A Heritage Thanksgiving

The first year I helped our farmer friend Mike slaughter his turkeys I came home with a 40-pound bird as my reward. It barely fit in our oven and my wife has been on a tear ever since trying to reduce the size of our Thanksgiving gobbler.


This year, we implored Mike to find us a smaller bird and he replied that he could get us something closer to 12 or 14 pounds from a friend who was raising heritage breeds. But it would cost us an extra dollar a pound, he warned. We jumped at the chance.


So our turkey this year was a 12.4-pound bronze turkey. You'll notice that these heritage birds are slightly darker, the legs a little longer, the breasts a little slimmer. I liked the look of it and cooked it in the usual manner:


About four hours before the bird is supposed to go in the oven, clean it up and salt the cavity and the outside with coarse salt. Let it sit on the kitchen counter and come up to room temperature. Just before placing it in a 450-degree oven, brush it all over with extra-virgin olive oil and stuff the cavity with onion, garlic, carrots, celery, parsley and thyme. Tie the legs together but otherwise leave the cavity open.


Place the bird on a rack inside a big roasting pan along with a handful of fresh sage and a hand full of rosemary sprigs. Place the bird in the oven for 1/2 hour to brown in the high heat. Then lower the heat to 350, remove bird and flip it over in the rack. Place it back in the oven and roast another 1/2 hour, then flip it again. Continue this process for two hours. The turkey may well be done (if you have a very heavy bird, this could take up to 3 1/2 hours. But I have never had a turkey take longer than 3 1/2 hours to roast using this method.)


To test for doneness, stick an instant-read thermometer deep into the thickest part of the thigh or the wing joint, being careful to stay away from the bone. I had to use the wing joint because the thigh on the heritage turkey wasn't thick enough. It's done when it reaches 160, or a few degrees less. Place the turkey in its rack on the kitchen counter to "coast" while you make your gravy.


For the gravy, I will have been simmering all morning the turkey neck and the gizzards (except liver) in a pot with water and the usual aromatics--onion, celery, carrot, parsley, thyme. I eat the neck with a little salt. Then I put the roasting pan on the stove top and turn the heat up to moderately high. I brown the bits at the bottom of the pan (there's much less juice and fat with a heritage turkey), then pour a couple of ladles of the giblet broth, stir everything around. Turn off the heat.



Now melt about six tablespoons butter (or turkey fat) in a large sauce pan, add six tablespoons flour and make a roux, stirring frequently over moderate heat. The flour needs to cook for just a few minutes. Now you can pour in the browning juices from the roasting pan, whisking as the gravy quickly thickens, and adding giblet broth, one ladle-full at a time, whisking and whisking, until the gravy is just the thickness you like. Remember it will get even thicker after you've taken it off the stove, so I usually shoot for something a little thinner than what I would put on the table.


Finish the gravy with a splash of heavy cream, maybe some Madeira. I didn't have Madeira this year and my wife suggested I use Calvados, the French apple brandy, instead, since we were having apple tarte Tatin for dessert. That worked just fine. Season with salt and pepper to taste.


There were 13 of us for Thanksgiving dinner at my sister's new digs in McLean Virginia, including my in-laws and sister-in-law from California with her friend from India. Everyone swooned over the turkey. The heritage bird was by far the moistest, most flavorful thing we had ever tasted. It didn't need any of that brining or deep-fat frying that the food sections and magazines are all out of breath over this time of year.


Say goodbye to the Butterball. I do believe you could cook a heritage turkey almost any old way and it would still be the most delicious thing you've ever experienced.

We're In Martha Stewart Living

This month I play a small role in the never-ending effort to "solve" Thanksgiving. In Magazine Land, that would entail the issue of how to prepare a turkey correctly sized for your particular gathering.

I have to admit, this assignment almost stumped me. Of course, Martha had already done all the heavy lifting, coming up with three different turkey recipes alligned with three very different sized gatherings.

There's a dry-brined whole turkey for 14, for instance, then a wee turkey breast roasted with root vegetables to serve six. By far the most elaborate preparation is a boneless turkey breast stuffed with pecans and sausage, rolled in the manner of a French roulade and roasted in cheese cloth. All you have to do is find a butcher to sell you a boneless breast. Oh, right. A butcher.

You'll notice that two of these Thanksgiving solutions involve turkey white meat. Unless its stuffed between two slices of bread with mayo and cranberry sauce, or smothered in gravy or Bechamel sauce, I don't even really like white meat. If you like to spend idle hours drooling over gorgeous food photos, though, this piece is for you.

Otherwise, my best advice for Thanksgiving is to find a local farmer who will sell you a pasture-raised turkey of almost any kind. Cook it any way you like. You are almost guaranteed to have the best turkey you ever tasted.

We're In Edible Chesapeake!

On the right-hand side of this page, you'll see a picture of a man in a strange plastic suit using a machine to pluck a turkey. That's our farmer friend Mike Klein. I've lost count of how many times I've visited his small truck farm in Brandywine, Maryland, shortly before Thanksgiving to help him round up and butcher his flock of turkeys.

My first year as a volunteer, Mike had around 80 turkeys and he'd ordered the chicks especially early in the season. That gave the birds a few extra weeks to grow. My reward for helping that weekend was a 42-pound bird that just barely fit into our oven and earned me a permanent Thanksgiving black mark where my spouse is concerned.

Butchering turkeys puts you in close contact with the food destined for your table. We chase them down inside their pen, then hang them up and slit their throats so they can bleed out. They get a brief dunk in scalding water, then a turn on the plucking machine before we gut them, chill them down and package them for transport to Mike's customer's.

I wrote up the experience for this fall issue of Edible Chesapeake magazine, now on news stands. Next to my piece is one by editor Renee Catacalos about taste-testing heritage turkey breeds. Unlike Renee, apparently, I like gamey flavors. That 42-pound bird--a broad-breasted bronze--was one of the best I've ever eaten.

People have come up with all kinds of ingenious methods for cooking turkeys and testing for doneness. But here's a curious factoid: no matter what size the bird (unstuffed), they all take 3 1/2 hours to cook. I'm not sure why that is, but that's my experience. Maybe it's because our turkeys are always bigger than 20 pounds. Just another of those kitchen mysteries we'll probably never solve.

Leftover Madness

Now that Thanksgiving is behind us, it's time to dig out from all the leftover food.

There were a couple of big pots of turkey stock in the cold room that needed to be broken down into smaller containers, labeled and frozen. One down, one to go.

On Sunday, friends agreed to help out by actually eating some of the leftovers in the form of dinner--open-faced turkey sandwiches with cranberry relish and gravy on sweet potato bread. (More about that later).

Part of my reward for helping our friend Mike butcher his turkeys was a stewing hen he had in his freezer. I originally thought I'd make it the center of a coq au vin, but then used the dark meat in our paella. Yesterday I turned the rest of the bird into soup and, at daughter's request, that was last night's dinner, with carrots, peas and linguine noodles.

Most of the weekend was spent making client meals. The leftover meat from our 31-pound turkey was begging to be included. Presto-changeo, turkey-a-la-king. The sauce was especially delicious with the addition of our very potent turkey stock. Whole Foods had run out of puff pastry (I can't even count the number of times that happened), so along with a 4-cup container of turkey-a-la-king, I sent the client two thick slices of toasted country bread. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.

Still, I have several pound of turkey meat to deal with. Into the freezer, perhaps? Or will inspiration strike somewhere where we least expect it?

Yesterday I was finally able to turn my attention to the bowl of green tomatoes I'd picked during the big garden cleanup a week ago. I'd stashed them in the cold room, but some were not so green anymore. The morning started with the assemblage of a big pot of the green tomato and apple chutney I wrote about earlier. A very heady aroma fills the kitchen when all those tomatoes and apples, brown sugar and cider vinegar, ginger and cinnamon, get to boiling on the stove top.

While the chutney bubbled away and reduced down to its delicious chunkiness, a client dinner for Wednesday demanded that I shop for and prepare a Jewish pot roast, or chollent. (I'll write about that tomorrow). So the chutney, one day later, is still in its pot on the stove, waiting to be reheated and canned. And let me count the other chores awaiting: A pot of turkey stock to freeze, pounds of turkey meat to dispose of, sundry leftover sidedishes that haven't even been completely inventoried yet...

Will it ever end?

Dark Days: Meal 5

Oh, it was quite the feast, this Thanksgiving, with the 31-pound bird we butchered at our farmer friend Mike Klein's farm at the center of it all. Brother-in-law Tom, the oenophile, outdid himself, with bottles of champagne to drink with hors d'oeuvres, a beautiful Sancerre and an audacious German auslese Riesling, Pinot and even a port for dessert. Father-in-law Dave, meanwhile, came armed with a lively Zinfandel.


My wife had started cooking a day ahead. Spiced pecans for starters, a Tarte Tatin and pumpkin creme brulee for dessert. (She's so smart: She even had the vanilla ice cream for the tarte scooped and ready to serve in the freezer.) She also made a classic stuffing, baked on the side, and her famous macaroni and cheese. Sister Linda brought a beautifully composed cranberry relish with candied ginger as well as ginger-spice cookies for the dessert segment. Mother-in-law Susan arrived with two gorgeous dishes of the family's traditional, cheesy onion casserole. Apparently she thought we'd invited an army for dinner.


Specifically local: we changed our original menu according to what we had grown in the garden. For hors d'oeuvres we displayed radishes and carrots along with bowls of pickled green tomatoes and pickled beets. Turns out it's not just me who's crazy for the pickled tomatoes. They disappeared in a flash. My wife had a genius idea for serving soup in shot glasses. I made soup from the Longue de Nice squash we received last week in our farm subscription box (plus maple syrup, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, etc.) and garnished it with roasted pumpkin seeds.


For the buffet accompanying our magnificent double-breasted bronze turkey I harvested all of the Lima beans that were still hanging on the vines here in our edible landscape in the District of Columbia. These I soaked the day before; they plumped up beautifully. I turned them into our faux-cassoulet, a baked casserole with garlic, onion, sage and bread crumbs. We have so much Swiss chard growing in the garden and it loves this time of year. I gathered the stalks (and leaves) from two plants and sauteed these with red onion and pomegranate molasses, then added some of the beets that are plumping up nicely. We have so many potatoes still in the ground. These were cooked simply and mashed the old-fashioned way, with butter and cream. The bread for the stuffing was baked at the local Whole Foods. And my wife, who's been on quite a baking tear or her own lately, made the most deletable and handsome dinner rolls infused with sweet potatoes from our CSA subscription.


To juice it all up, there were two kinds of gravies: one with giblets, the other without.

We followed the buffet with a salad of the many different lettuces that are so happy in our garden at the moment. We had planned to make a much bigger production of the salad with sliced pears and nuts, but in the end we just tossed the greens with a simple honey-mustard vinaigrette. I had a big plateful and could easily have taken seconds.


We've concluded that while 31 pounds is still a bit large for the turkey, we would pay almost anything for the quality. Everyone at the table remarked on the succulence of the meat, the flavor of this pasture-raised bird. Over the years, we've also noticed that beyond a certain weight, turkeys take about three hours to cook no matter how much they weigh. Those instructions in the classic cookbooks where it says to calculate 15 minutes per pound? Don't believe it.


There are several ways to judge turkey doneness. The meat and skin will be shrinking away from the ends of the drum sticks. The legs and wings will allow some movement in the joints. And the best measure: an instant-read thermometer will register about 165 degrees in the deepest part of the thigh.


My method of cooking the bird is to brush it all over with extra-virgin olive oil (my grandmother used butter) and season liberally with coarse salt and black pepper, inside the cavity as well. I stuffed the bird with big handfuls of sage and rosemary gathered from the garden, along with two small heads of garlic cut in half, half an onion, and half an orange cut into two pieces. I did not truss the bird at all, but did fold the wings back so the tips were not exposed.


Place the turkey breast-side-up in a rack inside a roasting pan and bake 1/2-hour at 425 degrees to start the browning process. Then lower the oven temperature to 325 and cook with the breast up another hour. Remove the bird from the oven and turn it upside down. (I used tea towels to turn the hot bird. Balled-up newspaper also works.) We laid some aluminum foil on the rack at this point so that the ribs of the rack did not dig into and cling to the exposed breast. Place the bird back in the oven and continue roasting another 1 1/2 hours, or until it is done.


The timing might be very different for a smaller turkey. I don't think we've ever had one less than 25 pounds. But turning the bird seems to help retain the juices and distribute them so that the breast meat isn't all dried out. It certainly results in a uniformly brown bird. Whether this would have the same good results with a factory-raised turkey is another question. Personally, I'm not interested enough in eating a factory-raised turkey to find out.


My grandmother used to get up at the crack of dawn to begin preparing the Thanksgiving meal. We awoke to the smell of onions and parsley being sauteed for the stuffing. She was also quite particular about covering the breast with a cheese cloth that she drenched in butter. And she would continually baste the bird throughout the roasting. We did none of these (our turkey covered the entire roasting pan. There was no way to get at the pan juices to baste it with). Yet our turkey came out browned to a stunning, light mahogany color all over. The meat could not have been more perfectly cooked--it was so moist and flavorful.


Truly, with family and friends gathered 'round, with great food--much of it grown ourselves--and fine spirits, it was a meal to be thankful for.

Why We Give Thanks...

For being at the top of the food chain...

For the good earth...

For friends...

For Mother Nature...

For music...


For dance...


For laughter...

For a place to grow...

For good things to eat...

For family.