Start with the turkey. The rest will follow. Part 1.

Start with the turkey. The rest will follow. A menu for Christmas dinner practically writes itself with a little decision making to guide it through.

The turkey, whether it’s fresh, frozen, brined, buttered, fried, stuffed, whole or dismembered is all dependent on your own expectations and whatever mood you’re in. To keep it simple – an ideal goal at Christmastime – let’s say it’s fresh, buttered, and stuffed. For flavourings, it’s got to have sage, so mix a bunch of freshly chopped sage with a celebratory amount of softened unsalted butter, shoving it between the flesh and the skin.

For the stuffing, in the season of excess, why have one when you can have two? The one going inside the bird has got to be this one, that’s so east-coast Canadian it’s not even referred to as stuffing but as dressing and as such, is made up of potatoes. It’s as simple as making mashed potatoes but has the addition of some onion and the official herb of Nova Scotia, summer savory. The bread stuffing that I crave, with an extra dose of gravy over top is done as a side casserole.

Summer Savory Potato Dressing

Makes enough to stuff a small turkey
Serves 8 as a side dish

1.145kg (approximately 5 medium) white potatoes, peeled
1/2 tsp kosher salt
70g unsalted butter
1 small yellow onion, diced finely (approximately 150g)
2 tablespoons dried summer savory
100ml whole milk (3.5% M.F.)
2 teaspoons large flaked sea salt, such as Maldon
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

In a large pot add the potatoes and fill with enough cold water to cover. Bring to a boil, add the kosher salt and turn the heat down. Simmer, partially covered until the potatoes are tender when pierced with a knife. Drain the water off the potatoes, add the rest of the ingredients, and mash until resembling a relatively even texture. Allow to cool completely before stuffing the bird.

Basting the beast need not be complicated either. Though turkeys are lean birds this one is so loaded with butter it won’t hurt missing an encounter with the brush here or there, leaving you to get in full cheer with your guests. When you do remember to baste it, I like mixing equal parts of maple syrup and butter in a small saucepan on the stove and brushing it over the bird in liberal amounts. The sugar and butter help the skin bronze beautifully and the sweet maple syrup will drip down over the obligatory parsnips roasting, tucked up alongside. Leave the bird to cook depending on a number of factors but try to think of it as a giant chicken, and just cook it until the juices run clear in the thigh. If you need precise timings, refer to any number of guides out there on the subject.

The cranberry sauce does not come from a can. I understand some need it to but for shame if you’re in an area such as Canada that has access to good fresh and frozen cranberries that come directly from our friendly east-coast cousins. It’s hard to improve on the recipe on the side of the bag, which consists of adding water and sugar and simmering until the tart berries have just given up their shape. I don’t want my cranberry sauce tasting like oranges, anise, cinnamon or anything else. If you feel like some extra fussing in the kitchen, say to escape some drunken family member or cat obsessed aunt, add a grated apple which will provide a jellied texture to the sauce as well as some extra natural sweetness.

Cranberry Sauce

340g bag whole cranberries, fresh or frozen
170g granulated sugar
1 small apple, peeled, cored and grated
125ml cold water

In a small saucepan add 230g of the cranberries, sugar, apple, and cold water. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally for 10-15 minutes until the cranberries have started to pop and collapse. Add the remaining 110g of cranberries and continue to cook for another 5 minutes, until the berries just begin to pop. Pour into a resealable glass jar and cool. Refrigerate until ready to serve.

Gravy is gravy is gravy. Thicken the sweet pan juices with a slurry of white all purpose flour and cold water and season with a generous amount of freshly ground black pepper. If for whatever reason you haven’t much in the way of pan drippings add some turkey stock that you’ve made from simmering the neck on the stovetop with some aromatics, then add some wine (known as chef’s juice on Christmas) before going on to add the thickening slurry.

Sides plus dessert coming up in two posts!

Sunday Night Dinner at Grandma’s

There’s something to be said for making the house smell like roasted meat, adding aromatic warmth from slowly braising onions, peppercorns and bay leaf in hearty red wine for hours on end, steaming up the windows and infusing everything, including the curtains with the scent of home cooking. Admittedly, it’s a smell that’s not so enticing the day after.

It’s such an old-fashioned kind of smell, like home or grandma’s house. Actually I’m confident that I’ve out-grandma’d the older ladies in my building with the scents that come from our apartment on most Sunday nights. Cooking this way is about escapism. Before starting another work week, I take great pleasure in spending all day cooking dinner for the smells alone so I can bask in familiar scents and chase off any Sunday night stresses that come from thinking about going to work on Monday.

At the end of it all I expect a perfectly tender roast, and depending on the cut of meat, something that’s falling apart, served with a gravy-like sauce. If it’s beef and I’m feeling particularly nostalgic, I like to have horseradish, freshly grated or in a prepared cream sauce. Roasted root vegetables are the ideal accompaniment and you could use whatever you want but carrots, scattered with fresh thyme before being roasted and caramelized in butter and honey taste like tradition, barely updated. Really old-fashioned would be peas and carrots but I just can’t bring myself to take it that far. Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi have an excellent take on them in their first book, Ottolenghi the Cookbook if you’re looking to combine the two together. Instead, I like the idea of turning peas into a vibrant side salad, adding in a bunch of watercress, chopped roughly with some fresh parsley and tarragon, and a warm vinaigrette made from shallots lightly sautéed in butter, cooled by a splash of red wine vinegar.

For our Sunday Night Dinner at Grandma’s post I wanted to share a roast beef recipe, something simple with gravy that would be heightened with a grating of fresh horseradish, but that idea was quickly thrown out as soon as I saw that the butcher had four beef cheeks – on the small side for beef cheeks – tucked behind a stack of skirt steaks, right up next to the beef neck roasts. I’m a sucker for anything “au poivre” in the colder months. Peppercorns, cream and mustard are undeniably harmonious flavours at the table. Beef cheeks au poivre is different in that the “au poivre” treatment usually happens after the meat gets a quick sear stove-top and the pan, a dramatic de-glazing with some brandy. The great thing about using beef cheeks for this dish is that they retain their shape after hours of cooking but melt in your mouth and could literally be eaten with a spoon if it wasn’t so inappropriate to do. It’s an incredibly rich dish that I’m all too happy to enjoy on any given Sunday night in the winter, with or without grandma.

Beef Cheeks Au Poivre

Serves 4

4 (approximately 830g in total) beef cheeks
3 tablespoons dijon mustard
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
500ml red wine
2 large shallots, roughly chopped
1 bay leaf
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 x 30g tin green peppercorns in brine, drained
150ml whipping cream (35% M.F.)

Preheat the oven to 300°F.

Coat the beef cheeks generously with 2 tablespoons of the mustard, and season with salt and pepper. In a medium Dutch oven or other heavy-bottomed oven-proof pot with a tight fitting lid, heat the butter and oil over medium-high heat. Going in batches to avoid overcrowding the pot, brown the beef cheeks on all sides. Place the beef cheeks aside on a plate. Turn the heat down to low and add the shallots and red wine, and using a wooden spoon, scrape the brown bits from the bottom of the pot. Return the beef cheeks to the pot with any juices that have run out onto the plate. Toss in the bay leaf, cover with a lid and place in the oven for approximately 3.5 hours. Beef cheeks can take a lot of abuse without going dry or falling apart. You’ll know when they’re ready when they look like they’re about to fall apart, a bit like the meat is bound by gelatin – I’ve had some that take up to 7 hours.

Remove the beef cheeks from the pot and place on a plate, covered with foil to keep warm. With the pot back over low heat, whisk in the remaining 1 tablespoon of dijon mustard, whipping cream and green peppercorns. Serve the beef cheeks with the sauce poured over top.

If you’re making things ahead of time, you can separate the beef cheeks and the liquid left behind in the pot and refrigerate for a day or so. When ready to serve, re-heat the beef cheeks and rewarm the cooking liquid, adding the rest of the sauce ingredients as instructed above.

Chicken Soup with “Matzo” Balls

Now that we’ve covered that chicken fat is good for you, as much as I hate to do it, we have to talk about soup. It’s a necessary evil when you’re sick. Soup is warm, easy to digest, and restorative. But it’s also prescriptive and that’s why I really don’t like it. We have soup when we’re sick, when we’re cold, when we want to clean out the crisper, when we don’t really want to eat at all. Soup is not the food we want to eat when we want to enjoy life but when we’re recoiling from it.

When you’re sick – like really sick, I don’t expect you to go to the effort of making this for yourself. I don’t think you could unless you’re a highly functioning sick person. You have to do a bit of shopping with a special trip to the butcher to pick up the chicken carcasses and a whole chicken, though you could also be one of those “I have my life together” people and have the chicken bones stashed in the freezer or better yet, a supply of your own chicken stock ready-to-go. Unless you’re that person, this post is really for your *caretaker to read.

This is the soup to eat when you’re sick and trying to get back to normal life. I didn’t grow up with matzo balls in my chicken soup and never really gave much thought into what they were until I was in university. When I finally got around to making them for myself I realized they were a refined version of what I’d already been doing to my soup, which was crumbling in as many soda crackers as would fit in my bowl. Matzo balls, it turns out are cracker dumplings. After this epiphany, I thought I could probably sub out the matzo meal and replace it with the soda crackers that I was familiar with having in my soup. Between the chicken fat and garlic in the soup, and the chicken fat and rosemary in the “matzo” balls, this is an aromatic bowlful, which should have you returning to full health and proper food in a couple of days time.

Chicken Soup with “Matzo” Balls

Makes approximately 3 litres

For the Chicken Soup Base
2 pounds chicken carcasses
2 carrots, unpeeled and roughly chopped
2 celery ribs, roughly chopped
1 onion, unpeeled with the root-end removed, halved
2 cloves garlic, unpeeled and halved
1 bunch parsley, stalks only
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon black peppercorns
2 teaspoons fennel seeds
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1 parmesan rind, approximately 3” (optional)
water to cover

For the Chicken Soup
1 small chicken
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme or 1 tablespoon of fresh thyme
200g carrot, finely diced
270g parsnip, finely diced
20g celery, finely diced
2 large cloves of garlic, minced
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

For the “Matzo” Balls
(makes 17-18 balls)
20 (57g) unsalted soda crackers
2 tablespoons chicken fat (skimmed from the cold soup base)
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 teaspoon fresh rosemary, chopped finely
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt

To start, make the chicken soup base, which is really just a chicken stock with a few more assertive flavours such as garlic and fennel seeds. If you’ve made chicken stock before it’s likely you’ll ignore this recipe entirely and just use your own and that’s okay. Chicken stock is personal and largely comes down to what you feel like throwing in the stock pot. To make this stock, just like any other chicken stock, throw all ingredients into a large pot and fill with cold water so that the water comes just a couple inches above the contents. Heat to just barely a simmer for at least 3 hours. Don’t bother skimming the top. When you’re done, strain the stock into a large vessel, be it a heat-proof bowl or another pot and allow to cool before refrigerating over night. Discard the stock ingredients.

Preheat your oven to 400°F.

While the stock is simmering, remove the back from the chicken, and toss the back in with the rest of the stock ingredients. If you’re doing this on a different day than the stock, freeze the back for later use. On a quarter-sheet pan lined with parchment paper, place the chicken breast side-up and coat it with the olive oil. Sprinkle on the thyme and season generously with salt and pepper. Roast the chicken in the oven for approximately 45 minutes or until the juices run clear. Remove from the oven and allow to cool on the pan. Once it has cooled enough to handle, place the chicken on your board and pour any of the roast drippings into your chicken soup base. Remove the meat from the chicken, discarding the skin and bones. Dice or shred the meat into soup-spoon-sized pieces and store in the refrigerator until ready to assemble the soup.

To make the matzo balls, blitz the soda crackers in a food processor or blender until you have fine crumbs. If you wanted, you could also use the more traditional matzo meal in place of the soda crackers. In a small bowl combine the cracker crumbs with the rest of the matzo ball ingredients and cover tightly with plastic wrap. Refrigerate the matzo mix for approximately 30 minutes so the crackers can fully absorb the wet ingredients. Roll the mixture into small balls with your hands and drop carefully into a large pot of boiling water, being sure they don’t stick on their initial drop to the bottom. Turn the water down to a simmer and cover for 40 minutes by which time they will have plumped to almost double their original size. Strain out the matzo balls and store in an airtight container in the refrigerator until ready to use.

To assemble the soup, in a large pot add the chicken soup base along with the carrots, parsnips, celery, and garlic. Simmer the vegetable gently in the base until just tender. Add the diced chicken and season the soup with salt and freshly ground pepper. Add the matzo balls and serve.

*Note to caretaker: the choice of mug makes all the difference in the world to the sick person, so choose wisely.

Good Food for Sick People

The Internet is full of unqualified people doling out advice to other people and this blog is no exception. That’s why we’ve temporarily changed our tag line to the pushy “HOW TO EAT. WHERE TO EAT.” I love food under any circumstance but it can’t be just any kind of food. I need to be romanced. Gin and tonics are for lunch meetings whereas beer is for after work. Vanilla cakes with chocolate frosting are for birthdays, crustless tuna sandwiches are to be eaten poolside and well, lime slime-coated desserts are for Halloween. I want to tell you exactly how and where to eat food.

This is a good thing. If I were an actual nutritionist, I would be telling you to eat food that’s good for your heart, low in salt and sugar, and high in fiber because, while a nutritionist may have your best health in mind, they certainly aren’t thinking about your tastebuds. They can’t be trusted. And since this is the Internet and we have the power to choose the advice that we agree with the most, let’s just say whatever I say is healthy truly is. I know if I were going to choose between the advice given by a nutritionist and someone like me, I would simply go with the one with tastier food.

This pre-defensive ramble is all because I’m about to tell you how to eat when you’re sick. Unfortunately it’s November and with the colder, darker, wetter, and all-around crumbier weather, also comes cold and flu season. Not to mention the depression that comes with the acknowledgment that this is only the very beginnings of winter.

This food will make you feel so much better about it all! We’ve got no-cook remedies, a restorative chicken soup, and a happy-making milkshake that we’re going to roll out over a few posts. Let’s start with the no-cook stuff though because when you start to feel sick, the best thing to do is attack the virus as quickly as possible in order to catch it off-guard.

Chicken fat is the main line of defense against annoying colds. When you hear people waxing on about chicken soup and its magical curative properties, what they’re actually talking about is chicken fat. In her book, Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes, Jennifer McLagan tells us that poultry fat, chicken fat especially, is actually very good for you. It’s low in saturated fat but high in monounsaturated and polyunsaturated – those are the good ones. The monounsaturated fat has palmitoleic acid which is thought to help boost the immune system. This tidbit of information combined with McLagan’s obvious love for delicious food is all I really need to run with the idea that chicken fat is good for you.

Homemade chicken soup (the kind with fat floating on top) is all well and good when you have someone to make it for you when you’re sick but what happens when you leave the house in the morning feeling fine but by late afternoon, as the November sun is setting, you find yourself with a full-blown sore throat? First, blame someone else like your fellow subway commuters, then blame your office colleagues, then head to the grocery store on your way home and pick up a rotisserie chicken.

Not only do you not have to cook dinner tonight, leaving you time to get some sleep but a rotisserie bird’s skin – the non-gourmet type – is full of fat and salt. The fat will help boost your immune system and coat your sore throat at the same time, while the salt will help to kill any bacteria lingering back there. It also tastes really good!

Another quick and dirty, no-cook remedy is to have a shot of whisky and/or a shot of fernet because I think if we’re going to start following every nutritional bit of information offered on Goop then we should also start taking Buzzfeed articles more seriously, like this one on the 22 Excellent Reasons to Drink More Whiskey. The real reason I suggest whisky though is because the alcohol will kill the bacteria in the back of your throat and maybe help you by dulling that cool ache you’ve started to feel since coming home.

The other half of this boozy remedy is the fernet, which has a longer history of being a cure-all. This is a strongly flavoured – think Buckley’s cough syrup – Italian bitter that’s incredibly herbaceous. Bitters of course, are widely known for helping unsettled stomachs and opening up the digestive tract. The fernet does both of these things, meaning you don’t have to stop by the drug store on the way home – just open up your liquor cabinet.

It may all sound very untraditional but it really does help. And if it doesn’t, at the very least, a dinner of chicken skin and whisky won’t make you feel like you’re eating because you’re sick but that you’re eating to enjoy life, despite being sick.