Everybody loves turkey breast for their turkey sandwiches but the more flavorful meat comes from the dark meat found in turkey thighs and legs. These, by the way, are much less expensive than the breasts. Mom and dad have a great way of preparing braised turkey legs, perfect for a cold winter day.
Have you ever seen a ling cod? They are almost primeval looking – huge, gaping mouths with sharp teeth. As with any fish, the most important factor for how good it tastes is its freshness. I picked up this fillet at Whole Foods (they usually have a good selection of fresh fish) where they told me that the ling cod had just come in that morning. With the lemon-garlic butter sauce it was divine.
Are you familiar with Cook’s Illustrated? It’s a magazine and a website from the same people who create the PBS show America’s Test Kitchen. It’s the only cooking show we watch with any regularity, and we read each issue of the magazine from cover to cover. What I love about the magazine is that they go into great deal of detail about the how’s and why’s of various cooking methods; I always learn something new. (What I don’t love about the magazine is that they tend to overcomplicate things, just for that n-th degree of perfection.)
This apple cranberry stuffed pork roast recipe is based on a recipe from Cook’s Illustrated (Sept 07). We absolutely loved it; I’ve been eating the leftovers for days. The filling is essentially a sweet sour chutney, made with brown sugar, vinegar, dried apples and cranberries. Though pretty much any chutney would work in this recipe. The roast is “double butterflied”, filling applied, meat rolled up and roasted. The acidity of the chutney-ish filling tenderizes the pork roast from the inside. The original recipe calls for grilling the roast with soaked wood chips but you can easily make this roast in the oven. The recipe also uses dried apples, which can be a little hard to find. I think next time we may try making this with peeled, diced, fresh apples.
We have a 3 ft by 6 ft patch of arugula growing in our garden and for the last two months I’ve been looking for ways to make use of it. By the way, arugula (a.k.a. rocket) grows like a weed and re-seeds itself every year. The bugs and snails don’t seem to touch it (they go for the lettuce instead). Clotilde of Chocolate and Zucchini is always a great source of inspiration and I remembered her intriguing recipe for Pesto de Roquette. I had heard that walnuts are good in pesto so I tried making the arugula pesto both ways – one with pine nuts and one with walnuts. I think the arugula pesto with walnuts is better. The strong, meaty flavor of the walnuts balances out the astringency of the arugula, a good blend of flavors. I’ve made pesto both with mortar and pestle and with a food processor. The food processor method is definitely easier but the mortar method produces larger pieces of the arugula (it could be that my mortar is too small for this task).
I prefer a mild garlic flavor that you can achieve by using roasted garlic. The 1/2 raw garlic clove is added for a little kicker. The first time I made this pesto it was with only raw garlic and it was a little overwhelmingly garlicy. Using roasted garlic is a great way to still have the garlic flavor but without the intensity.