices and you're worried about the sausages boiling rather than roasting then transfer them to their own pan after 10 minutes. For extra naughtiness put a bit of turkey fat on them.
Desserts
Just a quick section here because desserts aren't really my thing.
Xmas pudding
My advice is to buy one at a shop. With all of the above going on you really don't want to be bothered into making one of your own. Strangely they need to be steamed for an hour or microwaved for only a couple of minutes. What with all the timing and coordination hassles with the main course, I just microwaved the pudding this year and it came out fine. For the flaming brandy, Stig suggested we microwave the brandy to heat it up instead of doing it in a saucepan. He had a lengthy explanation for this but I can't remember it. Something about the alcohol not boiling away. It worked OK.
Whipped cream with brandy stirred into it went down quite well with the pudding. Careful with the brandy content. If you add too much it tastes chemical somehow.
Fruit salad
After all that heavy fatty food, chunks of pineapple, mango and melon mixed together are very welcome. This is another one you can prepare on Xmas eve. My main problem with fruit salads is that they cut the bits up too small and that there are too many different types of fruit in the one salad. Three is the maximum number of fruits I will mix together and even that is pushing it.
Right, that's about it. Watch out for your dish co-ordination- you ideally want all the dished to be ready within a 20 minute period as that's how long it takes to get 8 pissed people to get round a table. If you have any opinion about how these recipies could be improved or you think I've given the wrong advice on any particular dish then you can stick it up your arse. I'm writing a weblog here, not a fucking cookbook.






[ Back to the Public Albatross System]