Cooking: November 2005 Archives
I've done a large turkey several years in a row just to prove to myself that I could. I'm still saying that Alton Brown's suggestion of a 24-hour brine for the turkey is the best way to go. My mother may have made fun of me but she ate the damn thing and was pleasantly surprised that I was able to do it, I think.
This year, it's just Jeff and me. Cooking Thanksgiving for two is more challenging then at first glance because it is just so easy to say "fuck it" and have pizza. But we decided it was still Thanksgiving so I'm trying out a turkey breast in the slow cooker, Jeff's Mom's stuffing, roasted parsnips and sweet potatoes, and some ginger squash soup I made last weekend. Sounds peaceful and relaxing to me.
I am in no way any kind of food snob and my cooking skills still mark me as an amateur which I'm fine with. I am getting comfortable with trying some new things, working through my fear of self-poisoning, and really just enjoying the discovery that some cooking isn't really as hard as I've imagined it would be.
Case in point, salmon, which I love. If someone told me that four nice pieces of salmon on a bed of spinach and chopped mushrooms in the microwave for nine minutes gets what appears to be a top-quality and snazzy meal, I'd have said they were crazy. But it is true. I've done it twice now, once with an orange juice and Dijon mustard sauce and once with a teriyaki sauce and both times, it came out perfect.
Who knew the microwave was good for anything but heating up leftovers and water?
In an attempt to completly sabotage my Health Care Infrastructure course this weekend, I put off my very important presentation on the VA Health Care system to take a side trip down the cooking trail. By the end of the weekend, I'd wound my way through the current issue of Everyday Food and managed to make a big pot of roasted red pepper soup, four delicious salmon fillets in an orange juice and dijon mustard sauce, roasted parsnips and sweet potatoes, and eight rice and bean burritos that promptly got frozen for later use.
At least if I flunk out of school, I won't starve.
