Turkey Pot Pie on November 28

Chicken or turkey pot pie is one of my favorite comfort foods, yet I rarely make it.  I made turkey stock yesterday with the carcass, had some leftover pie dough, and turkey so it was a no-brainer.  I sauteed crimini mushrooms, along with some leeks, and fingerling potatoes in turkey fat and butter, added the last of the greens from T-Day, the turkey, flour, some of the stock, cream, half-and-half, sherry, mixed herbs (thyme, rosemary, marjoram, and sage), and let it simmer on the stove for about 15 minutes.  I put the mixture in a 13×9 baking dish, topped it with the pie dough, and baked it at 400F for 30 minutes.

Bruce made a salad of mixed greens, fennel, dried cherries, prunes, black oil-cured olives, green olives, pecorino romano cheese, and leftover sherry-ginger vinaigrette.  We finished the pickled beets and drank a bottle of Bonterra sauvignon blanc 2008.

Fettucine Alfredo on November 27

It was nice to relax; we don’t participate in the frenzy of black Friday; instead, we enjoy being lazy after two days of cooking.  We traditionally eat hot turkey sandwiches for brunch, and spend the afternoon puttering around the house or reading/napping.  We usually don’t go out-of-the-way to cook much for dinner; leftovers will suffice, but I had a hankering for pasta.  There are many different versions of this dish out in the food world and unfortunately, most of them are bad: overcooked pasta with gloppy white besciamella-type sauce, and maybe topped with some overcooked chicken or shrimp.  This dish was inspired by a short article I read in Saveur magazine a few months ago where the ingredients can be counted on one hand: cooked fettucine, butter, pasta water, cracked black pepper, and Parmigiano Reggiano cheese.  So simple, but together the ingredients  (quality really matters here) create a symphony of flavor.

The pasta was served with leftover greens and stuffed mushrooms from the Thanksgiving feast, pickled beets, and the wine was L’oca Ciuca super Tuscan 2006.

Thanksgiving Celebration on November 26

We hosted Thanksgiving dinner again this year, celebrating with our longtime friends: Diana and Tim.  This has been a year of big changes for the four of us and we have much to be thankful for: our friendship, our health, the roofs over our heads, and the food on our tables.  This year, the theme was simple and local.  We bought our turkey from Walker Farm, the cranberries from a Bandon farmer, the potatoes, greens, onions, fennel, shallots, and other veggies from the various farmers at the Corvallis farmer’s market; the bread for the stuffing and the pie dough were homemade, the filling for the pumpkin pie was fresh, and the mincemeat was made by a friend.  The point made in this account is that 95% of what we ate was from local farmer’s that we know.

Our menu was as follows:

• Homemade rabbit liver pate’ crostini
• Roasted, stuffed portobello mushrooms with Parmesan cheese, breadcrumbs, mushroom stems, parsley, porcini dust, garlic, and green onion
• Roasted turkey with maple butter and herb gravy; prosciutto, hazelnut, fennel, and pear stuffing
• Mashed butterball and sweet potatoes with garlic and buttermilk
• Sauteed kale, Swiss chard, and tatsoi with butter, olive oil, and lemon juice; topped with garlic candy
• Roasted cranberries with habanero, persimmons, macerated wild blueberries, apple cider
• Pumpkin and mincemeat pies with molasses whipped cream
• Applesauce, cranberry, and walnut cookies (by Tim)

We enjoyed Gruen sparkling wine with the crostini and mushrooms, Two Rivers Bricco with the turkey and fixings, and Winter’s Hill Golden Nectar for dessert.

Grilled Mongolian Lamb Sausage Patties on November 25

It was another beautiful day on the Oregon Coast, and we spent the majority of it in the kitchen prepping for the big feast we will be hosting tomorrow.  We wanted to do something relatively simple for dinner (we had ground lamb defrosted), so I found a Mongolian Lamb Sausage recipe in the ‘Beyond the Great Wall’ cookbook.  I chose to make patties to grill on the Ducane.  The other ingredients in the sausage were chopped cilantro, green onion, garlic, ginger, salt,and black pepper.  The patties were served as lettuce wraps (Bruce thinks he’s gone to Heaven with lettuce wraps twice in one week), with red leaf lettuce, escarole (really good), shredded carrot, daikon radish, and white turnips.  The wraps were accompanied with Thai sticky rice, black rice vinegar, and a chile paste made with Franny’s pepper paste, salt, sugar, fish sauce, garlic, and rice wine vinegar; we drank a nice bottle of French Sauvignon: Touraine 2008.

Whole Wheat Clam and Broccoli Spaghetti on November 24

It was a beautiful and warm day here on the Oregon Coast, so we got outside to do some much-needed yard work after the wind storms we had over the weekend.  Our yard is full of old growth shore pines, sitka spruce, and willow trees, all shedding pine needles and leaves.  We decided that after a hard day of work in the yard, we needed something simple yet substantial for dinner.  I made a sauce of anchovy, garlic, Franny’s pepper paste, white wine, tomato paste, and clam juice, and added cooked broccoli,  canned clams, and whole wheat spaghetti to it.  Bruce made a torn Caesar salad and we enjoyed a nice crisp pinot grigio from Ca’ Del Sarto 2008.