Maybe you, like me, are already tired of looking at anything even related to turkey. We’ve had our leftovers of mashed potatoes, dressing, cranberry relish. We’ve had turkey sandwiches with real mayo and relish inside. We’ve drunk the last of the sparkling cranberry juice, the pinot noir, and all the myriad of appetizers. So, I’m sorry to bore you with yet another recipe for using up leftover turkey. But I liked this so much I can’t NOT share it with you.

Most years in the past I’ve made a southwestern turkey chili that’s been a staple in my repertoire. I just never wanted to try anything new. But then I got my weekly email from America’s Test Kitchen, which linked to a Cook’s Illustrated recipe from 2007. It was a white turkey chili recipe. It was a bit different – it is more like a chile verde dish with the poblanos (also called pasillas), Anaheims and jalapeno chiles. There are a LOT of chiles in this recipe, but believe me when I tell you it’s not hot. Yes, really. And if you have any sensitivity to chile heat, just leave out the jalapenos.

What I did like about this recipe is that it’s quite easy. Not exactly stir and serve, but certainly a lot easier than the old standard I’ve made for years. The recipe was slightly adapted by me, and I added some grated Cheddar as a garnish too. Our family group who ate it last night, liked the cheese. The dish isn’t overwhelming in beans – there are 3 cans in the whole dish and one of the cans gets whizzed up until smooth in the food processor, so you don’t even know they’re there except for making the broth a bit thicker. Please note that without the garnishes, each serving is just 10g of fat.

The original recipe called for cooking a raw turkey breast. I just adapted it to utilizing the leftover cold turkey we had, so some of the directions have been changed. I also didn’t choose to serve raw jalapeno as a garnish, so included all the chile in the cooked mixture. And, I didn’t have just turkey breast, but all kinds of white and dark meat. It was just fine. But if you prefer all white meat, by all means go for it.
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So, what did WE do on Thanksgiving? We lazed around and watched the rain for a couple of hours. Once it cleared up outside, we took walks, watched some TV, cooked some (maybe only about 3 straight hours for me) and had a great day. We had six was all, for dinner. Fewer than anticipated, but no less enjoyable.


First off, I made an appetizer that I’ve blogged about before, but when I did I was laid up with my fractured foot and didn’t have a photograph of it. So I took some photos this time. It’s a toasted slice of baguette with a little creamy mixture of mascarpone cheese, herbs and blue cheese spread on it. Then it’s topped with a piece of fresh bright-green watercress, a little slice of crispy apple and then drizzled with a bit of honey. It’s sensational, that’s all I can tell you. If you’d like to learn more, click here.

For dinner we had a delicious Kosher (brined) turkey from Trader Joe’s, the same Italian sausage dressing I made last year, gravy, mashed potatoes made up ahead and kept hot in the crock pot for about 2 hours, my regular cranberry relish and garlic green beans. Those green beans are just SO delicious. Every time I make them I fall in l-o-v-e with them again and again. And they’re EASY. No kidding. I’ve blogged about the beans before (recipe from our friend Meredith), but didn’t have a very good photo of them, so here’s a nice big one so your salivary glands can work overtime. Click here to see the story about the green beans with the recipe.

Our daughter, Sara, brought 3 pumpkin pies. She was supposed to bring a salad (that I’ve blogged about) but she totally forget. To tell you the truth, nobody missed it. We had so darned much to eat, we certainly didn’t need the salad. The green beans were our side instead. And pumpkin pies made up for it. They were just Libby’s recipe, with whipped cream. Plain and simple. We had a great day; hope you did, too. 

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Here’s a little quick and witty piece of wisdom and will hopefully describe me today as I prepare a big dinner for our family:

The hostess must be like the duck,
calm and unruffled on the surface
and paddling like hell underneath.
. . . . . Anonymous

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Interesting recipes just have a way of delivering themselves to me sometimes. I had a little more than half a head of cabbage (I halved this recipe). I wanted to try something new, so I did a Google search for “cabbage recipes” and up popped up Cherie Stihler’s cabbage website. Without too much scrolling I found this recipe that just sounded so unusual. Once you read this, you’ll discover what’s odd about it. I know, you’re asking, what’s so unusual about noodles and cabbage, for heaven’s sake? Well, according to the recipe, this dish isn’t supposed to be eaten until it’s dwelled in your refrigerator for at least three days. Maybe four. And you boil the heck out of the cabbage too. That’s unusual.

And, you ask . . . how was it? Well, it was scrumptious. And that was eating it on the FIRST night. But it got better and better, just like Cherie said it would, with each day. Next time I’m making this in a full-size recipe. I could even eat this as an entrée. But then, as you’ll see, it has a goodly amount of butter in it, and what’s there not to like about almost any vegetable or pasta dish with ample butter? I used less butter than indicated and it was still very good. So, you see, you need to try this. Thank you, Cherie, for maintaining this great website of cabbage recipes. She’s an author too, and in case you’d like to see the books she’s written, go to her home page.
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We’ve driven out to our house in the California desert for a week. Family members begin joining us tomorrow and will come and go for about 5 days. But for the moment, my DH and I are alone. My blog guru has completed stage one of my blog conversion. You won’t see any difference yet. I’ve been busy (in the background) updating every blog post I’ve ever done. First I revised categories (so you can search on my site – correctly – for all my salad recipes, for instance) and tags (that help people find my blog when they do an internet search). The second part is opening every post I’ve ever done [ugh] and correcting font code problems. My guru guy is going to write a little program of some kind that will make all the old posts look better, but that means all the posts have to be coded the same when he writes the override. The first project took me about 10 hours to do. This one (regarding fonts) will probably be weeks of work because it takes me about 10-15 minutes per post to get just one corrected. It’s so very tedious (adding and deleting code). It will be several more weeks before there is a new design, and THEN you’ll see new fonts. Until then you won’t notice much difference.

So, back to dinner last night. In reading all my old posts, my mouth was watering over any number of them – things I’ve made in the last year and haven’t made since. So many recipes, so little time. I’ll tell you, it’s tough being a blogger of food. The one recipe that kept popping up in my head was the stuffed vegetarian Poblano (pasilla) chiles with corn that I made earlier this year. They were so awesomely good. Spying some lovely, big poblanos at the market was all it took for me to try it again. Only problem was I didn’t remember what all was in it (of course, in my own defense, I didn’t know I was going to make these until I saw the chiles, so how could I know the ingredient list . . . really). So I had to guess. I bought some fresh corn on the cob. [A little backstep here – I should know better than to buy fresh corn on the cob in November, for goodness’ sake . . . sometimes Trader Joe’s, or any other market that tries to sell these in November, are suspect. I should have put the package back and gone for the frozen corn. So, you’ll know better when you try the recipe, okay?] I decided to put some ground turkey in them this time (not in my original), and some mushrooms.

Now, knowing that most everybody here in America is going to have some leftover turkey this week, this recipe is timely. Instead of the ground turkey I used, substitute about 1 ½ – 2 cups of cubed leftover turkey. Don’t cook it, though, just add it into the mixture at the end.

Every time we drive to our desert house I stand at the open refrigerator at our main home and try to anticipate what I might need. I can’t keep both houses (cupboards and refrigerator/freezer) stocked with everything known to a home cook. So I forgot a couple of key ingredients and had to improvise. My DH said these stuffed chiles were better than the first time. I’m not so sure, but they were totally different, so even though they may look the same, they weren’t. These were less spicy. More like stuffed bell peppers in a way. These had ground turkey in them. What was missing was the chipotle chiles in adobo sauce that I think enhance so many, many dishes. They pack a wallop of heat if you use very much, but in moderation (meaning very little) it adds a depth of flavor unlike other enhancements. I didn’t have limes (used lemon instead). I also had no regular red and yellow bell peppers to add. None at all. So, this version is different – much more moderate in spicy heat. Still tasty, though. The poblanos were very mild this time – they had virtually no heat to them at all. I added a half of a jalapeno chile to the mixture too.
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James Joyce met Marcel Proust once at a literary dinner, and Proust asked Joyce did he like truffles, and Joyce said yes, he did, and I know Joyce was very amused afterwards. He said, “Here the two greatest literary figures of our time meet, and they ask each other if they like truffles.” . . . Arthur Power in W. R. Rodgers’ Irish Literary Portraits

…mushroom photo from www.boisdale.co.uk
…truffle photo from www.whitetruffleauction.com

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Here’s a little quote for the day:

The smell of bread baking,
like the sound of light flowing water,
is indescribable in its evocation
of innocence and delight. . . . . M.F.K. Fisher

You’ll find very few yeast breads here on my blog. It’s not that I don’t like them, but I’ve just tended to cook other things, and there are so many good artisan breads out there now so we can find good breads in several markets close by. But back in my ancient history I used to bake all of my own bread. I know I wrote up a post about it once upon a time. I even used to sell bread to family and friends when I was a cooped-up young mom. At the time my ex and I had just one car and only twice a week did I get to have it, so the other days I was home trying to find things to do. Making my own bread was so much better to eat because the markets had nothing but the mega-bakery institutional kinds of breads. The kinds I didn’t like then, nor do I like now.

One year during the time I was baking every week I came across this recipe for Pumpkin Raisin Bread in a raised, yeast type. My old notes don’t tell me where I got the recipe, but I have changed it over the years, so it’s really my own anyway. I added more spices, more pumpkin, reduced the sugar and sometimes added walnuts too. This bread didn’t get baked all year around – just in the Fall months. It was very popular with my friends. And, I will tell you this bread is just fabulous with turkey sandwiches. I made it every year – for years and years – the day before Thanksgiving so we’d have some for sandwiches. It freezes well – whole, or you can slice it, freeze it in foil, then in plastic bags, and it will keep for several weeks. At Thanksgiving, though, it never lasts more than a day or so. Periodically I make it now, and it’s usually this time of year.

Pumpkin bread with apple butter – sublime!

Just realize this is NOT a sweet tea kind of bread. It’s a toast-kind of bread, or a sandwich-type of bread. It’s light and airy, not dense. And if you’d like to include more healthy flours, substitute about 1 cup or so of whole wheat flour for white bread flour. For some years I attempted to recreate this recipe in my bread machine, but have never been successful, except at mixing up one loaf at a time and using the machine for JUST the mixing process, not the rising and baking. This bread needs a different rising time than the machines offer. This time I mixed it up in my stand mixer, using the dough hook. Instead of combining and mixing things in separate bowls I just started with the water and yeast mixture in the mixer bowl and once it had bubbled enough so I knew the yeast was good, I just added the other ingredients to the bowl. That kept the dirty dishes down to a low level. Every house I’ve ever lived in I’ve had to find the right spot for raising dough. Yeast dough likes a quiet, warm place without drafts. This time the wide bowl sat on top of my espresso machine and within a couple of inches of the under-cabinet fluorescent lighting, which gave the bowl a nice warm place to do its thing.

My YEAST TECHNIQUE: I’ve mentioned it here before, but I have a technique for proofing (proving it’s viable) yeast. It’s not my own idea, but back in those olden days when I was baking all the time I read lots of bread cookbooks, and one explained all the chemistry of yeast. And this cook’s advice was to mix the yeast with warm water as usual, but to also add a tiny bit of ground ginger and sugar. Yeast is a growing thing, and it needs “food” to develop its skill, and the ginger and sugar help give it a jump start. My breads back then made a successful leap. I don’t think I ever had a yeast failure ever again.

So, this bread is fairly straight forward – you mix up a batter, add the other extraneous ingredients, mix, add the flour (not all of it unless you have to). One of the secrets to bread baking is to add only as much flour as the dough needs to keep the stickiness under control. If you remember that adage, you’ll not likely have any problems with yeast dough. I add the raisins and nuts after the first rise, but the recipe indicates it’s done during the first mixing. Your choice. And if you are doing this for turkey sandwiches, maybe you don’t want to add the nuts. They don’t serve much purpose for sandwiches. But they’re great if you’re making toasting bread.
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In trying to make more vegetarian meals, I ran across this recipe I hadn’t made in awhile. My friend Susan made this for us one night as a side dish to a roast chicken and a salad. It was really nice. I’ve made it a couple of times since. If you prepare it as a side dish, you likely could feed more people, but I make it as a main course, so it actually fed just four of us the other night. We had it plus a green salad, so one slice of the tart simply wasn’t enough – we all dug into the dish for seconds. I have added bacon to it a couple of times. And sometimes I don’t make the herb-enhanced crust, but use a store-bought pie shell. You can also substitute Feta cheese for the goat, or even Swiss cheese also. Any kind of chard will work – even the rainbow type. The leeks provide some good flavor, and the golden raisins and pine nuts add different texture. All good things. The original recipe is one by David Leite, published in the Los Angeles Times several years ago. The recipe says to serve at room temperature, so you could even take this to a picnic, or make it hours ahead of time. I like those options, although I served it warm. This isn’t a big, huge “wow” dish, but simple, hearty, satisfying.

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The other night we went to our friends, Cherrie & Bud’s house, for dinner. We used to have a more regular get-together where we both cooked the dinner together and our husbands got to enjoy the results. We always tried new things. Seems like we’ve both been busy; too busy to even plan it ahead. Cherrie made the entrée (a chicken Mediterranean dish – delicious), Israeli couscous (a Trader Joe’s box mix that was just really good), and a Sticky Toffee Bundt Cake with a rum sauce (more on that later in this post). I brought the ingredients to make salad (a fennel and orange one) and a vegetable side dish.

We enjoyed some champagne and appetizers on their back deck, then I started working on my part of the dinner. Let me start by saying that this dish is really very, very good. I’d make it again. BUT, to hand cut the zucchini and yellow crookneck into little, tiny linguine-like strips was tedious. Cherrie couldn’t find her mandoline (she has one hiding somewhere), but finally I needed to get started. She helped too, but still, it took us both about 20 or more minutes to carefully slice the squash. WAY too much trouble. If you want a very impressive looking dish, though, use your mandoline and make those little julienne slices. Much of it can be done ahead – there’s no reason it couldn’t be, although the recipe didn’t indicate it. The recipe came from the August issue of Food & Wine, from a Cleveland chef named Douglas Katz.

You blanch the squash in boiling water, remove to drain, then mop it with towels or paper towels to absorb the excess moisture. Meanwhile, you prepare some sliced shiitake mushrooms, shallot, garlic. Those things get sautéed, then you toss the “linguine” with a light oil dressing, toast up some pine nuts, combine things, sprinkle the pine nuts on top and put some little blobs of goat cheese on top too. I have some suggestions – I thought the flavors were wonderful – I’d make it again, but would probably just do it as a much quicker sauté and forget the linguine cutting, even if I do have a mandoline. It’s very colorful, and very tasty. It could even be a vegetarian entree as far as I’m concerned. I could have just had that for dinner.

So, the ending of the evening. . . Cherrie is the first to admit that she’s not the best baker out there. She says she has more failures than successes. Cookies she can do (and does almost every Christmas season with her sister Laurie), but just about anything else she’d rather buy than even try. This dinner we planned, however, Cherrie and I agreed we were going to use things from our pantry – that we had on hand. (Well, I couldn’t because everything I made was with fresh produce). But Cherrie did – chicken from the freezer, the couscous mix, and the dessert. The cooking school Cherrie and I used to visit with regularity, is no longer in business. We were so sad to see it go. The place sold some great boxed mixes, the Sticky Toffee Bundt cake was one of them. So, with trepidation, Cherrie decided to bake the cake. Even SHE was amazed that it turned out – looked beautiful on the elevated cake stand.

After we cleared all the dishes, Cherrie began slicing the cake and asked Bud to go out to the garage to get the special frozen yogurt they’d gone out to buy – from a new place called Juice? Or Juicy? Can’t recall the name. Bud returned to the kitchen as we were scooping the warm butter sauce over the cake slices. He had a rueful expression on his face. With long, drawn out words he explained . . . slowly . . . each word separated . . . “I … put … the … frozen yogurt … in … the … refrigerator.” Cherrie’s face fell. She said WHAT? She said “What ever were you thinking?” He just looked at her. No words from his mouth. No explanation. When they’d gotten home with the frozen yogurt it was his job to put it in the FREEZER. Nope, for whatever reason, he put it in the refrigerator. Needless to say, after several hours, the frozen yogurt was a kind of thickened sauce. Cherrie was more than a little bit upset – at first. But, we ventured on, just adding this “sauce” on top of the hot butter sauce. We returned to the dining room and began eating the cake and drinking good hot coffee. Cherrie was still niggling Bud about his mistake. But you know what? The yogurt “sauce” was really good on it – it was cold, liquidy, and a nice side note to the cake – which was sweet and rich. Eventually we all agreed it was almost BETTER than the frozen yogurt. Sometimes kitchen disasters turn out to be winners.

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Have any of you begun watching the TV show with Steve Raichlen, the grill expert and author of any number of grill cookbooks? He has a program on PBS called “Primal Grill.” His show is filmed somewhere in Arizona, apparently his ranch, cows grazing close by, an ancient pickup truck in the background, and several different kinds of grills behind him. I can’t say that he’s all that natural behind a camera, but I like his recipes. I own a couple of his cookbooks and haven’t ever been disappointed in anything I’ve made. The recipes for all his shows are available on his website, Primal Grill . This particular segment was about cooking lamb, and as I watched him sink a knife and fork into this burger and saw the goat cheese oozing out of it, I knew I had to make this.

Ground lamb isn’t available in my markets, so had to go to a butcher to get it – and all they had was frozen in one pound chunks. So, the burgers I made with two pounds made slightly larger burgers than indicated. And I used less goat cheese – the recipe indicated 8 ounces of goat cheese, but there was no way I could have enclosed 2 ounces of goat cheese into my burgers. I’ve altered the recipe to that effect. I ended up making 8 thin patties, putting the goat cheese between two of them and sealing up the edges. Our burgers were done in 8 minutes per side (instead of 7, but remember we used a bit more meat), and were absolutely delicious! My DH adores Greek salad, so the yogurt cucumber sauce dolloped on top of the burger, that oozed down onto the “salad” and each morsel combining a piece of meat (with goat cheese) and some lettuce, tomato, onion and cucumber was sublime. We didn’t have the pita bread, just the “salad” underneath, so you can do that as well. If you like lamb, this one’s a winner.
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