Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/218145
2B
Daily News – Wednesday, November 27, 2013
County Fare
&
fresh
tasty
Is a vegetarian Thanksgiving easier? Jell-O molds for your
Thanksgiving spread
BY DEB LINDSEY
The Washington Post
A funny thing happens
when you host a vegetarian
Thanksgiving: The whole
shebang gets a heck of a lot
easier.
Consider all the questions you no longer have to
answer: Did I order the
turkey in time? Is it fresh, or
frozen? If frozen, do I have
time to thaw it? Do I have
space? Should I brine? Wet
or dry? Do I have a bag or
bucket big enough? Space
in the fridge?
And that's before the
oven even gets preheated.
I've long said that vegetarianism too often focuses
on the absence of the meat
rather than the presence of
the vegetables, that the produce itself gets short shrift
when the dishes are defined
that way. (Hence, I wish we
had a day of the week that
starts with the letter V so we
could have Vegetable Vdays rather than Meatless
Mondays.)
Still, I have to admit that
the best thing about cooking
my first all-vegetarian
Thanksgiving last year
might have been the fact
that there was so much
more room — in the oven,
on the table, on the to-do list
and, finally, in our stomachs
— because we had declared
the whole event to be fowlfree. In its place, thankfully,
were all the vegetables we
wanted to celebrate.
Thanksgiving is my
favorite holiday for cooking
because its roots, so to
speak, are those of a harvest
festival, which is one of the
reasons I've loved spending
it for the past 10 years or so
at my sister and brother-inlaw's Maine homestead.
Last year, when I participated so intensively in the
planting, manure-shoveling,
weeding and bug-killing
that successful small-scale
organic vegetable growing
requires, the harvest celebration was all the sweeter.
As always, we did most
of the cooking in the woodfired brick bread oven that
my brother-in-law, Peter,
built several years ago. It's a
Washington Post
Polenta Stuffed With Squash and Mushrooms photographed in Washington, DC.
thing of beauty, but it
requires planning — and
negotiation. One holiday
tradition is the annual
when-are-you-going-tofire-up-the-oven-so-wehave-manageable-heatwhen-we-want-it discussion between Peter and my
sister, Rebekah. The first
year I cooked Thanksgiving
dinner there, we roasted a
20-pound turkey so quickly
(in what I think must have
been around 800-degree
heat) that I had to tent it
with foil after a mere 20
minutes because it was
already so browned. Another 20, and the thing was
pretty much done.
Sometimes it's the opposite problem. Last year, the
afternoon before the holiday, Peter called up to my
third-floor bedroom with
the notification I had
requested: that the oven was
at 500 degrees. I had
planned to put several pies
in shortly thereafter, but I
foolishly waited another
hour, and then by the time
the crusts were defrosted
and the fillings put together,
the oven temperature was in
the low 300s — and falling
fast. We built another fire,
let it burn out and swabbed
down the interior, and then
the temperature was at . . .
600. Such is the trade-off
when cooking with fire.
Nonetheless, without a
turkey to worry about, we
had time to wait for the temperature to fall; then we put
in the pies, including one
I've made for more years
than I can count, a cranberry-apricot number based on
a recipe in the "Silver Palate
Good Times Cookbook" of
the early 1980s. I also had
time for a major pie experiment: We had grown sweet
potatoes, but rather than boil
and puree them into a custard, I took inspiration from
an open-faced apple pie by
Rose Levy Beranbaum and
thinly sliced the sweet potatoes, arranging them in the
crust like so many petals. I
brushed on a mixture of butter, brown sugar and Persian
spices and put it in to bake.
It was a bit of a mystery;
when the crust was
browned and the sweet
potatoes were soft, I pulled
it from the oven, but the
slices seemed to be swimming in the pooling butter.
Would this be pleasant
enough to eat?
As it cooled, I had my
answer: The slices soaked
up the butter mixture, puffing and firming just enough.
And when we tasted it, the
combination of sweet potatoes, just a touch of sugar
and the haunting spices
was, if I do say so myself, a
triumph.
And then, of course,
there were the savory vegetables. On Thanksgiving
Day, we grated freshly harvested beets and carrots into
a raw salad, tossed Brussels
sprouts in tamari for roasting and ran pans of freshly
foraged oyster mushrooms,
cubes of butternut squash
and freshly dug sunchokes
and celery root through the
wood oven. The Brussels
sprouts stood on their own,
the sunchokes and celery
root went into a pureed
soup. The mushrooms and
squash
were
stuffed
between layers of polenta
for a casserole.
I baked the latter in a
huge Spanish cazuela, a
round clay baking dish that
evenly distributes and maintains heat — and gives
whatever's in it a rustic look
impressive enough to warrant centerpiece status.
Especially when it's topped
with tomato sauce and
cheese, bubbling and
browned.
When everybody came
together, we knew just what
we were thankful for: a year
of hands-in-the-dirt work
that had culminated in a harvest we could be proud of
— vegetables that didn't
require 20 pounds of poultry around which to gather.
They could stand on their
own, and they did.
Before the anticipation of who would get the choicest,
crispiest piece of turkey skin or the angst over whether you
really could handle a second piece of pie, there was one suspenseful moment around the Thanksgiving tables of our
youth: Would the Jell-O come out of the mold intact?
Two households, two eras, but one very American tradition. We each grew up with mothers who proudly placed the
glistening, jiggly stuff on the holiday table.
Reminiscences about those creations during a staff meeting a few months ago prompted a little competition. Egged
on by our Food section colleagues, we decided to engage in
a friendly Jell-O showdown. (We will pause for your Jell-O
wrestling joke and pretend that you are the first one to make
it.)
There would be no winner, just full stomachs, though that
didn't prevent Becky from not-so-subtly polling the tasters to
see whether hers was their favorite.
On the recipe card and on the plate, these two creations
differ substantially.
Becky's mold, whose recipe originated in a community
cookbook owned by her grandmother, starts with two cans
of cranberry sauce — the ridges of which are sadly mashed
out in the process of making the mold — and strawberry JellO. Mix-ins include chopped apple and walnuts. Her mom
makes it with crushed pineapple. But after Becky bought
rings instead one year and learned that her husband's uncle
was not a pineapple fan at all, out it went for good.
For Jane's recipe, provenance unknown, a box of lemon
Jell-O is dissolved into apple cider, turning the liquid a nice
harvest gold. Grated apple (peel included) and diced celery
create festive red and green specks. Jane's Midwestern mom,
taxed with making holiday dinners for her family of six plus
guests, often chilled the stuff in a ring mold. But sometimes,
she simply let it jell in a baking pan, then carved out squares
and set them on salad plates atop an iceberg lettuce leaf,
adorned with a dollop of mayonnaise.
Samples of each mold were exchanged. The result: Let's
just say a mix of politeness and family pride prompted both
our unwillingness to savage the competition and our personal preference for our own gelatin. It was a bitter disappointment to our co-workers, some of whom clearly had been
angling for a smackdown all along. We took the high road.
Mostly. There were just a few little things. Becky said she
found the celery bits in Jane's Jell-O off-putting. Jane detected a tinny flavor in Becky's that she attributed to the canned
— canned! — cranberries.
Quickly regaining graciousness, Becky conceded she'd
been contemplating a conversion to from-scratch cranberry
sauce. And Jane allowed as how Becky's walnuts had been
such a tasty touch, she might consider adding them to her
family recipe.
Maybe those are tweaks for next year. Or never. Some traditions are best left largely intact — just like a perfectly
turned-out Jell-O mold.
Thanksgiving with Smashburger owner Tom Ryan
A week from now,
Smashburger-founder Tom
Ryan will be elbow-deep in
turkey necks.
It takes him two days to
make the gravy that he will
ladle on the turkey, the potatoes, the stuffing and sides.
And before he roasts the
turkey and uses stock to
deglaze the roasting pan and
scrape up the drippings,
before he makes a roux to
thicken the sauce, he deals
with necks, which he finds
at Denver butcher shops,
including the meat departments at King Soopers
stores.
At least one day before
his High Holiday, Ryan
dusts the necks with poultry
seasoning, salt and pepper,
cooks them until they are as
dark as chocolate, plops
them in a pot of boiling
stock and keeps them there
for hours, until the meat
turns tender. He calls necks
the "oxtails of the poultry
world," for their ability to
add deep flavor to dishes.
By the time people begin
piling their plates on the big
day, the Ryan household is
nearly swimming in gravy
— much more than needed
for the feast.
"We deliver gravy as
gifts," said Ryan on a recent
Saturday, as he tore meat
from necks, to be used in the
gravy and stuffing. "It's coveted."
I tasted the stuff, and let
me tell you — it's so good, I
think he should open a
restaurant called Gravy
Train; everything gets shel-
lacked with the turkey elixir.
Don't think he won't
consider it. In addition to the
fast-growing Smashburger