Today In Cooking

If your turkey is tough and dry, don’t blame the turkey. The cure for a terrible tasting Tom isn’t a slow-cooker with a can or two of cream of anything soup. Here are a few tips that’ll make your turkey taste terrific.

1. Cool it, clean it and refrigerate or freeze it ASAP. Don’t drive it around in your truck to show your pals. Take a picture!

2. Don’t stuff it. It doesn’t do anything to the flavor and prolongs cooking time.

3. Don’t baste it. It doesn’t work either, but it will make the skin crispier.

4. When plucked, carefully separate the skin from the meat. Starting at the neck, work your fingers between the skin and breast. Cut up some partially-cooked bacon, onion, garlic and herbs and place between the skin and breast.

I’m not sure on the details about how the whole blackened fish thing first happened, but I’ll bet there’s someone out there who could enlighten me. By most accounts, the credit goes to legendary chef Paul Prudhomme, who introduced us to his own style of Cajun cuisine at his New Orleans restaurant, K-Paul’s. Chef Prudhomme dunks pieces of fish in melted butter and then dredges them in a blend of seasonings that include salt, herbs and several types of pepper. They’re placed into a screaming-hot cast iron skillet for a couple of minutes a side, just long enough to burn the spices and cause shortness of breath for anyone caught in a poorly ventilated room. You’ve heard of pepper spray? Well, you get the same effect if you hover over a pan of cayenne pepper rubbed burning fish. Let’s start by opening the windows before you start cooking.

If you’ve ever tried blackening a piece of fish, poultry or meat in a lightweight Teflon skillet, I’ll bet you were disappointed with the result. What you got was browned, not blackened. If you want to do it right, you need to fire up the old cast iron skillet over high heat for at least 20 – 30 minutes. You can’t get it too hot. OK, I know some of you will test this statement, so don’t go to extraordinary measures like placing the pan in a blast furnace. Just put the skillet on the kitchen burner or a portable high-BTU burner that doesn’t exceed 30K BTUs and heat the pan until it’s white hot. Once you’ve inhaled burning pepper, you’ll understand why I mention ventilation a time or two. You should consider doing it outside…really.

Several years ago I was a partner in a catering company in Northern California, Silver Sage Caterers. Silver Sage is still a thriving enterprise run by my good friend, Greg Cornell. Our bread and butter business was catering banquets for sporting groups like Ducks Unlimited, California Waterfowl Association and Safari Club International. Oh sure, we did weddings and other formal affairs, but I got to the point where I couldn’t talk to another mother about the color of their tablecloths (“I ordered aqua and this is obviously not aqua”), so we stuck to the people we were most comfortable with.

One of the things we learned early on was that, no matter how much food you bring, these guys will eventually eat it all. Never run out of food. As with any catered event, running out of food is never a good thing. We did get scared a couple of times, but everybody got fed. I still have to attend a few functions every year and I’m frequently annoyed when they run out of food, particularly cheap food. Now, in all fairness to the caterers, sometimes their clients underestimate how many people are going to show up for an event. You can’t expect a caterer to bring a whole mess of extra food, just in case the guest estimate was too low. On the other hand, loading your guests up on inexpensive eats like bread, potatoes, rice and beans is cheap insurance. Whether you’ve got 3 couples coming over for dinner tonight or 300 duck hunters coming to your local DU dinner make sure there’s plenty of bread!

I’ve always wondered how much perfectly good deer meat gets ground into hamburger. I’m always running into people who are looking for some new ideas about what to do with the 300 pounds of ground deer meat they’ve saved up over the years.

“My wife’s had just about enough deer chili to last her the rest of her life. I’ve tried sneaking it into spaghetti sauce, tacos, you name it. She’s on to me. Got any new recipes?”

My wife and I have a couple of friends who don’t spend much time in the kitchen. Most of the food they bring home is already prepared or something that’s already been seasoned, sauced and ready for the oven, grill or, more likely, the microwave. Getting invited to their house for dinner means a few things. First, we’ll eat well after the sun goes down and there’s a sizable line-up of empty wine bottles on the counter. Second, I’ll probably end up having to finish cooking whatever it is we’re supposed to eat, but by the time I’m involved, it’s too late. Finally, the dinner will be bad. The meat will be overcooked and gray, the vegetables as soft as baby food. Look, as long as I still have all of my teeth, I like my veggies crisp.

Another couple who, like us, enjoy the company of the host couple, but not their food, calls their style of table fare “prison food.” These non-foodies also don’t keep any leftovers. A quick inventory of their fridge will reveal a bottle or two of dressing, some packaged cheese for the kids and a few bottles of white wine. Some people are just not that into food. I suppose that there’s also no good reason to hang on to lousy food.