Christmas Salads

I have the ingredients.

I have the containers with which I will be storing said ingredients.

I have the tools with which I will turn said ingredients into different foods.

And tomorrow, you're invited to join me right here as I prepare my dish for my family's potluck Christmas dinner.

On MY Menu This Year

This year, I am going to be preparing salad. I know, it sounds boring off hand, but that's only when you stop listening. I have gathered two heads of Romaine Lettuce, which I will be tossing in a bowl with some shredded carrot, cucumber and red peppers.

From there, I have all the ingredients necessary to create 4(!!) separate and distinct salad dressings: Caesar, Southwestern, Red Pepper and Apple. The first two come from base recipes with the ideas as dictated by the cookbook. The latter two are my own ideas.

But wait! There's more! I have a loaf of Parisien Bread which will be turned into homemade croutons and a pound of bacon, which will be turned into bacon bits.

Doesn't sound like a plain-old boring salad anymore, does it? It does? Oh... well.... at least it's not so much a copout anymore.

That's to come... TOMORROW!!!

Curried Turkey

So, when I was sitting back, trying to decide exactly what I should do with this blog, it came to me: I am sitting on a wealth of recipe blogs written out over the past year that would be perfect over here!

The first such recipe is that of my Mom's Curried Turkey on rice. This has become a staple for any time I have been involved in consumption of massive amounts of turkey (such as Thanksgiving and Christmas), but also brought over to getting turkey (or chicken) from the grocery store. This recipe is very simple, has a good amount of kick to it and is almost criminally tasty. It's a sin, almost. It would be a sin if one of the Ten Commandments was 'Thou Shalt Not Consume Delicious Turkey Dishes'. Now, that law may exist in Leviticus or Deuteronomy, but I don't particularly care for all the laws in there anyway. *gently pats his pants, a blend of polyester and cotton, a sin*

The base ingredient here, in case you were unaware, is turkey, white meat to be exact. You could use dark meat, but I never have, so I can't vouche for the tastiness of it (though, I could imagine it working as well). If you haven't recently had a turkey feast, just go out to the grocery store and get a turkey breast or two. The key here is making sure the turkey is cooked before anything else. If you have leftover turkey, just make sure it's chopped into bite sized pieces. If you are going from raw, you have an additional step... put the turkey in your skillet with some butter (butter works better than oil for taste) and cook it until it's no longer pink (if you enjoy a stronger flavour, be sure to add some thyme. If not, add some ground coriander seeds during this step). If you are going from cooked, add the turkey to the butter and immediately go to the next step (the turkey itself will have likely been .

The next step, of course, is adding some sort of crunch to the dish, something that will add a unique aroma without sacrificing the original intent of the seasoning. To acheive this, I typically chop of two or three green onions and add them right in. They don't need a lot of time to tenderize, so you can add them while...

Oh, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The next thing you need for this is a sauce base. Nothing works better for this than some store-bought turkey gravy. One can will do, usually... though if you are using more turkey, a second may also be employed. What you want to do is stir all of the contents of the skillet (the turkey and onions) into the gravy. Then comes my favorite part.

Add one teaspoon of curry powder. Again, this is something that you could use the curry from the jar (it's more like a thick, grainy mustard), but I've always gone with the powder. One teaspoon, believe it or not, is more than enough to eliminate the tan, almost khaki colour of the gravy and convert it into a kind of brownish-yellow.

Let all of this simmer together until the gravy/curry mixture is bubbling nicely (remember, everything else was already cooked, so you just want to make sure it's hot).

"But Mr. Cooking, sir, how are we supposed to enjoy this dish?"

That's a good question, Xanga. There are a few different ways you can enjoy curried turkey. I typically employ one of two methods.

1) Boil up a pot of rice and serve it over that. Since curry is a dish most commonly associated with India, putting this dish on a bed of rice is always a viable option. I prefer using Minute Rice, so I can time it's completion with the completion of the turkey.

2) If using leftovers from the night before and the feast that was, I'd also recommend considering some leftover mashed potatoes. The potatoes make a thicker bed, meaning less of the gravy escapes as would through the rice. But be sure to bare in mind that the potatoes won't soak as much of it through, either. So if you want it to soak through, using something lighter is your best bet.

And, in the end, your dish should look something like you can see at the top.

And now, because I am not exactly keen on doing an old copy-paste job, I want to give you a couple of recipe variations that I have stumbled upon in my time honing and perfecting this recipe:

1) The first, and simplest, addition is potatoes. Typically, especially when we would get curry dishes at Sunfest, they have potatoes with it. So I did that... boiled or baked up a couple of potatoes, let them cool right down, then diced them and added them in when I added the gravy and curry. Of course, you can choose to keep the skins on or take them off. I personally prefer to leave the skins there.

2) This one is a little trickier: Instead of gravy and curry powder, add a can of Coconut Milk and a scoop or two (or three) of Curry Paste. If you are going to do this, you'll want to take a small pot and simmer them together beforehand. This actually makes the curry taste a little more authentic than it would if you did it with the gravy. Is it tastier? Well, that's up to individual taste.

And that is it! Recipe #1! I am going to get me an account so that I can determine calorie counts and what not, but I'm not exactly up to doing that now.

Let me know what you think, and be sure to tell your friends to check this place out! Maybe you, or someone you know, will have just found a new favorite dish.

Real Life Cooking: Why??

In my journeys through a wide assortment of used bookstores, new bookstores, web bookstores and other bookstores (though, where they are beyond new, used and web is purely existential.. it's inside of all of us), I have found one thing: Cookbooks rarely document defeat. They are always a tale of recipes that work. Perhaps it's that pursuit of perfection that drives us to purchase these cookbooks to begin with. Perhaps we are all so lacking in confidence in our kitchen prowess that we only feel to necessary to lean on this crutch of pre-written recipes.

Well, I hope to change that.

In our journeys through the kitchen, we are not perfect all the time. Some meals don't accomplish what we intend them to. Some meals are failures altogether. But one thing that remains constant is that we try. We step into the kitchen and face that stove... like a Christian thrown to the lions in the Roman coliseum. The only difference is our stoves will not eat us (well, not yet anyway... one of my biggest fears is that we will one day create a stove so smart that it becomes sentient... then we will all be doomed!).

I, like everyone else, am prone to having bad days in the kitchen. But that is a journey we can all take together. Perfection is something we can attain, however. This blog is going to be a path along cooking in real life. No fancy gimmicks. No stylized ingredients. Real food.

Hopefully, some other people follow along and learn something.