Turkey Tetrazzini

Cooking always seems to be a test of my patience.  I want to turn up the heat and have my onions cooked already!  But this is counterproductive to the end goal.  You want tender and translucent not crispy and fried.  Things start to bubble too much, turn down the heat.  Don't think "nah, it'll be fine."  That's when things burn and your special birthday dinner home cooked meal turns into special birthday Chinese take-out.

I blame my lack of patience when cooking on my follow-through issues.  I have awesome ideas and always put in a lot of energy at the start.  It's the seeing it through to the end with that same level of enthusiasm that remains an elusive devil.  Looking around my living room, I count 5 unfinished craft projects.  Some of them are several years old...I am awful! 

With cooking though, you can't really pull the "oh I'm bored, let's move on to something else and then go back to this" excuse.  Probably because you'd end up starving or living on a lot of take-out. Though, maybe you live in an area with a lot of really amazing take-out, so I won't judge.  My downfall?  Less than a mile from my apartment and perfectly situated on the drive home is a grocery store with some of the best prepared foods I have ever eaten.  So, I remind myself, the food I am cooking is worth it.  And, between you and me, this turkey tetrazzini is most certainly worth the effort and the wait.

Turkey Tetrazzini

 

Ingredients:

 

3 c. stock - either chicken or turkey

4c. Cooked turkey

12 oz. sliced mushrooms (I did a combination of white and bella)

1 medium onion - chopped

1/2 c. flour

1 c. frozen chopped broccoli

1 c. frozen carrots

1 c. whole milk
1/2 c. sour cream

1/2 c. bread crumbs

1/2 c. parmesan cheese

1/2 c. butter

1 box farfalle noodles - cooked

2 tsp. nutmeg

 

Directions:

 

Cook the farfalle and set aside.  Preheat the oven to 350F.

 

In a 12 inch skillet, melt the butter and saute onions for about 7 minutes (remember the opening rant about tender and translucent).  Add the mushrooms and cook for an additional 10 minutes.  You want the mushrooms to cook down a bit and soften up nicely.

 Add the flour, mixing well to create a paste.  Add the milk then stock, mixing until the paste dissolves completely.  Mix in the sour cream and then simmer until thickened, approximately 15 minutes.  Add the nutmeg and salt and pepper to taste.  Give it a little test but don't be scared by the nutmeg.  When you add the meat and veggies, it all evens out.  Add the turkey and vegetables.

Broccoli and carrots may seem like a weird addition since peas seem to be everyone else's vegetable of choice.  But, the essential elements to a traditional Tetrazzini are poultry, mushrooms, pasta, and parmesan cheese.  Everything added to that is just bonus points and I selected some tasty and colorful veggies as mine.

Give the sauce another taste to make sure you are happy and add in the pasta.  Now, I used a 12 inch skillet and the sauce did fit.  However....I knew for certain that the pasta would create a massive overload situation, so I added the sauce to the pasta that I had put back into its original pot after I strained it through a colander. 

Mmmmmm, I'm hungry already, but wait!  It gets better.  After you get this all nice and mixed up, place it into a 9 x 13 casserole dish.  At this point, mix the bread crumbs and parmesan cheese together and then sprinkle over the casserole.

Into the oven this guy goes, for 30 minutes.  It's ready when the topping has browned and the sauce is bubbly.

The sauce is wonderfully creamy without being too heavy.  This is a great comfort food for a cold day.  The nutmeg provides a nice addition and works well with all the other flavors.  The mushrooms hold up really well and add a nice hearty feel to the entire dish.  Enjoy!



Turkey Pot Pie with a Savory Biscuit Crust

We've been down the pot pie road before.  However, there is never a single way to do things (most of the time), especially when it comes to cooking.  We all have our flavor preferences.  We like using certain vegetables over others.  Therefore, I don't feel bad bringing the pot pie train back into the station.  Plus, there is one significant change in this recipe. We are going to rock the biscuit crust!

I couldn't resist the bonus deals on turkeys at the holidays so a ridiculously large 12 pound turkey sat in my freezer until I was ready to go turkey crazy for several weeks.  Now, I do realize that 12 pounds is actually small for a turkey.  It only become ridiculous when you are the only one in the house who is going to eat those 12 pounds...because you are the only one in the house.  After a couple of decades of being on my own, you would assume I would have mastered the art of cooking for one but, it's way more fun to cook as if I were cooking for a tiny army of a tiny country.  And you can't complain because that means you get to read about pot pie and biscuits and probably other turkey leftover concoctions fairly soon.

I hadn't made a pot pie in a while and it is an excellent way to get rid of a lot of poultry in a single shot.  However, I was not keen on the idea of making pie crust...just wasn't feelin' it this time around.  That makes the top choice biscuits, but not just any biscuits would do.  I wanted the biscuits to be a bit savory with the hope that it would enhance the overall flavor of the pot pie.  Mission accomplished I think.  The thyme and rosemary drop biscuits provide a nice boost when combined with the filling's creamy sauce.

Turkey Pot Pie with Savory Biscuit Crust

Ingredients:

Biscuits:

2 c. all purpose flour

1 Tbsp baking powder

3 tsp. sugar

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 c. shortening

1 1/4 c. whole milk

1/2 Tbsp thyme

1/2 Tbsp rosemary

Filling:

2 white potatoes - peeled, diced, boiled and drained

1 medium onion - chopped

1 1/2 c. frozen mixed vegetables

1/2 c. celery -  chopped

1/3 c. butter

1/2 c. flour

1 c. whole milk

3 c. stock

4 c. turkey -  cooked and diced/chopped/shredded

Directions:

Preaheat oven to 425F.  Peel the potatoes and dice them up in to bite sized pieces.  Boil them until they are just soft enough to be pierced with a fork then drain and set aside.

Melt butter in a saute pan over medium heat cook onions until tender, about 5 minutes.  Add celery and cook for an additional 7 minutes.  

Add the flour and mix thoroughly.  This will create a rather gross looking brown paste.  Don't be scared.  It all works out in the end.

Add the stock and milk.  Simmer until thickened, about 10 to 15 minutes.

Once you are happy with the consistency give it a little taste test.  Add salt and pepper as you see fit then add the frozen vegetables, potatoes, and turkey.  Just as a small but important side note...add these new items very carefully.  I was using a 12" saute pan and everything fit but there was a harrowing moment where I was not sure it would.  Go slow to avoid a cream sauce typhoon.

Get this all solidly mixed together then transfer to a 9 x 13 casserole dish.  I went with my stoneware because she hadn't been experiencing the love recently and I decided it was time to rectify this egregious error.

Now to get crackin' on the biscuits.  Sift together flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt.  Then add the thyme and rosemary.  Using a pastry cutter, cut in the shortening.  Continue cutting in until everything gets nice and crumbly.  Mix in the milk until just moistened.  I'm using a bit more milk than would be considered traditional because I am making drop biscuits.  These will not be turned out and kneaded, rolled, and cut.  Instead, once mixed, you will drop them by the spoonful over the pot pie filling.

At no point will I claim I did this last step with any amount of precision.  I took a big spoon and dropped randomly sized dollops of dough as I saw fit.  When you are ready, bake in the oven for approximately 45 minutes,  until the biscuits are golden brown.

These are one of the days where I wish scratch and sniff photography was a thing.  Sooooo good!

The rosemary comes out the most in the biscuits and the creamy pot pie filling is just comfort on a fork.

The Great Greek Chicken Escapade

Oddly enough, while I was in high school, I excelled at English and found myself in the AP English class my senior year.  At one point we were doing a Greek mythology section and to cap it we were all assigned a food dish and Greek god/goddess.  We were to make our dishes, dress up, and attend an end-of-section feast at our teacher's house.  My dish was Greek Turkey.  I followed the original recipe to the letter but have since adjusted it to my own taste.  Don't ask for the original recipe because this was *cough* 17 *cough* years ago in the dark ages of AOL and Prodigy dial-up connections.  My teacher just handed me a sheet of paper with the recipe on it.  What became of it is anyone's guess.  What I can tell you is that whether you use my recipe or go to Google or Pintrest for other versions, it will make your entire house smell like food nirvana.

For today's kitchen adventure however, we start with a substitution.  We are doing Greek Chicken.  I am a single lady and as much as I enjoy cooking for an army, the average turkey is a bit much, so a smaller chicken it is.

Greek Turkey Chicken

 

Ingredients:

 

1 oven - set to 350F

1 roasting pan

1 whole chicken - 8 - 10 labs
3 lemons (plus 1 optional squirt of lemon juice concentrate)

6 cloves garlic

2 Tbsp oregano

1 stick butter

 

Preheat oven to 350F.

 

Wash bird inside and out, then place in roasting pan.

 

Put 1 Tbsp of oregano and 4 whole garlic cloves inside the bird.

Cut lemons in half.  Now, here you have a choice - be neat and juice them into a bowl or do what I do.  Squeeze out juice from lemons onto bird and dump 1 Tbsp of oregano onto it as well.  Rub down the bird.  Take 2 of the used halves and place inside the bird.

Take the other 4 halves and place 1 into each corner of the roasting pan.

Place the bird in the oven.

On stove top melt butter, add 2 cloves of garlic - crushed, and the optional lemon squirt.  This is used for basting.

My preferred basting schedule is as follows:

• After first 30 minutes - baste with butter mixture
• Then, baste every 15 minutes for a total of 1 hour - baste with butter mixture
• Then, baste every 30 minutes until bird is done - baste with own juices.

If you are heavy handed with the basting brush and run out of butter before my suggested end time, don't worry about it.  By the time you run out, there should be plenty of buttery lemony goodness in the roasting pan to use.

I absolutely adore this recipe.  For me, it is simple and easy as long as you have several hours set aside for cooking.  It smells amazing and because the primary flavorings are lemon and oregano, the turkey chicken has a light fresh taste.

If you are wondering about sides, I am a huge fan of the sweet potato.  I would also suggest roasted fingerling potatoes.  Fingerlings roast up pretty quick and can therefore be done while the bird rests.  For greens, whatever is in season is always the most flavorful, but otherwise some salted green beans can add some nice crunch to the meal.  I went with salad on this particular occasion.