Turkey soup, Take 2

The last time I made turkey soup I totally spoiled my kids for ever giving them canned soup again. This time I think I've ruined myself.

I knew I wanted to get some turkey or chicken thighs, since I much prefer dark meat for soup. Actually I prefer it for just about everything. All I could find on short notice was bone-in. I didn't think that would matter. (Remember this line -- it comes back to bite me in the end.)

This would be the first time I did turkey soup that didn't start from leftover roast turkey, so I decided to try something different. Instead of cooking the turkey, then dicing it up and tossing it in the soup, I butchered the thighs raw (mostly), and cooked it in the pot with the mirepoix. I noticed as soon as I tasted the finished product that the turkey was exceptional.

My wife told me the next day that she usually takes a little of the meat and a lot of the noodles. This time she went back for more of the meat. In most chicken and turkey soups the meat is actually dry, even though it's literally floating in broth. This was tender and juicy.

I know I've seen boneless thighs at the butcher's before. Next time I want to make soup, I'm going to call ahead and make sure they have some.

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Ingredients

1-1/2 lb turkey thighs, bone in
-- or --
1 lb boneless turkey thighs
1 cup turkey stock
1 cup carrot, sliced 1/8-inch thick
1/2 medium onion, diced (~1cup)
1 cup celery, chopped
2 large eggs
1 cup white flour
2 cloves garlic, minced
2-3 tbsp fat (rendered bacon fat or lard)
salt and pepper

Directions

Make mirepoix from the onion, celery and carrot and set aside. All the veggies should be in half-inch or smaller pieces, slightly smaller than dice. (Yes, that's why it's called "dicing".)



In a large pot or small dutch oven, melt a couple of tablespoons of fat over medium heat. Pat the turkey dry with a paper towel, then coat with salt and pepper.



Put the thighs in the pot skin-side down and fry until the skin starts to peel back from the edges. Turn the turkey over and remove the skin using tongs and a sharp knife. Turn over one more time and cook until slightly browned.

Both the front ...



... and back ...



... should be just a little browned.

There are two goals to this step. First, to fry up the skin so you can have a snack while you're working on the soup. Second, I find it easier to butcher the meat if it is a little cooked around the edges so I have something to grab it by. Completely raw poultry doesn't give you anything to hang on to. Remove the meat and turn off the heat.



There is a good chance you'll have a large amount of turkey fat in the pot at this point. I've never heard of a good use for it other than making biodiesel, so pour most of it out and discard it ... unless you make biodiesel. (But that's someone else's blog.) Leave enough in the pot to keep it well lubed for the mirepoix.

Next you have to remove the bone. This is the most useful way to think about it, and is very different from carving a whole roast turkey. In that case you're removing meat from the outside of the carcass. In this case you're removing the bone from inside of the meat.

Rather than do a step-by-step of how to do this butchering, I'm going to recommend you order the thighs already boneless. That's what I'm going to do in the future.

Once the bone is out, dice up all the meat into large bite-sized pieces.



The second bowl above contains all the scrap that's left over. Keep this in a zip-top bag in the freezer for the next time you make stock.

Wash your hands, knives and all surfaces the raw turkey has touched, except the inside of the pot. You don't want to risk cross-contamination.

Now that everything is set, put the pot over medium heat again until the fat starts to bubble. Add the mirepoix and garlic and sauté until the onion is a little past clear and starts to pick up some color. Stir it frequently so the garlic doesn't burn.



Push the veggies to the edges and put the turkey in the middle. Add plenty of salt and pepper -- at least a teaspoon of each.



Turn the heat up and brown the meat, turning everything occasionally so all the meat gets well browned on all sides.



Add enough water to barely cover everything and allow the water to come to a boil.



Add the stock and reduce heat to low. While it simmers for 20 minutes, make a thick pasta with the eggs, flour and salt. Cut into noodles 2 inches long and 1/4-inch wide and add to the soup.



Check the salt and pepper and simmer another 10 minutes, stirring once or twice.

Making mirepoix

Mirepoix is a simple combination of onion, celery and carrot sautéed together. It is so common in French cooking that recipes will sometimes call for a certain amount of mirepoix, instead of listing the three vegetables separately.

When you do see recipes for the mirepoix, it is typically either two parts celery to one part each of onion and carrot, or equal parts each. I have found that you don't have to be really precise with this. As long as there's enough of each that you get all three flavors, and you dice everything about the same size, you'll be good.

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Ingredients

1 medium onion -- the size of your fist
6-10 carrots -- as big as your thumb at the base
2-3 celery stalks

Directions

It's best to do this as mise en place. That's just French for "set in place" -- meaning get everything prepped and set out all at once before you start actually cooking. Set out three bowls before you start chopping.

First dice the onion.

Then do the celery. The bottom inch or so will be bright white, and quite possibly not looking very good.



That's okay, since we're going to cut the whole bottom off anyway.



Unlike onion, which grows underground but is completely clean after peeling the outside, celery grows aboveground and manages to accumulate lots of dirt in the bottom of the bunch.



Separate all the stalks and clean well with cold water. If it's exceptionally dirty, put a capfull of distilled white vinegar in a sink full of cold water and rinse it there. Pat the clean stalks with a paper towel to dry them.



You can see above that the color can vary quite a bit from the outside to the inside. Keep the small leafy stems from the inside to go in your Bloody Mary and dice up the larger pieces.

Cut each one lengthwise before dicing one or two stalks together.



For the carrots, don't get those little pre-milled, suppository shaped things they market to kids. Get real, carrot-shaped carrots. Cut off the leafy top, and also the stringy root at the smaller end.



Chop longer pieces from the smaller end, and thinner pieces from the big end.



Clean up as you go, putting all the trimmed pieces in the trash, and the diced pieces into the bowls you set aside at the beginning.



Sauté everything together in a little melted fat -- bacon, lard or butter.

Pasta carbonara

Depending on who you talk to, carbonara may have eggs, cream, mushrooms, peas, garlic, pepper, and any of a half-dozen different kinds of cheese as the "proper" ingredients. I'm not a purist about it. I just care how it tastes. Oh, and "easy to make with what I already have" is pretty good, too.

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Ingredients

1/2 lb pancetta
-- or --
1 lb bacon
1 medium onion, diced
1 clove garlic, minced (that's "diced really small" if you were wondering)
1/4 lb butter (one stick)
1/4 cup grated Parmesan
2 tablespoons dry parsley, or 3 tablespoons fresh (optional)
For fresh pasta
2 eggs
1 cup flour (plus a little more, depending on the size of the eggs)
1 teaspoon kosher salt
Otherwise
1 lb pre-made fettuccine or farafelle (bow-tie) pasta

Directions

To make the timing work well for this dish, it's better to prep all the ingredients for the sauce,1 then make the pasta and get it into the pot, and finally make the sauce.

First chop the pancetta ...



... into bite-sized pieces, about one inch square.



Then dice the onion.



Next mince the garlic and add it to the onion .

Finally, set out a stick of butter so it will start to warm to room temperature. If you don't like the idea of leaving it out while you make the pasta, feel free to leave the butter in the fridge, it's not that critical. Set everything aside and start on the pasta.

After putting the water on to boil, make the pasta from scratch and cut into fettuccine noodles. Don't cut the noodles until the water is boiling. You can cut them and set them aside, but it's much easier to put them straight into the water. Put a large pan for the sauce over high heat before putting the noodles in the water.

If you're going with pre-made pasta you'll have much more time to work on the sauce. If you're fast with all the chopping steps above, you can do all the prep while the pasta cooks.

To start the sauce, put the pancetta (or bacon) in the pre-heated pan, turn it down to to medium, and cook until it's starting to show browning around the edges. You can take bacon until it's a little crispy, but don't go much farther.

If you used bacon, you might want to pour off some of the fat at this point. Pancetta gives up much less fat, and reduces in size much less than bacon. That's why the ingredients specify twice as much bacon as if you use pancetta. Some people won't want that much bacon fat in the finished dish, but you at least want to leave a generous coating in the pan before adding the other ingredients.

Add the onion and garlic and reduce the heat further.



As you get more comfortable in the kitchen you'll be able to keep the heat up higher and not burn anything. Until then, don't risk scorching the garlic. It gets very bitter. Sauté until the onion is translucent, tossing or stirring occasionally.

If you've timed it right, the pasta should be ready about the time the onion is finished. Turn off the heat under the sauce but leave it over the burner, we'll use the remaining heat to melt the butter.



Add the butter to the sauce pan, and pour the pasta into your colander. While the pasta is draining, stir the butter into the pancetta/onion mixture.



Add the pasta to the sauce pan.



Add the parsley (if you want it) and Parmesan and toss well to coat everything.



Serve with garlic bread or a nice crusty Italian or French bread.

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1. Chefs will call this Mise en place. That's just French for "set in place" -- meaning get everything prepped and set out at one time before you start actually cooking.

How to dice an onion

Lots of recipes have the line "1 medium onion, diced" in the ingredients. Not too many of them show you how to do that. Here's a simple way that's easy to learn and pretty quick.

First, cut the pointy end off.



Then put the cut end on the cutting board and cut it in half straight down the middle.



Now that you have it split, it's much easier to peel the papery outer layers off.



Now comes the real dicing. Cut down and in, starting at one side and moving across to the other. The closer you make these cuts, obviously the smaller the dice will be.



Notice in the picture that I'm starting with the tip of the knife about a half-inch away from the root. You don't want to actually separate all the pieces from the base yet, and it's surprisingly easy to misjudge how the length of you knife will compare to the round onion.

Continue making cuts all the way across the onion.



Once you've made cuts all the way across, cut straight down cross-wise up to about a half-inch from the root.



If you hate waste -- or your mother drilled into you that you should never throw away food -- once you get close the the root, turn what's left on it's end and finish dicing.



The important part here is not to get the solid piece of the root into what you're cooking. It's better to throw out one or two little pieces that could be used than to cook a solid chunk of root.

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If you want long, even pieces instead of small ones, here's how to slice an onion in shreds.

Rib steak with broiled asparagus and broccoli

You might think after three days of eating prime rib I'd be a little tired of it for a while. If so, you'd be wrong. Maybe if I had gone four days straight then I'd have gotten tired of it. I guess I'll have to try it sometime and see.

Until then, I'm going to keep enjoying days like this past Saturday. I took the girls to the West Side Market, had some lunch on the balcony, and picked up a rib steak and some veggies for dinner.

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Directions

Prep

I started with two heads of broccoli.



Cut the stem off really close to the head.



A few florets will come free if you cut close enough. Next cut everything down to bite-sized. Any florets that are too big, split the stem in half then pull and it will come apart cleanly. Don't try to cut all the way through or you'll end up with little bits of the head all over.



Keep going until everything is prepped.



Next is the asparagus. Note the small, white-ish, triangular leaves down the sides of each stem. These become important later.



As soon as asparagus is cut in the field it starts losing moisture through the cut end, which starts getting fibrous and tough. Unless you can guarantee yours was just harvested that day -- or maybe the day before -- you'll need to remove the dried out part. But you don't know how much that will be.

So here's what you do. Hold the un-cut end in one hand. Bend the cut end with the thumb and index finger of your other hand until it snaps. It will break right at the edge of what has gotten tough.



With the veggies prepped, I started on the rib steak, on the bone. It's the same cut as the standing rib roast, but cut one bone thick and cooked like a steak.



This is about a pound. I could easily eat the whole thing, but with side dishes this is plenty for my wife and I to share.

Pat it dry with a paper towel, then apply a generous coating of kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper.

For the girls, I always get a half-pound of stew meat.



It's way cheaper than nearly any other cut of steak, and I have to cut their meat up for them anyway. I cut it before cooking which exposes much more surface area to the pan for the Maillard reaction to work its magic, so the taste is generally just as good.

Cook

Throw a couple of tablespoons of bacon fat in a hot pan.



Let it melt and get hot enough to start forming tiny little bubbles. That's how you know it's ready for the steak.



As soon as you put the steak in you should hear a strong sizzle and see bubbles all the way around.



Leave it like this for two minutes without lifting it to see how it's doing. You'll know it has formed a delicious brown crust when the steak moves around when you give the pan a quick shake. When it moves around freely, it's ready to turn over.

While the steak is cooking, season the asparagus. Put it on a baking sheet covered with foil. Drizzle with a couple of tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, and add kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper.



Toss everything in with your hands to make sure every stem is coated, then spread them out in a single layer.



Put the pan six inches under the broiler set to low. Once you've practiced this once or twice you can go on high. Don't try it the first time though -- greens under extreme heat are very touchy.

By the time the asparagus is in the oven, the steak should be ready to flip.



Already looks good enough to eat. Notice the steam. As Rachael Ray would say, that pan is screaming hot. It should only take about 30 seconds to form the crust on the other side and come loose from the pan. As soon as it does, put the whole pan in the bottom of the stove, well away from the broiler.

Now you've got just a couple of minutes to season the broccoli. The asparagus will cook very quickly. I wouldn't try doing two sides at the same time like this until you're pretty comfortable with all the techniques going on.

Put the broccoli in a mixing bowl that is quite a bit larger than you need to just hold all of it. Pour the olive oil in around the edge of the bowl so it runs down underneath, not directly onto the florets. You want the oil on the surface, not soaked in. Toss well to coat, and add salt and pepper.



Somewhere in the midst of all this going on, I found the time to get the diced stew meat into a hot non-stick pan with some bacon fat in it. I went with the non-stick so I could do a stir-fry.



Way back when I first showed the asparagus, remember I said to notice the white-ish leaves on the stems? Take a look at them now.



When you see the edges just start to turn brown it's time to turn everything over. Put it back under the broiler and keep a close eye on it. At this point you can go from "done" to "charcoal" in about 30 seconds.

During that minute or two to finish the asparagus, I gave the stew meat a quick toss.



Starting to look good. It's not getting as much crust yet as it would in the steel pan. That's good, though. As small as these pieces are, they wouldn't release well -- they would stick and burn.

Now everything is going to start finishing up all at the same time, so make sure you don't have any kids or cats underfoot.

First up is the asparagus. It's done when the leaves are dark brown.



You want to pull it just before things start to go black. This will take some practice to get right. It's definitely better to pull too soon than too late.

As soon as that's out the broccoli goes in. That will take less than a minute on each side. So like I said, don't try both sides together until you've practiced, and make sure no small creatures are around to trip you up.

Next up is the beef stir-fry.



Turn the broccoli as soon as you see the first sign of brown, and pull it as soon as you see brown on the other side. Broccoli wants to burn. I think it doesn't want to get eaten.



Now pull the steak from the bottom of the oven.



It smells even better than it looks. Plate up the steak with the asparagus and prepare to collect rave reviews.



Serve up the beer stir-fry and broccoli to the kids.

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The pan sauce

All that wonderful baked-on crust in the steak pan should have been more than enough flavor for a fantastic pan sauce. (Should have been? Yeah, a little foreshadowing there.) First step is to melt a couple of tablespoons of butter over low heat, swabbing it around to pick up plenty of the stuck bits.



Don't forget, like I did, that this pan has been in the oven and the handle is still very hot.



Once the butter is melted, add a couple of tablespoons of flour.



You need to stir this constantly over low heat. Much lower than what I had it set to. And don't go out on your back porch to dispose of the dead mouse the cat just brought home. The flour will burn by the time you get back.



It may not look that bad in the picture, but the dark brown area is already starting to get grainy and lumpy. I stirred and beat that sauce as hard as I could to try to rescue it. No such luck. I had to put the whole pan outside before the smell of burnt flour made it out of the kitchen and into the rest of the house.

Polish hot sausage hash browns

[NOTE: This recipe is appearing in the Project Foodie Lefotever Tuesdays #11.]

My wife let me sleep in Sunday morning while she made breakfast for the kids. Unfortunately, I've taught the girls to like real food, so instead of cereal they finished off all the eggs in the house. (I feel sorry in advance for the boys who will eventually date my daughters. Instead of Burger King, they'll have to take them to Hellreigel's.)

I opened the fridge to see what we had. Hmm, half a baked potato left over from last night's dinner.



Sweet onion and orange bell pepper from the salad. Okay, we've got hash browns. Now what to have with it? Oh, look at that, I've got that pack of hot polish style sausages. Sure, they're usually a lunch thing, served on a bun with mustard and raw onions. But it is a sausage isn't it?

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Directions

Start by dicing the potato. First slice a bit less than a half-inch thick.



Then cross-cut the slices ...



... and crossed the other way to make cubes.



Melt a little bacon fat in a pan over medium-high heat.



I'm using non-stick because the potato skin can really be a problem on stainless steel. Cast iron is a little heavy to do the quick flip technique, and I don't want to mash the potatoes up constantly mixing them with a spoon.

If I were starting from a raw potato instead of one that had already been baked, the potato would have been much firmer to start, and would have needed a good 10-15 minutes in the pan before adding anything else. For that, I might use the cast iron.

Once the fat is melted, add the potato and give it a toss to coat everything evenly.



Now take one thick slice of the onion and give that a rough chop, same size as the potato.



And add it on top of the potato.



Next up is the pepper. Cut a couple of rings from it.



Cut them in half and flip one side over so you've got a bunch of long-ish pieces all facing the same direction.



The other option is to cut the pepper lengthwise instead of doing crosswise rings. I prefer rings. Don't ask why, I just do. Give them a rough chop, same size as the onion and potato.



Add that to the pan.



Give it a toss. Then add salt and pepper.



By this time you can see the steam starting to come out from the potatoes.

While the veggies start to cook, take the sausage and quarter it lengthwise.



Then chop it to the same size as the potatoes.



By this time the veggies should have started to get a little browned around the edges.



Add the sausage to the pan, give it a quick toss to combine everything, and put a lid on.



Most polish sausage is already cooked and just needs to be heated through, so at this point we just want to get it hot quickly and get a little caramelization on the edges. Take the lid off every 30 seconds or so and give everything a toss. When the sausage looks good, sample one to see if it's heated through.

When the sausage is hot, transfer to a bowl and serve with Tobasco sauce.

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Bonus

While previewing this set of photos, I noticed one that would make a great wallpaper. The link below takes you to a 1023x769 version. (Yes, I know it's off by one pixel in each direction. It resized strangely. I'll update it when I get a spare minute.)

Fettucini Alfredo

Here's a tip for any single folks trying to impress a date: Invite them over for dinner and whip up a killer Alfredo sauce from scratch while they're sipping a glass of wine. Pull this one off and you won't have to be good at anything else for at least a week. The best part is it's probably one of the easiest things you can make.1

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Ingredients

1/2 lb butter (2 sticks)
2 cups grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 cup (or more) parsley

Directions

While your pasta is cooking, melt the butter over medium heat in a heavy-bottomed sauce pan. Don't use something thin and risk burning.



If the butter is completely melted before the pasta is done, turn the heat as low as it will go. You don't want to boil it.



The timing of the next couple of steps will make or break the dish. Leave the butter over low heat until the pasta is completely done then add the parsley.



Give it a quick stir and add the cheese. Turn the heat up to medium and stir quickly.



Only stir until the cheese is melted. It's okay if the butter isn't completely incorporated. It's actually better is it stays a little separate -- it makes it easier to stir the pasta in.



Pour half the Alfredo sauce into the pasta pot, return the pasta, then add the rest of the sauce and mix.



Add more grated Parmesan and parsley and serve.

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1. You should still practice at least once on your own first. Never cook something for the first time with guests watching.

How to render and store bacon fat

Not too long ago the average housewife would have been amazed at how wasteful we are, throwing out all that great bacon fat. After all it's a rendered fat, just like lard or tallow, suitable for cooking and use in recipes.

I followed the lead of someone who's done more research and started keeping mine. It's really easy to keep, and much better than vegetable oil for frying.

All you need is a bowl and a paper towel next time you make bacon.



Pour the fat into the bowl while it's still hot.



Lift the paper towel up by the corners and let the melted fat drain through. The hotter it is when you do this step, the faster it will drain.



The paper towel will catch all the solid bits, which is all we're really trying for.



The finished product will be anywhere from light yellow to nearly brown, depending on how crispy you made the bacon and how hot you had the pan.



I leave this to cool for a while before transferring to a plastic container, which I then keep in the fridge.



I could go with glass or stoneware for storage, but I'd worry about shattering it by pouring hot fat into a cold vessel. You can see in the photo above that I've got three or four rounds of bacon fat in there. We like bacon more than we like frying, so we end up with a surplus. If you know some recipes that call for bacon fat, let me know.

In colder areas you can probably store this in the pantry, though you'd have to have a secure lid and make sure the outside is spotlessly clean or you'll attract pests. In fact, just put it in the fridge. If you want it softer for a recipe take it out an hour or so ahead of time.

Unlike lard, this will add some flavor to whatever you're cooking. But everything's better with bacon.