Turkey tails! I spotted these in the frozen meat section of my local grocery store. Since I’m a big fan of tails, I thought I would do something with these tails. Originally I thought of smoking or frying them, but I stumbled on an idea on the internet that sounded really great. Adobo turkey tails!
1.5 cups apple cider vinegar
.5 cup medium sweet soy sauce (ABC Kecap Manis)
40 garlic cloves, crushed/chopped
2 tbsp sugar
1/4 tsp coarse kosher salt
1 tsp black peppercorns, crushed
2.5 lbs turkey tails (bone-in)
Place the defrosted tails in a hot pan and cook until browned. No need to add oil to the pan, these tails ooze enough fat to brown themselves. Add peppercorns, garlic and cook until brown. Add 1 cup of vinegar and bring to a boil. Bring heat down to medium heat and add the rest of the vinegar, sweet soy sauce, salt, and sugar. Mix thoroughly and continue to reduce sauce, taking care to coat each tail evenly.
These were yummy. Regrettably, I had some gastrointestinal upset which I suspect came from the tails. My man also suffered some stomach pains after consuming the adobo. I discovered that the brand label Pride of the Farm and meat packer Cargill Turkey has a history of food recalls related to salmonella contamination. While I thought that the vinegar and high heat would have sufficiently killed off most of the microbes, it doesn’t any of the toxins produced by them. Of course, this also led me on a furious clean up with bleach of all the kitchen surfaces to ensure everything was sanitized.
Baked mussels is a mainstay of many Asian menus and buffets. We had some leftover black mussels from our seafood broth experiment and I decided to use them to make cheese baked mussels. I used the an internet recipe as a guide to making the mayo sauce since I didn’t have any Kewpie mayo on-hand. The result was excellent home-baked cheese mussels.
6 tablespoons mayonnaise
1/2 lemon, squeezed of juice
1/2 teaspoon garlic chili sauce (or more if you like more heat)
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon sugar
Shredded cheese
In the pics, half of my mussels were covered with a cheddar mix (with asiago and romano), while the other half covered with only sharp cheddar. If you desire a bolder color on your mussels, go with straight cheddar.
As part of a New Year’s eve feast, we went with lobster for our meal. Unfortunately, pre-cooked lobster = fail. The man didn’t have much time to go hunt down fresh live lobster and settled for the cheap $$ frozen lobster he found at Kroger. Unless you plan on using the lobster meat as some kind of garnish or topping or mix-in, I wouldn’t recommend eating store-cooked lobster straight from the shell. Yuck!
However, we did have an opportunity to make lobster broth from the 4-some of puny lobster shells. We tossed all the shells, heads and claws into a pot, covered them with enough water, and added crushed raw garlic, quartered onions, salt and peppercorns. Brought the mixture to a boil, then we let it simmer several hours (about 4-6). The result was a dingy gray liquid that “perfumed” the entire house for a few days. Seriously, if you don’t want your house smelling like a seaside fish market, don’t make seafood broth indoors.
Alas, the gray water didn’t make for an attractive clear seafood broth. We weren’t as industrious as straining the liquid through cheesecloth as some internet sites suggested. For future reference, I recommend cleaning the lobster shells of any dirty matter that might color the broth. Unfortunately, that means reserving the lobster heads, where all the flavor comes from.
We froze leftover lobster broth for future experiments in lobster bisque making.
Four days before Christmas (Saturday): crock pot whole wheat lasagna with beef and sage pork sausage. It cooked perhaps a little too long with not enough sauce. Luckily, we had jars of sauce to make additional batches to ladle on. Remember to add some sugar, spice and cinnamon for an added kick!
Sunday: Smoked turkey brined in salt/rosemary/garlic pepper water for 48 hours. 1 cup of salt to enough water to cover a 12-13 lb turkey produced a nicely flavored and moist turkey. However, the smoking process toughened the skin; I unfortunately omitted the oil/butter rub on the surface and under the skin. This year, I also stuffed the cavity with garlic instead of lemon, which consequently went into a batch of mashed potatoes! Yum!
12/23/2012 Smoked Turkey
Monday: Another crock pot day. This time we tried a point cut brisket with potatoes and carrots. Unfortunately, there was hardly any flavor to the meat; despite that we tried adding a homemade brown gravy at zero hour. The big mistake was filling up the crock pot with too much veggies and not enough sauce, which took 8-10 hours to cook. While I liked the tender texture of the fatty cut brisket, too much of the fat had dissolved into what sauce there was, making it for a less-than-delectable meal. We’ll try chuck next time and add flour to a beef broth next time (skipping the veggie broth). The man insists we should use beef bouillon, but I lean toward the broth instead.
Tuesday: Standing rib roast with cauliflower and brussel sprouts. As usual, I made a fantastic 2-rib roast coated in olive oil, garlic and rosemary. Since it was a small size (about 3-4 lbs), it cooked rather quickly for a little over an hour. The instructions on this page made for a fool-proof delicious roast. However, the drippings was too overwhelming for 1 pound of fresh brussel sprouts; so I opted to add a pound of frozen cauliflower to the mix. I think the extra water made the veggies too wet for my liking. Next time, 2 pounds of sprouts or bust! Fresh cauliflower would probably yield better results too!
Desserts: We opted for fried banana…however, we tried to find that perfect Brazilian recipe and failed. My experience with fried bananas are in one of two categories: banana-que and batter-fried bananas. We opted to go the banana-que route and melted butter and sugar in a pan. Sliced bananas then coated them in the melted sugar mixture; then rolled them in an additional coat of brown sugar and cinnamon. A true banana fritas recipe would include flour to create a thin crust, but we were looking for bananas fried like Texas de Brazil.
Snacketizers: Crabbed stuffed mushrooms with ricotta, mozzarella and parmesan blend were roasted in the convection oven to doneness. While it wasn’t bubbling hot melted cheese, I though this dry version was still yummy and not messy. We also tried several batches of cheese bread recipes that turned out mostly fail. My first batch produced a semi-wet dough that was cheesy, garlicky (coz I used fresh garlic) with heavy cream that had a thick crust and somewhat chewy inside. Second time around, I omitted the cream but somehow added too much water that came out extremely runny and resulted in cheese cookies. So it made sense to invest in a mini-muffin tin to prevent collapse of the dough. At this point, I ran out of tapioca flour and ran to the store to buy more; only to find that American stores don’t really carry tapioca flour in its pure form. I went with a gluten-free flour mix which had tapioca, rice and potato flours. Of course, this resulted in a very DENSE bread that was nothing like the moist fluffy cheese bread that I was addicted to. Back to square one: I had the man fetch some real tapioca flour at the Asian store. One cup later, I was closer to nailing the recipe. The crust was still too hard, but the interior was approaching puffy moistness of the classic Brazilian cheese bread. To further tweak the recipe, I plan on taking down the temperature to 325 and baking 20 minutes, instead of the high heat (450) and short bake times (10 mins).
I picked up this USDA Choice butcher-cut point brisket at Albertson’s when I saw the stacks of pecan wood outside the store earlier that week. It was time to try the taste of pecan smoked brisket. Alas, I still didn’t have time to smoke the this beast entirely–at 10 hours, it still hadn’t reached the grey color so desired in perfectly smoked brisket. I hit the dread stall, and the temperature gauge wouldn’t budge past 170 degrees. I even foil wrapped the brisket and let it sit in the oven for 3-4 hours, but no such luck. At least the blackened exterior looked and tasted good. And the pecan smoke was oh-so-pervasive, I was smelling pecan smoke in my hair and clothes nearly a week later.
