4645

I don’t want to eat Christmas dinner with anybody who would turn down your biryani.

4646

I love turkey. And I love the challenge of cooking it, even if I only get to do it once a year. The taste it yields when making tetrazzini far outpaces roast chicken, in my estimation.

But I love your brisket idea a lot. I wish I had someone who did that for Thanksgiving too.

What a shock that you, of all people, is using this is a chance to once again denigrate dark meat! I name you Agendapenblade!

-xtien

4647

I actually laughed out loud here in the office. That’s awesome, @xtien

4648

There’s a bbq chain in Jacksonville, FL called Bono’s. I used to get their BBQ turkey pretty regularly.

4649

I will eat turkey to be polite when I am at a gathering that is not my family gathering. I do this by drowning it in mash potatoes and stuffing. I don’t care how moist it is or even when I can visibly see the white meat is oozing clear juices, it always tastes dry and bland to me. At my family gathering, they almost always have a second option just for me. When I prepare the feast, I have three times now, I have a second protein and the dry bird some of my family insists on having.

4650

I like turkey and for me its just not Thanksgiving without it. Yes, it’s partly tradition but so what. As this thread has proven, there are cooking traditions well worth preserving. Of course, most of my family knows how to cook a turkey without destroying it, so that helps. We tend to eat mostly the dark meat on Thanksgiving and save as much of the light meat as possible for another tradition… turkey sandwiches! Both hot and cold. Cold turkey breast cuts with mayonnaise, lettuce, cheddar and thick cut bacon on a sourdough roll. Awesome. Hot, open faced, smothered in gravy and dressing. Sublime! All you turkey deniers are fools!

4651

A properly cooked turkey that is moist is something I enjoy. And hot turkey sandwiches for leftovers is yummy!

4652

Just a quick note here. Yesterday’s charred pork tenderloin became tonight’s trimmed and chopped pork loin tacos.

4653

I love me some turkey, but it’s rarely worth the effort of cooking the damned thing.

I tend to prefer drier bird flesh though.

4654

Are you kidding me? I’ve made chickens that took less than 10 mins to prep and get into the oven. And they were awesome. Turkey is pretty darn similar. What the heck are you doing that is so much effort???

4655

Chickens have a lot less mass and prep work than turkeys.

Turkey is pretty much always frozen, so you get to wait for that, then you play around with it forever, then it takes forever to cook. Or I could just get some unfrozen chicken and be eating in short order.

And I don’t cook turkeys, because I don’t remotely have a pan that could even hold one, nor the counter space to prep one. I’ve watched enough people do it that I never want to though.

4656

Be advised most places have fresh turkeys, especially around Thansgiving.

4657

I mean, I thaw stuff a lot, but I can understand the issue with turkey cooking. They are big, cooking them requires space. For some reason everyone wants a gigantic turkey, so most of the ones you can buy in the store are enough to feed a small army, and require an oven and possibly refrigerator space equivalency. If you’re lucky, you can land a turkey breast only, which tends to work well if you don’t need to feed so many people. The one or two times a year when I (might) cook a whole turkey are days full of lots of prep, for what ends up as 75% leftovers.

Chicken roasters though I go through a lot. The time/space/effort/taste all meet up in this perfect balance.

4658

Last night!

Chicken Tikka Saag (modeled after said dish at Boston U’s India Quality):


The chicken tikka itself was chicken breast marinated about 6 hours in Greek yogurt, lime juice, ginger-garlic paste, salt, pepper, cumin, coriander, turmeric, red chili, and lots of paprika, then broiled in a 550F oven for about 8-10m till just starting to char. The bamboo skewers–water soaked beforehand, mind!–burning up a little lends a nice, almost-barbeque-esque smokiness to the meat, too!

The main saag itself was a pretty standard onion/garlic/ginger/tomato base with the same spice assortment as above (albeit in different percentages). I added about half my spinach to the mix and pureed it down, then added in the other half (it was chopped frozen, so still pretty small bits) along with some yogurt, heavy cream, cilantro, and garam masala.

Tastes lovely, and the frozen garlic naan I accepted as good enough was, in fact, good enough when drizzled with ghee :)

4660

This thread should really have this header

Surgeons General Warning: Contact with @ArmandoPenblade is bad for your cholesterol and waist line.

4661

Also …

Laundry Warning: pictures posted here are known to cause drool stains on your shirt.

4662

Okay look dude this recipe includes chicken breast and like 2lbs of spinach!

. . . also 1 tbsp of oil in the curry, plus 1/3 cup of cream, 1/4 cup of full fat Greek yogurt, and like half a cup more of the yogurt in the chicken’s marinade. . .

. . . but it’s healthy, dammit!

4663

Lol, I initially only saw the first picture and was like “where’s the spinach?”

4664

4665

Pizza continues to be a popular subject in the family kitchen. We’ve tried a few different recipes for dough, and have one we like for the oven, but it still definitely has a character distinct from pizzeria pizza.

Now that spring has finally arrived in western PA, though, we can get closer, with pizza on the grill. I don’t know if it’s this dough recipe, or if it’s just that a grill more closely approaches a commercial pizza oven, but this is consistently the best pizza I’m able to make. Recipe courtesy a local mommy blogger.

Grill Pizza
2 tsp (or 1 packet) active dry yeast
1.25 cups warm water
4.25 cups flour
2 tsp salt
0.25 cup olive oil

Stir yeast into water. Let sit for 15 minutes.

Mix the flour and salt together. Either in a mixer with a dough hook, or in a large bowl, slowly add water and oil in turns. Knead (with dough hook or on a floured surface) until smooth, adding flour by tablespoons if it feels slimy, or water by tablespoons if it feels gritty. It ought to end up smooth and slightly sticky.

Put the dough in an oiled bowl under a damp dish towel, and let it rise until doubled in size. (About an hour.)

Punch down the dough and divide into eight evenly-sized pieces. Roll out with a rolling pin to ~1/4" thickness. (They’ll be personal-size. Divide into fewer pieces for larger pizzas, but those are harder to fit on the grill, and less fun to make.)

Heat your grill to medium. Brush one side of each pizza with olive oil, and place it oiled side down on the grill. Close the lid for a few minutes, and pull it off when the downward side is starting to brown.

Oil the uncooked side, then flip the pizza over and add sauce and toppings to the cooked side. Return to the grill and close the lid, cooking until done.

Pizzas on the stone in the oven, in my experience, rarely have the pizzeria-style droop, where a slice will have a thin crust beneath the toppings which is flexible enough to bend, but still a little crispy around the edges. They’re either bready and stiff, or crispy and stiff. This recipe gets closer to the pizza shop ideal than any other ones I’ve made.