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cookbook_challengeI had some Jamie Oliver shows saved from before Christmas, and decided to have a go at something today.
Difficult to provide the actual recipe(s) without going back to the show and transcribing it at length. At least, it may be detailed in a book, but not a book I own. However, it was basically a Christmas menu, involving cooking a turkey crown and turkey legs, with stuffing, plus various roasted vegetables. I planned to do a reduced version involving the legs only and no roast potatoes (because Sainsburys had no King Edwards on the shelves last week, nor Maris Pipers neither). And because there were only three of us having lunch together today.
I'm here to tell you, it takes a hell of a long time to bone a turkey drumstick! I bought two, and each weighed just under a kilo, so they were substantial limbs. The trouble with a turkey drumstick of size is not so much the bone, which was easy enough to find and not difficult to extract from its surrounding meat, as the sinewy/tendony/stick-like bits. There were several long sticks of hard substance, and one like a miniature shoulderblade, to be extricated from the meat. I didn't manage to get them all out, but did a fair job. (At this point, I decided there was plenty of meat on one drumstick to feed us all, though I did, when less busy, bone and stuff the other one for another day.)
I made a stuffing involving onions, sage, butter, chopped dried apricots, a little Cointreau (as I had no sherry), a bushel of breadcrumbs (I will spare you the diversion lamenting the behaviour of my new blender) and sausagemeat. Eventually, when I had dealt with the turkey leg, a sausage of stuffing was laid into the spread-out leg meat and rolled into a... something. I forgot to tie this up. And, sadly, I realised I had managed to divest most of the turkey leg of its skin.
Anyway, I nested it on a 'trivet' of chopped veggies and bits of bone. In the programme, Jamie nests his turkey crown on this 'trivet' and does not do likewise with the leg, but, hey. It went into the oven a bit later than I had intended—when cooked, it is supposed to rest for an hour, and I think it got about 30 minutes in the end.
Then I addressed the carrots and parsnips. Don't peel the parsnips, Jamie says, so I didn't, nor did I core them as is my wont, but I did halve them. Spread butter on them and put them in the oven. I halved the carrots lengthwise as well, and added olive oil to them.
Towards the end of cooking time, I added duck fat (off-recipe), bay leaves and a drizzle of honey to the nips, and added more olive oil, rosemary, and the juice of a tangerine (or possibly a clementine, but most likely just an anonymous 'easy peeler' small orange) to the carrots.
Made gravy using the juice from the cooking meat, plus the smushed vegetables, plus some stock from the pot into which I had put various bits of turkey leg and saved stock vegetables.
Verdict. Hmm. Well, if I want to cook a boned turkey leg again I'm gonna get the butcher to bone it for me. Life is Too Short. It's a good idea, though, filling the tasty dark meat with some nice stuffing, and it wasn't bad. [Historical note: for several years I used to produce a magnificent boned turkey for Christmas dinner, stuffed with two kinds of stuffing plus a cavity lining of bacon, and covered in flavoured butter. Always very good, and a doddle to carve. But in recent years my folk have clamoured for pork instead.]
I find I prefer the onions and parsnips done my own way, which involves merely cutting them up (and taking out the woody core from the nips) and slathering them with duck fat, none of this fancy business with herbs and so on, which I cannot say made an impactful difference, except to the time and stress of preparing them. Though I *might* try the honey-drizzling thing again, because it sounds as though it ought to work and be delicious. Possibly I did not give them their full ten minutes. I dare say the lack of deliciousness today is probably due to some deficiencies in my following of method, given that I re-watched the programme last night and probably forgot some stuff—I think I did pretty well, but there's bound to have been something.
I will say, though, that Jamie Oliver makes his cooking look achievable by a normal person.
Difficult to provide the actual recipe(s) without going back to the show and transcribing it at length. At least, it may be detailed in a book, but not a book I own. However, it was basically a Christmas menu, involving cooking a turkey crown and turkey legs, with stuffing, plus various roasted vegetables. I planned to do a reduced version involving the legs only and no roast potatoes (because Sainsburys had no King Edwards on the shelves last week, nor Maris Pipers neither). And because there were only three of us having lunch together today.
I'm here to tell you, it takes a hell of a long time to bone a turkey drumstick! I bought two, and each weighed just under a kilo, so they were substantial limbs. The trouble with a turkey drumstick of size is not so much the bone, which was easy enough to find and not difficult to extract from its surrounding meat, as the sinewy/tendony/stick-like bits. There were several long sticks of hard substance, and one like a miniature shoulderblade, to be extricated from the meat. I didn't manage to get them all out, but did a fair job. (At this point, I decided there was plenty of meat on one drumstick to feed us all, though I did, when less busy, bone and stuff the other one for another day.)
I made a stuffing involving onions, sage, butter, chopped dried apricots, a little Cointreau (as I had no sherry), a bushel of breadcrumbs (I will spare you the diversion lamenting the behaviour of my new blender) and sausagemeat. Eventually, when I had dealt with the turkey leg, a sausage of stuffing was laid into the spread-out leg meat and rolled into a... something. I forgot to tie this up. And, sadly, I realised I had managed to divest most of the turkey leg of its skin.
Anyway, I nested it on a 'trivet' of chopped veggies and bits of bone. In the programme, Jamie nests his turkey crown on this 'trivet' and does not do likewise with the leg, but, hey. It went into the oven a bit later than I had intended—when cooked, it is supposed to rest for an hour, and I think it got about 30 minutes in the end.
Then I addressed the carrots and parsnips. Don't peel the parsnips, Jamie says, so I didn't, nor did I core them as is my wont, but I did halve them. Spread butter on them and put them in the oven. I halved the carrots lengthwise as well, and added olive oil to them.
Towards the end of cooking time, I added duck fat (off-recipe), bay leaves and a drizzle of honey to the nips, and added more olive oil, rosemary, and the juice of a tangerine (or possibly a clementine, but most likely just an anonymous 'easy peeler' small orange) to the carrots.
Made gravy using the juice from the cooking meat, plus the smushed vegetables, plus some stock from the pot into which I had put various bits of turkey leg and saved stock vegetables.
Verdict. Hmm. Well, if I want to cook a boned turkey leg again I'm gonna get the butcher to bone it for me. Life is Too Short. It's a good idea, though, filling the tasty dark meat with some nice stuffing, and it wasn't bad. [Historical note: for several years I used to produce a magnificent boned turkey for Christmas dinner, stuffed with two kinds of stuffing plus a cavity lining of bacon, and covered in flavoured butter. Always very good, and a doddle to carve. But in recent years my folk have clamoured for pork instead.]
I find I prefer the onions and parsnips done my own way, which involves merely cutting them up (and taking out the woody core from the nips) and slathering them with duck fat, none of this fancy business with herbs and so on, which I cannot say made an impactful difference, except to the time and stress of preparing them. Though I *might* try the honey-drizzling thing again, because it sounds as though it ought to work and be delicious. Possibly I did not give them their full ten minutes. I dare say the lack of deliciousness today is probably due to some deficiencies in my following of method, given that I re-watched the programme last night and probably forgot some stuff—I think I did pretty well, but there's bound to have been something.
I will say, though, that Jamie Oliver makes his cooking look achievable by a normal person.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-10 07:16 pm (UTC)I don't think I've ever watched anything with Jamie Oliver. Making his cooking look achievable by normal people sounds like huge plus. (I used to watch a lot of Nigella back in the day and I own several of her cookbooks but I almost never use them as cookbooks - I just read them for the entertainement value.)
PS It's never even occured to me to core parsnips but maybe the ones you can get here in Sweden are smaller than the ones in the UK? Ours usually are the size of medium-sized carrots, but with a more statuesque shape :-)
no subject
Date: 2021-01-10 10:37 pm (UTC)I prefer big, sturdy parsnips. *Much* fatter than a carrot, though they would taper to carrot size at the root end. It's increasingly hard to find my nice big parsnips, so I can see that sooner or later I will just be cooking them whole!
no subject
Date: 2021-01-10 07:54 pm (UTC)I have to agree with
no subject
Date: 2021-01-10 10:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-11 07:14 pm (UTC)My father hates parsnips and turnips, so we didn't eat them growing up. And, being a creature of habit, I tend to use potatoes and carrots - maybe some yams/sweet potatoes.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-11 09:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-11 10:19 pm (UTC)I listed it that way because while there's technically a difference, for most Americans they're considered interchangeable. So I should clarify that I meant American yams vs. African yams.
American cuisine has a lot of roots in slavery (
looking at the news these days, you can see that we have a whole lot of things that are rooted there -- we don't acknowledge it well). West Africans saw the native sweet potatoes in the Americas and referred to them as yams - so that's what we call them.I'm gathering you're in the UK because you mention Sainsburys. If so, you probably call yams yams and sweet potatoes sweet potatoes and don't make it all complicated like we do over here. :/
There's an interesting book called The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South that takes a look at history through what I thought was a very unique lens. It's hefty, I'll warn you - and light on the actual recipes.