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A couple years ago (and a couple blog posts ago) I made a big ol turkey dinner for Melisa and I and it turned out quite well.  I’ve made some others since then, all in the same method, but over the Christmas to New Years break we had another turkey, and although I prepared and cooked it very similarly, I did do a couple of things differently, which turned out to be quite successful! I thought I’d outline them here for your enjoyment.

We had a 12lber this year which was a bit more reasonable for only 2 people (gotta still have copious amounts of leftovers) and it fit into our roaster really well, I definitely think 12 pounds is the magic number.  The preparation of the stuffing is all the same as the last post but the turkey was done slightly differently.  It still has the salt/pepper/rosemary/paprika rub all over it but we didn’t cook the stuffing inside of the turkey.  Instead 2 oranges were sliced in half and pushed into the bird as well as a bunch of fresh herbs.  Originally I was only going to buy a bunch of fresh rosemary, as opposed to using the dried stuff I already have, but Safeway was selling bundles of fresh herbs specifically for chickens/turkeys over the holidays that included rosemary and a bunch of other delicious smelling greens.  Most were shoved into the turkey in all the various spots I could find and the rosemary with the largest stem was used to close up the cavity itself holding the two fat flaps together.

Normally a turkey like this, fully stuffed, would take 5 hours or so in the oven, but things were much quicker this time!  The mostly empty cavity let the bird heat up much quicker and as the oranges let off their juices inside of the turkey they effectively steamed it from the inside further speeding things up.  After 2 and a half hours the turkey was not only done, it was almost overcooked!

The next step was to take the turkey out of the oven and then out of the roaster and let it rest on the cutting board.  The key is to cover it up with tinfoil and to then cover that up with 5 or so dish towels.  This effectively traps the heat inside the bird finishing the cooking process, keeping all the juices in the meet, and not letting any heat escape.  Apparently you can have a turkey stay fresh, moist, and warm for up to 4 hours like this!  The beauty of this method is that with the turkey done you now have an oven you can use for up to 4 hours to prepare sides or anything else you might need.  Earlier I had put our stuffing into a smaller roaster and now I let it cook in the oven for an hour and a half or so.  After that I carved the turkey, took the stuffing out of the oven, and we ate!

It was a delicious meal and this new method for turkey cooking worked great, the stuffing was still as moist as ever and since we use poultry seasoning in the stuffing I really didn’t notice any sort of flavour difference compared to normal.  A nice bonus was all of the fat that usually drips out of the turkey and seeps into the stuffing was not there either so it was even a bit healthier!  (I make a fairly wet stuffing to begin with so it was still super moist)

Here’s a shot of the spread:

Sadly it was taken with a cell phone and I didn’t wait for it to focus correctly apparently, I also didn’t think to take pictures of the process this time for blog documentation but rest assured, everything tasted great

Everybody seems to be getting married lately!  Well maybe not everyone, but a good chunk of them…  A couple of weeks ago we went to a wedding that had a full Chinese 12 course banquet dinner which was pretty crazy but also quite lovely.  (Pictures of said dishes are in a album Melisa uploaded to facebook for those that are interested and have access)  Yesterday evening we got back from a 6 hour trek to the interior of BC after spending a weekend attending another lovely wedding and visiting some wineries.  Something new I learned, people from that area refer to the Vancouver region as “the coast”, as in “I don’t really feel like driving to The Coast” which I thought was pretty funny, certainly not something you’d ever think to call if when you live here.  In a couple of weeks we’re heading back out to the interior for another friend’s wedding right before flying out to New York so we’ve got a lot of things on the go (mixed with work being super busy now that students are back at UBC).  I thought 3 weddings in 2 months was a lot but one of our friends is going to five! so that’s kinda crazy.  Fun times though all around.

Noticed that wordpress switched over to their new jetpack service so I enabled that on the backend, from a user perspective you won’t really notice anything different except for the twitter feed on the right is a bit cleaner looking now as it’s integrated into wordpress itself and no longer relying on a third party plugin and there should be a couple of new sharing buttons on the bottom of this post which again are integrated into the site now.  Well another thing you’ll notice is that there is a new post on the page, so there’s that.  Maybe there will be more to come.

Back in August, while we were moving into our new place, I had this crazy idea to enter a cooking competition over at the Something Awful Goons with Spoons forums.  Melisa was not impressed as our house looked like this:

I did it anyway.

My original plan was to basically copy and paste this big in-depth post I made on the SA forums for their competition.  Unfortunately it appears that since I was lazy and waited so long to write this up the post has been put into the archives and I can’t see it anymore So instead I bring you lots of pictures and whatever I can remember.

The competition was for non professionals to make some sort of breakfast item from scratch.  I tried to think of something that I had had in my childhood that wasn’t super common and maybe had some sort of Jewish roots to it and I came up with making Blintzes, which I had never done before and hadn’t eaten in years.  Melisa had never had any either so that was a nice bonus.  A blintz is basically a French style Crepe with some filling in it lightly fried and I figured, how hard could it be?  Well it wasn’t too hard but it was pretty involving and did take a while.  After scouring cooking books and the Internet for a while I finally came up with 2 recipes I was happy with (both made by people’s grandmothers) and ended up combining them to create a slightly different recipe that I thought would maximize the tastes from both.

Step 1 was to assembly the crepe ingredients:

We have 4 eggs, 4 cups of milk, 2 1/2 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon of salt, and butter for frying.  First the Eggs are beaten

and then blended with the milk

and then mixed with the salt and flower (I accidentally almost used kosher salt, which would NOT have combined well, luckily I had pulled out the box of table salt by the time I needed to use it)

Once that is all mixed up nicely, you want it to be super smooth, you’ve got your crepe batter!  Next step is to ladle it out on a hot pan with some butter in it and start frying these babies up!

You want to pour a little bit of batter into the pan and then roll the pan around to make a thin crepe.  Fry the crepes only until they are just done, it’s important not to brown them.  They must stay soft enough to roll them easily later.  Thin and soft:

This is what happens when you forget to butter the pan back up :\ (not to worry, you should have lots of batter, enough to make 15 or so blintzes)

Next assemble the ingredients for the filling.  I used 1 egg, 1 teaspoon of salt, 1/2 cup of sugar, 1 lb of pressed cottage cheese, 1/2 lb of cream cheese, 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon and 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla.

Mix the sugar with the egg, than mix in the dried cottage cheese and cream cheese, and than the cinnamon and vanilla.  The process follows:

When it’s all combined the result should be a nice creamy cheese mixture like so:

Perfect for filling crepes with!  First place a crepe down.  Take a couple spoonfulls of filling and place it on in the lower half of the crepe. Fold the bottom on top of the filling, fold the 2 sides in, and than roll the crepe up.  This is the way you roll a burrito and is the traditional way to serve a blintz.

I wound up with quite a few blintzes

Now comes the most crucial part where a ordinary filled crepe becomes a blintz!  Fry them heavily in butter.  Oh Jewish food, so fatty.  Lube up a pan with lots of butter and then lay the blintzes down.  Fry them on medium-low heat until both sides are golden brown and delicious.

The finished collection of delicious blintzes! (seasonal fresh cherries are optional):

Finally plate a couple blintzes, put a dollop of sour cream on each and enjoy!

Delicious Blintz cross shot!

A couple months ago, around easter, Safeway had a deal where if you bought a turkey under 16lbs you could get it for 99cents a pound.  This price was too good to pass up so Melisa and I immediately trekked out and procured a 15lbs bird, obviously wanting to make the most of this sale.   Since then this turkey has been sitting in our deep freeze, waiting for it’s time to shine, and today it shined so bright.

In preparation for today’s feast yesterday over lunch I bought ingredients for the stuffing.  (a good homemade stuffing is the key to a turkey dinner)

16 or so nice big fresh mushrooms, a couple onions, some celery, and the pièce de résistance:

2 fresh challah loaves.  If you have never had stuffing made from challah you are missing out.

The turkey itself spent about 24 hours hanging out in the sink taking a nice bath in cold water, here’s a look at the little guy:

He was such a champ!

Next it was time to cut up the veggies, fry them up, and then cube the bread:

We were a bit ambitious on the amount of stuffing we wanted to make but it’s just so delicious.

After the turkey finished its thaw we rubbed it down in salt, pepper, rosemary, and a healthy portion of paprika.

I forgot to take a picture of the ‘process’ of combining the stuffing mixture together but through the help of a couple cubs of chicken broth and a couple eggs and a bunch of poultry seasoning (it got a bit messy) the mixture was ready to be stuffed into the turkey like so:

It was a tight fit but we managed to get it all in there! (again a bit ambitious with the amount of stuffing!):

Turkey and stuffing just barely fit into our roaster, the lid wouldn’t exactly close all the way but that was no problem.  We cooked the turkey at 325 for an hour and a half and then basted it with it’s juices every 30 minutes.  After 4 hours total he was ready.

Holy cow, does that look good or what!  Also if I didn’t mention it already we were a bit ambitious with the amount of stuffing we made:

There was still more in there that I didn’t discover until the carving process!  I tried a new method of carving today where you slice the legs right off and then slice the breasts off the turkey before slicing up the breasts themselves:

I think it turned out pretty well!:

Here’s the full spread!  Melisa made way too many mashed potatoes, there were still some in the pot that didn’t even make it into the bowl.

After carving the rest of the carcass we had an insane amount of leftovers:

Good thing turkey sandwiches are so delicious!

For the past few years Melisa and I have been living in apartments that either don’t have balconies or don’t allow barbecues, this has not gone over well with my stomach as I love to BBQ.  I’ve been searching for ways to successfully cook up a good steak indoors and thus far have always met with failure.  This failure finally ended tonight after cooking The Butter Steak.

Unfortunately I don’t own a Cast Iron Skillet and have never gotten around to finding a good place to buy one in Vancouver, further to that I have no idea where the broil pan is that came with my stove so the two common high heat short cook time methods of indoor steaking have never been an option for me.  I’ve tried numerous times to cook a steak on the stove top in a nonstick pan but it has never worked out, yesterday though in the Something Awful forum’s ‘Goons with Spoons’ section I stumbled across a thread dedicated to steaks and therein lay my answer, a medium heat long cook time approach to steak that I have never heard of before.  Basically it involves using the maillard reaction through butter to give the a nice crust even at a medium heat but also to keep the meat rare to medium rare with a long cooking time.  For a better explanation of the cooking process as well as instructions and fancy pictures I highly recommend you visit The Paupered Chef’s page dedicated to the process.  This in turn will lead you to an egullet article on the methods that started the ball rolling and has more info on how to cook the perfect butter steak.

I used a boneless rib eye (bone ins aren’t yet ‘in season’ at Save On apparently), slightly more than 1 pound in weight that was maybe an inch and a quarter thick and paired it with Baked Potato and Asparagus.   Here’s what happened (sorry for crappy pictures, blackberry took them, you can click on them for bigger versions though!)

So here we have the piece of meat itself, it has a nice amount of fat on it but right in the centre you can see large circle of fat that was almost disaster, the steak practically tore itself in half under it’s own weight when it was first down and searing on it’s side.

Luckily everything turned out ok and below you can see the steak cooking nicely on one side, notice the butter, or in my case margarine, pooling on the bottom of the pan, this is essential, check the links I posted above to learn why!

Here are the finished sides, the asparagus was a touch overcooked but still ok and the baked potatoes turned out great!

And here we have Melisa’s plate, my plate is a duplicate although the part of the steak I had was a bit more fatty and rare (and had a little more steak…).

Everything turned out great!  The only thing I would change is to actually use butter instead of margarine, I thought we had sticks of butter in the fridge but alas we did not!  The margarine worked well enough but didn’t provide the steak with as crunchy of a crust as real butter would have.  We’ll definitely be cooking steaks this way in our house from now on.

Do you like the Olympics? (Which are going on right now in my home city of Vancouver!) Do you like hockey? Do you like Beer?  If the answers to those questions are yes than do I have the podcast for you!  This week I was the guest on the Hops & Hockey podcast to bring a little Canadian perspective onto the weekly show now that the Olympic hockey tournament is in full swing.  So if you want to hear my voice again! (and why woudn’t you) you can check it out here.

So speaking of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics they have been pretty awesome so far.  It’s quite neat to be living in the city where they are going on and I managed to go to a Women’s Hockey game last week which was quite the experience. (as a side holy cow is women’s hockey terrible unless you are on the Canadian or American team)

A couple of weeks ago I made a special guest apperance to fill in on Some Other Podcast, want to hear my voice and my opinions on post E3 gaming news?  Of course you do!  Just go right here.

With the release of Battlefield: 1943 this week I even got all misty for the series and managed to write a second article for my Jaded PC Gamer “column” which you can see over here.

I should probably write more but it’s just so easy being lazy.  My wife is currently on a 3 week trip to Italy and London, you’d think I would have lots of free time for things like “writing” or “not being an asshole” but man it’s tough, plus my mom came out and visited me this week.  Well she’s leaving tomorrow and I still have one week of freedom left so maybe I can do something productive, we’ll see!

Just s a quickie but the first post of my new weekly column is up over at some other castle which you can find here.  As time goes on a history of my column will be available at this link.

We’ll see how this goes!

Well that’s it for Battlestar Galactica.  I liked the finale overall but I have a lot of problems with it, here are my random thoughts about those problems that I sent in an e-mail to my wife just now (she liked it more than me):

- opera house meaning hardly important, hera was walking into CIC anyways
- why was the opera house teased at use for 4 seasons?
- no idea what starbuck is (an angel?)
- Head Baltar and Head Six are also what, angels?
- “god did it” is a terrible explanation for all the questions left unanswered in the series
- convinced 38,000 to just give up everything
- fact that they did give up everything, all those raw materials
- anders didn’t get a choice to fly into the sun and die or not
- adama had to leave for some reason?
- everybody decided to settle way apart from each other
- robot montage/current day footage way too heavy handed
I liked it a lot on a macro level, stuff was wrapped up, but when you look down on a micro level at the various events it falls apart for me.  Sure stuff wraps up but I don’t like the explanations for how they got wrapped up.

Ah well, at least Baltar gets to be a Farmer now

My friend Andy wrote what might be his best piece of literature ever today, I highly recommend people go and check it out, so for the 2 people who might read this here is a link – World for Willies And Wangs

Also this is Andy’s tooth, he’s a pretty gross dude.