Thanksgiving Menu

Thanksgiving is my daughter Kate’s favorite holiday. So the menu is very important and I have to get her OK on everything. Over the years we have always tried new recipes and some pass on and some become traditions. I bring my own prejudices to the process, a reaction to the cooking of the 50s and 60s. I won’t eat anything made with cream of snot soup, or miniature marshmallows, or canned green beans. So that precludes two Thanksgiving “classics”, the green bean casserole and cranberry sauce with marshmallows and canned mandarin oranges. Instead, this is what we will be serving at our place on Thursday.

Turkey, of course, roasted not fried. I use the neck and gizzards along with an onion and celery to make a brown turkey stock while the turkey is roasting. For the liver, I use a trick I learned from a Gourmet magazine article years ago. I put the liver in the food processor with some heavy cream and Madeira and liquefy it. The mixture is then added to the stuffing to enrich it.The stuffing recipe varies each year and I usually ad-lib it. This year it will probably be corn bread and sausage with sage and thyme from the herb garden. I like to add brown rice to add some chew to a corn bread stuffing, but this year I may try some Israeli couscous I have in the cupboard.

Gravy is just the traditional gravy made with the pan drippings and the turkey stock. Mashed potatoes this year will be made with Yellow Gold potatoes and rutabaga. I like to add some  rutabaga (or yellow turnip or Swede as it is called in New England) to the potatoes to give it a little bit of flavor and texture. Nothing like a bowl of mashed potatoes with a puddle of butter melting in the middle. And it will be our own home made butter which Kate and I made Monday.

The cranberry sauce recipe we usually make is from the Vegetarian Epicure Vol. 2 by Anna Thomas, unfortunately now out of print. It is a perfect bound paperback and is now falling apart but is just as loved. This cranberry sauce is a cooked sauce that uses fresh cranberries and a chopped up navel orange, with cinnamon and cardamom for spices. It is a fresh tasting, fruity sauce without any of the canned or candy flavors of “traditional” sauces. A copy of the recipe can be found on the Reluctant Gourmet blog.

The vegetable side dishes are just as important as the turkey and stuffing. After lots of experimentation, we have come to standardize on a few dishes. Creamed onions are a traditional dish that we love, although we use a real Béchamel sauce to make them. Sweet potatoes are another classic, but the recipe we love is a streuseled sweet potato casserole from the November 2002 Cooking Light magazine, which is fabulous and can be prepared ahead of time. This is more dessert than vegetable, but it is Thanksgiving!

For more “healthy” side dishes, we like and will be preparing Cider-Glazed Carrots from that classic issue, the November 2002 Cooking Light magazine; and Shredded Brussels Sprouts with Bacon and Hazelnuts from the November 2004 Cooking Light magazine. For both recipes, a lot of preparation can be done ahead of time, which is always important for planning a Thanksgiving dinner. The latter recipe is particularly amazing because my wife, a certified, genetically-tested hater of Brussels sprouts actually likes them prepared this way. And it’s not just her Mississippi-bred love of all things bacon, she actually likes the sprouts fixed this way. Since my daughter and I love Brussels sprouts, this is a win-win recipe.

Finally, there is the not so small matter of desserts. Yes, plural, as in desserts. My son is a chocolate lover so we will be making a chocolate meringue pie from my mother’s recipe. The family joke is that my wife would try year after year to make the pie following recipes from Joy of Cooking, Fannie Farmer, you name it, and the filling would not solidify. So we would have chocolate soup pie. Recently I have been making my mother’s recipe and it works quite well. In addition we will have a pumpkin cheesecake, based on Dana Carpender’s cookbook, 500 Low Carb Recipes. This is a satisfying and rich dessert that is also low carb and will substitute for the traditional pumpkin pie.

That’s our menu for this year. Hope you have a great Thanksgiving (if you celebrate it). My mother’s chocolate meringue pie recipe follows.

Chocolate Meringue Pie

My mother’s recipe, sent to me by my sister, Sharon.

Ingredients

• 3 oz. chocolate
• 2½ c. milk
• 3 Tbsp. flour
• 3 Tbsp. cornstarch
• 1 c. sugar
• ½ tsp. salt
• 3 egg yolks, slightly beaten
• 1 Tbsp. butter
• 2 tsp. vanilla
• 1 baked pie shell
• 1 recipe meringue

Instructions

1. Melt chocolate in milk in double boiler and blend with wire whisk.
2. Mix flour, cornstarch, sugar, and salt. Add to chocolate mixture and cook 15 min., stirring constantly. The mixture should be thick and smooth.
3. Stir a small amount of the hot mixture slowly into egg yolks, stirring constantly. Return to double boiler and cook a few minutes longer. Add butter and vanilla; stir until melted. Cool the mixture.
4. Pour into pastry shell. Cover with meringue, and bake in 325º F. oven until delicately browned.

Meringue

Ingredients

• 3 egg whites
• 6 Tbsp. sugar
• ½ tsp. vanilla

Instructions
Beat egg whites until stiff. Add sugar gradually (1 Tbsp. at a time), beating constantly. Add vanilla. Pile lightly on pie filling, sealing edges.

Planting Garlic and Shallots

I added two 4x6 raised beds to the garden this spring, completing my phased implementation of my square foot garden. The extra beds gave me a lot of extra planting space and I kind of went overboard on some things. I wound up with an abundance of perishable items like lettuce and greens, more than our family could use and more than I could give away. I also had an overabundance of beans and squash.

This season, reading about everyone’s garlic and onion harvest, it occurred to me that maybe I should devote some of the garden space to crops that will store well into the winter without refrigeration and canning, rather than growing an overabundance of things I can’t use that will wind up in compost bins. So I decided to try growing onions, garlic and shallots.

Garlic and shallots are ideal for raised bed gardening since they like a fertile, well drained, loamy soil and Mel’s Mix should be ideal. In addition, they are shallow rooted, so the depth of raised beds should not be an issue. There are also opportunities for inter-planting. So for example, instead of allocating a few squares of my beds to quick growing radishes and turnips, I will instead plant them around the shallots and pull them before they interfere with shallot growth, freeing up those squares for something else.

Onions will be planted from plants next spring, but garlic and shallots have to be planted now. I ordered my garlic from Green Mountain Garlic, a small, organic grower in Waterbury, Vermont. I chose two hardneck varieties because they are very hardy and suited for Northeast conditions. German Extra Hardy is a so-called porcelain type with large bulbs containing an average of 6 cloves per bulb (24 cloves in a half pound). Bulbs have paper-white wrappers but the skin on the cloves has some reddish coloring. It is supposed to store well and has a mildly spicy flavor. The other variety I chose is Chesnok Red, a purple stripe variety from the former Russian Republic of Georgia. The bulbs and cloves were slightly smaller than the German Extra Hardy, yielding 45 cloves from a half pound.



The beds were prepared by weeding them and adding a generous amount of compost, then marking the squares.



The Chesnok Red was planted 9 per square foot, the normal recommended spacing. Given the size of the German Extra Hardy bulbs, I planted it at 6 per square foot. Holes were made with a dibble and the cloves pushed down a couple of inches. The beds were then mulched lightly with chopped straw and watered. I had to get these in now because we are facing a lot of rainy weather in the next few days.



As a last minute decision, I also chose to try growing shallots. At 7-9 dollars per pound at the markets, shallots can theoretically yield a valuable crop, not to mention the enjoyment from having a nice stash of shallots to call on as needed. Of course, I was late in making this decision so many suppliers were sold out. I found Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in Virginia still has a good supply. I ordered the ones labeled “French Red Shallots” and as a plus, they are certified organic. The bulbs I received were very large, compound bulbs. You have to feel under the skin for seams indicating multiple bulbs and break them apart before planting. A pound yielded 21 good sized bulbs ready for planting.

Again, the beds were prepared with compost. Usual spacing is 4 per square foot. The bulbs are planted to a depth of about two thirds the length of the bulb, with the top third sticking out. Shallots do not like to be completely buried and may rot. I planted 4 per square in 5 squares, and selected the largest bulb I received to have its own square. Since they multiply at about a 4-6 ratio, 20 bulbs should give me 90-100 bulbs at harvest, or about 5 pounds of shallots. That’s the theory, we will have to see what actually happens.

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Here are some good links for information on growing garlic:

http://squarefoot.creatingforum.com/t10215-friday-rookie-topic-garlic
http://www.organicgardening.com/learn-and-grow/garlic-growing-guide
Braiding garlic video ( http://youtu.be/G7Xyj82oO4g )
Harvesting and curing video ( http://youtu.be/gpuU2qLuylU )

Links for growing shallots:

http://squarefoot.creatingforum.com/t7360-friday-s-rookie-topic-vi-shallots
http://www.vegetablegardener.com/item/5252/how-to-grow-shallots/page/all

My First Meyer Lemon

The Meyer lemon tree I bought on impulse this spring spent its summer on the deck. It flowered profusely in the spring and set a lot of fruit. All but five dropped and the biggest of those is now ripe and the rest are starting to ripen. I will have to come up with a good recipe to use my first lemon. Any suggestions? I found the LA Times has an article on “100 things to do with a Meyer Lemon” which is giving me some ideas.

The garden is mostly done except for kale, chard, parsley and some remaining beets which can take the frost we had last week. My wife and son visited the garden the weekend before the frost and harvested what they could. I photographed it but didn’t post it last week. One remarkable find they made was three more of the Summer Dance cucumbers. I have never had cucumbers up to frost before.

I haven’t done a lot of work in the garden the last couple of weeks because I have been recovering from surgery I had the end of September. One advantage of being an “invalid” was I didn’t cook or clean. My daughter was bothered by the stack of zucchini and patty pan squash piling up on the counter, so she decided to work her way through the Victory Garden Cookbook section on summer squash. One of the best was a squash pie made by layering slices of zucchini, tomatoes and cheese in a pastry crust and baking it.

As soon as I can bend comfortably in the middle, I have to clean up the beds and get ready to plant my garlic and shallots. Unfortunately I didn’t plant my spinach and sprouting broccoli seeds, but I may try a few just to see if they germinate and take. You never know what the weather will be. I also hope to pot up a rosemary plant for the winter. Last winter was so mild my rosemary survived into January or February when the really cold weather finally killed it.

Harvest Monday–24 September 2012

This week was a little different than usual. I did harvest the usual cukes, beans, and zucchini (photos at the end), but the garden is getting close to done. I have to clean up some of the beds to get ready for planting garlic next month. The big event for us happened Sunday when I signed up to pick wine grapes at our local winery, Nashoba Valley Winery, and suckered my wife and daughter into keeping me company.

I had to pay $18 per person for the privilege of working and we had to show up at 9:30 Sunday morning with gloves and shears. Perfectly reasonable. Over coffee and apple cider donuts Rick Pelletier, the owner, explained our task: pick 4-5 tons of grapes in 3 hours. Piece of cake. Our family was assigned to pick Vignoles, a white grape. Rick had hoped to pick it in two weeks when the Brix readings would have been closer to the desired 23 degrees, but the appearance of sour bunch rot required its addition to the day’s assignments. What’s another 2-3 ton of grapes? Besides, it was a gorgeous New England Fall day.

Here we are at the top of the Vignoles vineyard. Rick is explaining what to do and how to pick off or cut out the rotten grapes. Note the Segway with all-terrain tires Rick used to fly around supervising us while we lugged around 30-pound boxes of grapes by hand.

Another Sign of Fall

Certainly nights are now cooler and the sun is not as strong. The air is drier but also fragrant with the aromas of ripening fruit wafting from the orchards. A surprising aroma is the sweet perfume I encounter when I take a walk along the roads near my house. It is the smell of the ripening wild grapes that grow in the mass of brush along the roads. It drives the bees and the birds wild and explains some of the purple messes I find on the roof of my car this time of year. Another view of the vine shows it towering over and smothering the young sugar maples it is using for support. The South has its kudzu and we have wild grape.



The wild grapes that grow in the Northeast are Fox grapes (Vitis labrusca), a native North American species. Martha’s Vineyard was supposedly named for the wild grapes that grow everywhere. The Concord grape everyone knows is a cultivar of the wild grape developed in Concord, Massachusetts in the nineteenth century.The farm stands here all have baskets of Concord grapes for sale now. They are pretty and make good jams and jellies but are not so good for fresh eating. The skins are thick and tart and the seeds are large. One surprisingly good dessert you can make from them is grape pie. The pulp is separated from the skins and cooked in a saucepot, then strained through a coarse sieve to remove the seeds. The pulp is combined with the skins, sweetened and baked in a pastry crust.

On a road trip to Missouri one September a few years ago, I was driving along I-90 in upstate New York. I was running late and hoping to at least make Erie, Pennsylvania for the night. It was already dark as I turned the corner outside Buffalo and was heading south on I-90 along Lake Erie. Suddenly the car filled up with the a sweet perfume that reminded me of the wild grapes along the roads at home. Because of the grading of the highway and the brush growing along the sides, it was hard to see what the source of the aroma was. Eventually there were breaks and in the moonlight, I could see huge vineyards stretching off towards the lake. I later asked a tax client of mine who works at Welch’s if what I saw could be Concord grapes. She confirmed that area is one of their big producers, growing Concord, Niagara, and Catawba grapes for Welch’s.

The name you most often associate with Concord grape jams and juices, of course, is Welch’s. Welch’s is headquartered appropriately right here in Concord, Massachusetts, and the reason it has not been swallowed up by one of the mega food corporations is that it is a co-op. Welch’s is owned by the National Grape Coop, an agricultural co-op of more than a thousand grape producers located in Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Canada. For me, Welch’s is one of the few feel-good products you can still buy in the stores, although I don’t use a lot because of the sugar content. These days, I prefer my grapes made into wine.

Harvest Monday–10 September 2012

Another sign of Fall: the wild turkeys are getting nice and fat. You can see one of my abandoned raised beds in the picture, slowly being engulfed by the forest in the back. I gave up the fight and got a plot in the community gardens. The picture is fuzzy because the camera was on full optical zoom.
The last of my red onions are now drying in the garage. I don’t know what variety these are, I just bought a pot of seedlings at the farm stand. I think I will plant a lot more onions next year and I already have my garlic on order.

This year I had too much perishable produce (lettuce, chard, beans, etc.) all at once, so I wound up giving away a lot or actually losing it. I might as well plant things I can easily store and reduce the amount of perishable produce to what we can easily consume. Forget freezing. We seem to have a week-long power outage about every year now. All the frantic tree trimming done by the power company and the town doesn't help when the whole tree goes over in a freak October snow storm.



More beets, Red Ace and Bull’s Blood (with the red leaves).



Bush beans on the left and Fortex pole beans on the right. The pile on the left was made into stewed beans for the community garden pot luck dinner Sunday night. I didn’t have a Jalapeno so I used three tiny Thai chiles. That lit it up pretty good. Those things are hot! The pole beans are going in to a bowl of South African Green Beans for dinner tonight.



The two tomatoes lower right are my first Striped Roman tomatoes. In the close up you can sort of see the orange stripes down the tomato. When they are green, the stripes are a darker green than the rest of the tomato, which makes them very attractive even when green.





To see what other gardeners around the world are harvesting from their gardens, head over to Daphne’s Dandelions, out host for Harvest Monday.

Harvest Monday–3 September 2012

It’s definitely getting to be Fall. The days are cooler and the nights are colder.There are other signs around. Late August is when the garlic chives start blooming. The bed below started out as a small clump that I planted from seed and has self-seeded itself into a large bed (reminder to self: I have to remember to deadhead these things this year). The flowers are always a welcome sight, one of the few plants that bloom this time of year. They have a sweet, almost spicy fragrance that drives the bees wild.




Meanwhile, the garden is producing mostly cucumbers and zucchini, some oversized because I got to the garden a day late. The dark, slender cucumbers are Summer Dance. They are interesting in that they just grow longer, not fatter, the longer you leave them on the vine. Some of the ones below are over 10 inches long. They have a small seed cavity and probably would be good for pickles. The shorter, lighter green, cucumbers are Diva.







To see what other gardeners around the world harvested from their gardens last week, drop by Daphne’s Dandelions.