- roast turkey
- garlic herb stuffing
- couscous
- swiss chard with butter and salt
- herb sourdough bread
- trifle
It’s starting to get warm; it’s just at that point where we can open the windows, but we don’t need the air conditioners. In other words, it’s the perfect time to roast a turkey.
We took the roast turkey and garlic herb stuffing recipe from one of our new cookbooks: Garlic, Garlic, Garlic (it’s on page 276). The stuffing was absolutely magnificent – rich, creamy, amazing. (It’s a “custard stuffing” and uses 14 eggs!) I’d recommend putting home-made bread through a food-processor and letting it dry out a bit rather than using store-bought bread crumbs. Also, you might need a bit more than the 5 cups the recipe calls for.
The gravy was okay, but not great. I’d instead recommend using a gravy recipe from somewhere else. (Next time, we’ll probably use the one from our glazed turkey recipe.)
One of our side dishes was a couscous recipe from Cooking Light Five-Star Recipes – one of our favorite healthy cookbooks (page 101). We left out anything scallion or onion-like, and tripled the amount of tomato. We also put in an extra tablespoon of currants. This recipe makes a relatively small amount, so if you have more than about 4 people I’d recommend doubling it.
One of our other side dishes was Swiss chard. It’s very easy to fix. Buy about two bunches of it. (It may look like a lot, but it’ll cook down to almost nothing.) Rip the leaves off of the stalks and into small pieces. Then rinse them very well. Put them into simmering water. Bring it back up to a simmer, and cook for ten minutes. Drain the chard. Put a few pats of butter on it, and toss lightly until they melt.Then add salt to taste, a little bit at a time, until it tastes good.
Then there was the herb sourdough bread. This came out of our favorite sourdough book: “World Sourdoughs from Antiquity” by Ed Wood. The recipe makes two loaves. Make sure to have salted butter or some kind of spread around. (We like Smart Balance – the only healthy spread we’ve found that tastes like butter.)
Lest you think from the above that we’re health nuts (oh, wait, but there are those 14 eggs in the stuffing!), it’s time to move on to dessert. We made a trifle. It’s supposed to use ladyfingers soaked in a rum syrup, but if you can’t find ladyfingers, Nilla Wafers will do just fine. Then you layer the ladyfingers with various other wonderful fruitly things (involving bananas, lemon curd, and mashed strawberries). By the way – you can pulse the strawberries in the food processor; it’s easier than mashing them with a fork. This comes from our favorite Fruit Cookbook (page 401).
The trifle needs to set for a few hours, but you can leave it in the refrigerator while you eat dinner, and take it out halfway through the session.
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