What To Do With That Left Over Turkey?

Here's what my family does. My mom has made Chicken Strata with the left over turkey for as long as I can remember. I'm sure she found it in a magazine or some other source lost to time, desperate for a way to use up the left over turkey instead of throwing it away. You can only have so many turkey sandwiches. It became our traditional day-after-Christmas breakfast. And while we always ate it for breakfast, I have been making it as a dinner for years by just frying up chicken breast instead of using left over turkey, hence why I have named my recipe chicken strata not turkey strata. Guess what we are having for dinner tonight?

This dish has become so associated with my family that I made chicken strata kits last year and gave them as Christmas gifts.

I think you will easily become as addicted to this dish as I have become. After all, as my wife says, how can you go wrong with a dish that calls for gravy?

Let me know if you try it what you think.

Corn Bread Dressing by Demand

Here is Ed's recipe for Corn Bread Dressing. My wife's family has this every Thanksgiving and Dinah likes to have it a few more times during the year. When Dinah makes it we just use Heinz's brown gravy. The dressing is pretty good with gravy, I think it needs it, but I'd still rather have stuffing.

I wish I had known Ed longer. I only got to meet him a few times early on when Dinah and I were dating. He was our best man at out wedding. Shortly afterwards Ed fell at home and had to go to the hospital. On check in they found he had bone cancer and it had spread through most of his body, unbeknownst to him. He died in just a few days.

This is his recipe as Ed wrote it, I just reformatted it and adjusted some measurements to what is common at the grocery.

Enjoy.

A Happy Thanksgiving

We hosted Thanksgiving this year since leading up to it no one could seem to decide what to do. I think it came off excellent.

Our dining room is a little undersized for seating more than six but we had eight adults and three kids. It worked out. I wouldn't want to do that every day though.

I baked two pumpkin pies (pungkin as Rose says) the night before. I have made the real deal before with real cooked pumpkin but the can really is the way to go if you want to be sure that the pumpkin itself is going to taste good. But you have to buy the canned pumpkin not the canned pumpkin pie, big difference. I used store bought pie crust too. I wasn't in the mood to go homemade on that. I still got rave reviews. My secret? Mace and nutmeg.

I picked up the smoked turkey on Wednesday. This worked out great. We just needed to reheat the bird for two hours in the oven. Since our target was 11:00AM, this sure beat getting up at 4:00AM to pop it in the oven, not to mention the labor saved in not having to prep and season the turkey. It came out perfect. I let it rest for about 30 minutes before cutting into it and the legs just tore off. I barely had to use a knife. We got a 13 pound turkey and I carved half for serving and the other half for leftovers for people to take home.

Our bread was a combination of yeast rolls I picked up when I got the turkey and frozen biscuits I got when my coffee shop closed. The yeast rolls went over better than the biscuits but I preferred the biscuits.

Dinah's mom brought the traditional squash casserole and baked sweet potatoes. I don't like yellow squash but this casserole is quite good. I attribute it to the crushed crackers. Rose normally likes it but not yesterday. I'm not a sweet potato fan, especially the traditional pan with marshmallow on top. I was grateful that Dinah's mom's version has brown sugar and pecans instead of marshmallow. It was very good. Rose had three helpings. I thought it was adorable that she spit out a "seed." I had missed a pecan in serving her. Good girl.

Dinah's dad brought scalloped potatoes. They were out of a box and I LOVED them. Always have. The funny thing was he had never made them before and bought a bag of potatoes with the two boxes. Apparently Debra teased him about the potatoes already being in the box. And they were!

Deana brought the dressing and gravy. I grew up with stuffing, My Mom makes a traditional oyster stuffing with wild rice and croutons. She leaves out the oysters though. Every year half was stuffed in the turkey and half was cooked in a casserole. And every year we sobbed when the stuffing from the bird was gone because is always tasted better than that made in the casserole. Don't let anyone tell you they are the same. I LOVE stuffing. I'm still not up on the dressing thing which is made in a pan and cut and served like brownies. It's dry and needs gravy (graby as Rose says). I know this was an old family recipe. I like it but it just isn't the same. There was very little left though.

Rose didn't seem to care for any turkey at the beginning of the meal. I think the sweet potatoes preoccupied her. But near the end she asked me for "chicken." She had two helpings of white meat. Good girl. The turkey really was excellent. I think because it was smoked and only reheated it was much juicer than any I've had before. It barely had any smoke flavor and they must have brined it because every now and then you'd get a taste of something sweet or a bit of spice. And best of all was the crispy skin because I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE turkey skin and I'm the only one who eats it. It was mine, mine, mine.

So who knows what's missing?

MASHED POTATOES!

WTF? Apparently there was a communication break down and we ended up with none. I had planned on making them in my super-duper-can't-live without-anymore stand mixer, even looking forward to it, but I pulled off since I was told they were being brought. If there is anything close to being sacrilegious with Thanksgiving it is no mashed potatoes. I sobbed but we all survived fine.

And the best part? Aside form the food and family, we got to leave Rose with Grandma and the two of us went to the movies! Four Christmases was HYSTERICAL!

PS

I forgot about the cranberry issue. I grew up with real cranberry dressing. A bag of cranberries cooked down with sugar and spices until the berries start to pop. My wife's family eats the cranberry equivalent of spam. I'm not sure what this gelatinous red bile in a can is but there is no way I can eat. I've tried, it's not happening. It was nice to know that Debra was equally revolted, so I was not alone for once.

Schnitzel Holstein

Yesterday I found three boneless pork chops tucked in the freezer. Trying to figure out what to do with them I thumbed through my German cookbook and hit on schnitzel. Ok, schnitzel is supposed to be veal but I didn't have any and heck, my grocery doesn't sell it either, so pork schnitzel it was. I saw a variation called Schnitzel a la Holstein which involved topping the schnitzel with a fried egg, anchovies and capers. Hey, I had that in Germany once. I don't remember the anchovies but since I like them and had a can, why not.

The cool thing was that the baguette I had bought for serving with the fondue had gone rock hard before I got around to making the fondue. Rather than throwing it out like I normally would I decided to grind it up in a my food processor and make home made bread crumbs. And lo and behold I was able to use those very same bread crumbs to make the schnitzel. Cool.

Funny, up until a few years ago I was revolted by runny eggs. That yolk had to be fried hard and stiff for me to eat it. I don't know what changed, maybe the business trips to Germany, I don't know. But I do enjoy them over medium now. I'm still not a sunny side up kind of guy, I like the yolk kind of thick, but loose. As I told my wife last night, just mentally tell yourself it's gravy and you'll have no problem.

Buy that's an awkward paragraph. Anyway if you would like to try your hand at schnitzel, here's my version of Schnitzel Holstein.

Eggcellent

If you remember from my second post, hard boiling eggs really riles me up. Every time they tear, break, membranes stick. I end up with half the egg thrown out with the shell. It wasn't always like this. I remember years and years of happy egg boiling. Then one day it all changed. I've always blamed the eggs.

My mother-in-law gave us a microwave wave cooker. To say I am skeptical is an understatement. On Saturday my wife popped four eggs into this gadget, zapped it in the microwave and then dashed off to her mom's leaving me to figure out what to do with it. I figure it sat on the counter for a good 15 minutes before I got around to it. I plucked the four eggs out, nearly burning myself, they were like hot stones, and shoved them in the fridge door.

A couple hours later, home alone, I'm scanning through the fridge and my eyes stumble on the eggs. They're cool now of course. I grab one. What the heck. If Dinah want's them for egg salad I can always cook more.

It peeled perfectly.

Impossible! What the?

I grabbed another one.

Perfect.

Impossible!!!

Both were perfect. Think AJ. What's different? More importantly, what is the same about this microwave gizmo that is the same as back in the good ol' days when hard boiled eggs didn't stress me out?

nearly burning myself, they were like hot stones, and shoved them in the fridge

Somewhere I read that you are supposed to quench the cooked eggs in an ice bath to stop them from cooking. This prevents a sulfur reaction that causes the yolks to discolor. I never had an issue with gray rimmed yolks but I want to do things correctly so I started quenching my eggs in ice water. I never connected any dots.

I had to quickly test my theory. I grabbed the four remaining eggs, tossed in my super-duper-color-changing egg timer and boiled on high like the good old days. When my timer turned purple all the way through, I poured out the water and put the eggs in the fridge to cool.

I waited, impatiently, a couple of hours and grabbed the first one.

It peeled perfectly.

Impossible! Amazing!

I gave the next one a few more hours to cool just to be sure.

Again perfect.

I was so excited I jumped on my motorcycle and ran to the grocery to buy more eggs (luckily it was 55°F and sunny).

I saved the other two for the next day just to be sure. Again perfect. All four were perfect!

So my conspiracy theory was wrong, the eggs haven't changed. It was me all along. I wonder what else is like that?