Saturday, November 24, 2007

• Cranberries and Maple Turkey

  I cooked the turkey and the cranberries this year as I do most years.
  
  I cook the cranberries following the recipe on the bag.  Sugar, water, cranberries, pretty simple, so delicious.  I look forward to those cranberries all year.  Occasionally I'll experiment.  I'll add orange rind, or cinnamon, or use honey instead of sugar, but I always come back to the simple basic recipe as my favorite.  Other people eat the cranberries, but really I'm the only one who'd miss them if they weren't there.
  
  I do something a little different each year with the turkey, usually building on the previous year.  The first innovation for me was the oven bag several years ago.  At some point, maybe three or four years ago, I started putting garlic and carrots into the meat (punch a hole in the meat with a knife, insert 1 clove garlic, and 1 baby carrot).  Maybe two years ago I first used mayonnaise as the coating.  I don't usually do stuffing, but occasionally put stuff inside the bird to add moisture and flavor (apples and garlic this year).  This year, instead of using Mayo, I tried something a friend suggested.  I blended 4 sticks of butter with a quart of pure maple syrup and slathered the bird with that.  I was going to brine the meat, but as my blog of that evening suggests, I ran out of juice myself and had to hit the hay.
  
  Anyway, the result was a very juicy, very sweet turkey dinner.  You see two gravies in the foreground of this picture next to the meat.  The darker gravy is from the juice of the roast.  That gravy was really sweet.  My MIL asked me to baste out some of it for a gravy.  She'd gotten it mixed and then commented on the delicious looking dark color when it occurred to me what had happened.  "That gravy's gonna be too sweet, you'll want to add some salt."
  
  "Why"
  
  "I used a whole quart of maple syrup for the baste, that gravy is mostly maple syrup."
  
  After the addition of some salt and flour and a little bit of chicken broth, we had a delicious, but still sweet maple flavored gravy.  My poor MIL was horrified.  I suggested using the rest of the chicken base broth to make a separate, more traditional gravy (seen behind the darker maple gravy in the picture above).  That met with everyone's approval.  I think I'm the only one who ate, or at least ate and enjoyed, the maple gravy.
  
  I would suggest to anyone who does a maple turkey, brine it in salt the night before.  It really needed salt, it was delicious, but a bit too sweet.
  
  We also had "Stuffin' Muffins", corn bread stuffing, sweet potatoes with a candied brown sugar topping, potatoes with garlic, potatoes with sour cream, and three kinds of pie (pumpkin, pecan, and apple).  My MIL contributed the potatoes with sour cream, my lovely wife niknaknoke contributed the potatoes with garlic, a friend of ours contributed the sweet potatoes, and my talented SIL, Suzie_Duck, contributed the rest.  A special touch was that none of the pies were made with corn starch or corn syrup, so I could eat them all without fear of allergic reaction!
  
  It was a very relaxed 2:00ish meal followed by conversation interrupted with spontaneous tryptophan caused naps.  Pie was served much later.  My youngest, BlueFlowerPicker, had many helpings of pumpkin.
  
  It might just be the happiest, best Thanksgiving I've had since I lived in Hawaii.
  

  Currently Listening Where It All Begins By The Allman Brothers Band see related

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