More Brussels Sprouts

A variation on an old theme tonight: Brussels sprouts sauteed with lemon, toasted pine nuts, shallots, and butter. I have come to the conclusion that you pretty much can't go wrong once you've gotten as far as sauteeing the sprouts with shallots and butter, and throwing some lemon zest or juice or both on at the end. The most impressive part of this recipe I thought was how quick it was.

Unlike Fine Cooking'sbrussels sprouts with hazelnut butter or brussels sprouts with brown butter, there is no roasting or butter-making or anything fancy in this one. It is *dead easy*:

This one comes courtesy of Edible Vancouver (whose cover is responsible for my brussels sprout cravings BTW):


Brussels Sprouts Saute

1 1/2 lb brussels sprouts trimmed and sliced in half lenthwise (I only had 1 lb, so I 2/3'ed the butter, but kept the lemon and shallots and garlic the same)

5 tbsp butter, divided (I used 4: 3 at the beginning, one at the end)

6 shallots or 1 medium sized onion (I used 3 monster sized shallots), finely sliced

4 cloves of garlic, minced

1 1/2 tbsp fresh lemon juice

2 tsp lemon zest

1/4 cup pine nuts, toasted

1/4 cup parmesean cheese, finely grated

Heat 4 tbsp of butter in a large pan on medium high. When butter starts to bubble, add shallots, cook until shallots just start to brown. Add garlic and cook for 30 sec. longer. Add brussels sprouts. Turn heat up a little and saute until sprouts are tender (they suggest 6 minutes, I'd say closer to 10). Stir in lemon juice, zest, and remaining 1 tbsp of butter, and half of pine nuts. Transfer to a large bowl and garnish with remaining pine nuts and parmesean. And voila! That's all there is to it.


We served ours with grilled Mahi-Mahi ala Trader Joe's frozen section, and some left-over herb baguette from the bakery (and of course, red wine). Not to bad for a thown together at the last minute meal, if I do say so myself.

A new (mathematician's) scale for grading restaurants

Most restaurant critics or reviewers rate restaurants (and movies, hotels and other things for that matter) on scales that don't really mean very much. Some critics will give scales of 1-10. But this raises a whole slew of questions. It is very hard to know what a restaurant being a 1 means or what a 10 means. If you give a restaurant a 5.0 score, does that mean you liked it or that you thought it was average? What does average even mean? Most restaurants, unless they are particularly bad or expensive, are still fun to go to. So your average restaurant is probably still worth going to if you want to go out and relax. But when we say a restaurant is "mediocre" or "average," we usually are criticizing it.

Then there are the scales from 1 to 5. These suffer from the same problem except even worse with less granularity. No one wants to give a restaurant a 1 because unless you were poisoned it couldn't have been that bad. But no one wants to give a score of 5 either unless it was the best restaurant ever. So you are left with 3 scores, plus maybe a couple half points. Don't get me started on the "thumbs up/thumbs down" measurements. (How can you have "1 and a half" thumbs up? What if you put one thumb up and the other down?)

The "thumbs up/thumbs down" method, while having a granularity problem (not enough variety in the scale), does have one very interesting feature: symmetry. If the reviewer gives 0 thumbs up, we have a good idea of what the restaurant means: "eh" Not so bad that you'll regret going, but not so good that you'll just have to go back again. In other words, "average"

Based on this, I'm proposing a new way to rate restaurants (or for that matter movies, hotels, books, or almost anything else). We'll judge on a scale from -10 to 10. This is more mathematically sound because of the symmetry and effectively is modeled like a "reward" function in machine learning. If a score is greater than 0, then it was worth going to, but if a score is less than 0, it was not worth going to. This score takes into account factors such as cost, distance to travel, etc. So if two restaurants serve the exact same food in the exact same place with the exact same setting, but one costs more than the other, the restaurant with the lower prices will have a better score.

Here is an outline of what scores could mean:

10 - This is one of the top 2 or 3 restaurants you have ever been to of this style food. (In Montreal, Halal 786 gets a 10 for Pakistani, Y Lan gets a 10 for Vietnamese, Olympico gets a 10 for coffee, and Dieu De Ciel for Micro-Brewery.) It is impossible to order something at a 10 restaurant that isn't incredible. In fact, the best way to eat at these restaurants is by randomly choosing items from the menu as otherwise you'll always get whatever you got the first time you came to this place. These are restaurants that you'll go halfway across town (or the country) to get to.

8 or 9. Very, very good restaurant. Not quite worthy of a 10, but pretty darn good. You crave going to this restaurant and will go there whenever you get a chance.

6 or 7. Good restaurant, but a notch below the 8-10, which are really elite restaurants. You won't necessarily go out of your way to go to these places, but if they are near where you are, you'll have a fun time there. Examples in Montreal: Cafe Local, EM Cafe, the "up-stairs Chinese place," the Vietnamese place across the street from Y Lan that I almost never went to because it was across the street from Y Lan. (How did that stay in business anyway?)

3 to 5. These restaurants are still worth going to. They have good food and if you are nearby you may go there. It is unlikely that you will go unless you are specifically feeling like going out that night. You mainly are going here for the atmosphere of going to a restaurant, the convenience of not having to cook, and the convenience of a lot of choices. Once in a while, they'll surprise you with a really great dish, but for the most part, you can probably cook stuff this good yourself. I would generally say this is an "average" restaurant as an "average" restaurant is still a rewarding experience. Even though you could have cooked the food yourself, it would have taken a long time to put everything together.

1 to 2. You won't regret coming to these restaurants, but you won't get very good food. Generally, for a restaurant to end up in the 1-2 category, it will be cheap-otherwise you'd regret coming since the food isn't all that special. Either that or it used ingredients that would have been difficult or annoying to find.

0. No gain, no loss

-1 to -3 : This restaurant was bad. You left and feel like you wasted your money. You could have cooked this yourself and it would have been cheaper and tasted better. You will never come back to this place again unless one of your friends drags you to it.

-4 to -6: The food was terrible, the service was incredibly slow, and the place was overpriced. (They ran out of baked potatoes! The ice cream was melted once they gave it to me! The waiter spilled salad on me and I was happy because I didn't have to eat it!) You won't come back to this place again unless your friend convinces you that the head chef was sick that night and the restaurant changed ownership.

-7 to -8 : One of the worst restaurants that you have ever been to. You still have nightmares about that weird mystery meat they served you.

-9: Gave you E Coli or some other stomach problem.

-10: After trying one taste of their specials, you immediately get up and leave because the food is that bad. Even that one spoonful, however, is enough to make you sick, and you spend the next week working up the nerve to go outside.

One other interesting thing about the scale is you may have to make it context-dependent (yes, this sounds like my work at school). For example, I'm not a big fan of Subway normally. I think their sandwiches cost more than they should since I can usually make them myself. I'd normally give Subway a score of 1 or 2. (I only give the points because it would have been wasteful for me to buy the many kinds of meat that they offer.) However, at a rest stop on a road trip, I'd give subway a higher score. Maybe 5 or 6. I know that it won't make me sick, it will be pretty healthy, and I know what to expect. When I see a Subway sign on the highway around lunch, I generally will go there.

Well, that's my food scale. I will be using this food scale from now on in rating restaurants.

Fish Biriyani Fix

Top 5 signs of a good Indian recipe:

1. Garlic is measured in heads. not cloves.
2. Spices to actual ingredients ratio is at least 1 to 1.
3. Two words: Serrano Chilies (ribs, seeds and all).
4. The house begins to smell like an indian restaurant about halfway through the prep process and continues to smell that way for a week.
5. Involves creating a paste of herbs, spices, garlic ginger, peppers etc. that looks and smells like a medieval cure for pneumonia.

This one has all 5. And we needed it.

One of the (many) let-downs we've experienced since we left Montreal is the Indian restaurant situation. We were really hoping, Seattle being the tech hub that it is, that we could find some decent, cheap Indian food. Sadly, this seems not to be the case. The situation seems to be bleakest around the area of spiciness (we have asked for 5/5 on the spiciness scale and not even broken a sweat) and biriyani (which some places appear to have confused with rice with chicken curry glopped on top). Now, rice with chicken curry glopped on top is not a bad thing...but it ain't biriyani. Biriyani, done right, is supposed to be dry, but still remarkably spicy (despite the lack of sauce). The trick here is to cook the rice in such a way that the rice itself becomes spicy. The meat, if it hasn't disintegrated completely into the rice, should be falling-off-the-bone tender, and flavourful, but again *not drenched in sauce*. And so, we did what any 2 desperate chefs would do in such a state of deprivation: we made our own.

Fish Biriyani (Recipe courtesy of Suneeta Vaswani, shortcuts courtesy of us)

Ingredients:

Fish and Potoato Layer

- 3 dried Indian red chiles
- 1/2 tsp saffron threads
- 2lbs fish (we usually use tilapia or red snapper fillets)
- 3 serrano chiles (possibly more. depending on how brave you're feeling, you can leave the ribs and seeds in, or remove them)
- 1 head of garlic (about 25 cloves)
- 1 piece of peeled minced ginger root (2"x1")
- 2 tbsp oil
- 3 sticks of cinnamon (1" each)
- 3 green cardamom pods, cracked open
- 4 whole cloves
- 10 black peppercorns
- 8oz all-purpose potatoes, cut into 2" pieces
- 8 dried apricots, halved
- 1/2 cup plain yogurt at room temp.
- 1tbsp salt, divided
- 1tbsp corriander powder
- 1/2 tsp turmeric
- 1/2 tsp garam masala
- 1/4c fresh lime or lemon juice
- 1/2c cilantro leaves
- 10 - 12 mint leaves

Rice Layer:

-1 1/4 cups basmati rice
- 2 tsp salt
- 1/2 cup crispy fried onions (you can buy these in giant bags at indian grocers, and they keep forever)
- 2 tbsp oil
- 1 stick of cinnamon 2" long
- 3 whole cloves
- 3 green cardamom pods cracked open


Prep:

1. Rinse fish and pat dry. Cut into 2" pieces and set aside



2. In a mini-food-processor, combine red chiles and soaking water, serrano chiles, garlic and ginger, blend to a paste.

3. In a large saucepan, heat 2 tbsp oil, over med. heat, add cinnamon, cardamom, cloves and peppercorns and saute for 1 min. Add potatoes and saute for 6-8 min until golden on all sides. remove potatoes and set aside. In the same pan, add the chile paste and saute until mixture is fragrant (this will be hard to miss--and good for anyone with sinus troubles) and almost dry (2 to 3 min.)



4. Add apricots, yogurt, corriander, 2 tsp salt, turmeric, and garam masala, cook stirring continuouly, until almost dry 3 to 4 min. Return potatoes to pan and mix well. Reduce heat to low, and cover and cook until potatoes are about half cooked (5 minutes)

5. Carefully arrange the fish in the pan, sprinkle with remaining salt. Drizzle lime juice, saffron and soaking water over top. Spoon masala on top of fish (I usually just mix it briefly with a silicon spatula -- to avoid breaking up the fish too much). sprinkle with cilantro and mint. Increase heat to medium, and cover and cook for 5 min. Uncover and cook until liquid has reduced by half, leaving a fairly thick gravy in the pan. Set aside.



6. Rice Layer: Place rice in a large bowl with plenty of cold water, swish vigorously with fingers. Drain. Repeat 4 to 5 times until water is fairly clear (I usually just put the rice in a fine mesh seive, and lift the seive out of the water to drain). Cover rice with 3"-4" water cold water and soak for 10 min.

7. Fill a large saucepan 3/4 full with water. Add 2 tsp. salt and bring to a boil over high heat. Drain rice and add to sauce pan. Return to boil and cook until rice is cooked on the outside but uncooked in the center, 2 to 3 minutes. Do not overcook. Drain immediately and spread in a shallow pan to cool. (Shortcut: spread 1/2 the rice in an 8"x12" pyrex baking dish to cool, leave the other half to cool in the seive).

8. Preheat oven to 300 degrees F. Once the layer of rice in the baking dish has cooled enough to be warm to the touch, rather than hot, spread the fish and potato mixture over the rice. Spread the remaining rice on top of mixture. Sprinkle fried onions on top of rice (1/2 cup seems like a lot, but you won't regret it).



9. Heat 2 tbsp oil in a small pan. Add cinnamon, cloves and cardamom and saute until fragrant, 30 sec. Pour mixture over top of rice. Cover mixture tightly with foil, and bake in a pre-heated oven for 30 min. Let cook 5 min. before serving.

10 (optional) Carefully spoon rice into a mound on a large platter, taking care not to break up fish, place some fish and potatoes on top of rice. (We never get this far, we always just scoop it out of the baking dish--and out fish and potatoes usually disintegrate into tiny chunks anyways, but it still tastes *amazing*.

Veritable Vegetable Extravaganza

before	after

The veritable veggies, clockwise from top-left: Brussels sprouts with hazelnut butter, maple-cardamom roast turnips, sauteed kale, Swiss chard and feta pie.


I have been trying to write this post for about 2 weeks. In fact, I think I have been trying to write it for so long that I think most of the veggies I intended to write about are no longer in season...well, ok maybe it hasn't been *quite* that long.

So, at the time of year when it's starting to get wet and cold and dismal, what on earth could have caused a vegetable extravaganza? Let me explain: the start of the veritable vegetable extravaganza was coincided with the arrival of the Thanksgiving special of Fine Cooking magazine. Now, your average Thanksgiving special contains about 2 turkey recipes, and 6+ vegetable sides, and Fine Cooking was no exception. If one were to *actually* make every side dish for Thanksgiving dinner, there'd be no need for a turkey! Now to be sure, the vegetables have always been my favorite part of Thanksgiving dinner, and I personally think the idea of a vegetable medley for Thanksgiving sounds kind of cool, but I know others tend to be partial to the bird.

And so, rather than making all 6+ veggie dishes for one meal, I figured I'd start early and work my way through them gradually. And thus began the veritable vegetable extravaganza (hereafter referred to as VVE).

One vegetable that shows up around this time of year is the infamous Brussels sprout. I say infamous, because like spinach and broccoli and other unfortunate victims of poor preparation, Brussels sprouts can indeed be fairly vile if they aren't done right. This is really too bad, because if you do them right, Brussels sprouts can be quite tasty.

This year, Fine Cooking has cornered the market on creative ways to dress up Brussels sprouts:
Brussels sprouts with Dijon walnut crumbs
Brussels sprouts with toasted hazelnut butter
Brussels sprouts with brown butter and lemon
Brussels sprouts with herbs and shallots
Brussels sprouts with pancetta and lemon

So far, I've only made the first two--but as long as the sprouts are in season, I plan to keep working my way down the list.

The next two vegetables on the roster for the VVE are repeat offenders: kale and Swiss chard. I know, I know, everyone's tired of hearing about my adventures with kale, but this really a delicious (and straightforward) recipe.

For quite a while, now, I've been trying to find a way to make the kale taste the way it does in the roasted chicken and kale dish, without having to make enough chicken to feed a small army. Not that there's anything wrong with the chicken...but sometimes I just crave the kale. Anyways, this seems to be just the ticket. I've made it a couple times now and really enjoyed it. This particular time, I decided to skip the pasta altogether and just make a big pot of sauteed kale (it makes a delicious lunch).

There's a stand at the farmer's market in my neighborhood every Saturday that has absolutely delicious (and enormous) kale. The same stand also has delicious Swiss chard, and so, whenever I stop by there to buy kale, I almost always come out with a giant bunch of Swiss chard as well. The Swiss chard became part of a delicious phyllo pastry pie, along with some onions and feta cheese. If you've never had Swiss chard and feta, I highly recommend it. It's like spinach and feta (think spanikopita) but even better. My only objection to this recipe is that I think the phyllo pastry is more fuss than its worth. Maybe next time (and rest assured there will be a next time) I'll try using pizza dough.

This brings us to the last veggie of the VVE: Turnips. The recipe was another FC special: Roasted turnips with maple and cardamom--how could I pass that up? I couldn't. Next time, though, I'll be sure to buy the right kind of turnips. The tangy red ones--the type you often get in falafel sandwiches or shish taouk--do not lend themselves very well to the subtle flavors of maple and cardamom...oops.

And so we conclude the first installment of the VVE. However, I'm barely halfway through the veggie dishes from Fine Cooking, and the X-mas issue of Food and Drink just arrived in the mail, so I expect the extravaganza is far from over.

Culinary Hacks Pt. 1: The Magnetic Knife Rack Dilemma

The magnetic knife rack is a brilliant invention. In addition to keeping knives sharper and cleaner than its predecessor the large-wooden-block knife rack, it also is a small, and easily implementable step towards my dream kitchen (which in case you were wondering, looks something like a cross between Julia Child's kitchen, with her ever-so-functional peg boards, and the classic Ikea kitchen, with stainless steel everything, and the metal bar on the wall that you can hook things over or hang things on)--but I digress.

The fatal design flaw with the magnetic knife rack is how one goes about attatching it to a wall. This is less of an issue of you own your house/condo, but for us renters, it gets difficult. Clearly drilling through the tile backsplash above the counter was not an option (why on earth does everyone put tile there anyways?), and drilling through the wood cabinetry was, but seeing as its not our cabinetry, I felt it was kind of a jerky move. Anyways, this was clearly a job for google.

Query: "How to put up magnetic knife rack without drilling through tile"
Answer: (Besides several dangerous but unhelpful ads for cool culinary stuff): "Two-sided tape"

Really? Thats the best we can come up with? I find it hard to believe that two-sided tape would actually hold a 1' long strip of metal...let alone all the knives. And then there's the issue of pulling the knives off the rack without pulling the rack off the wall. And finally, if you've ever tried to work with two-sided tape, you know it makes everything it touches permanently sticky. Google Fail.

Now this is the part where the "hacking" starts. Normal people would conclude one of two things:
1) I guess I'll go buy a large wooden block that takes up valuable counter space and dulls my knives.
or
2) Screw it (no pun intended), I'm drilling into the tile/cabinetry anyways.

Hackers are not normal people. When part (most, really) of your job is to build things using parts that others before you assembled and usually failed to document, you have few if any qualms about using things in a way that was perhaps not their intended purpose. For most of us though, rather than being a skill we learned on the job, this resourcefulness is an innate quality, for which we finally found a use (besides annoying our S.O.'s). And you can't turn it off when you leave the office. This has lead to skates being repaired with zip-ties, rusted out wheel-wells being covered with duct-tape, "drapes" (actually bedsheets) being hung with self-adhesive hooks, string and paper-clips etc. I think its that "just make it work" attitude.

And so, that was how I found myself wandering around the kitchen, knife in one hand rack in the other, placing the rack on various surfaces to see if it could possibly fit there. The (accidental) stroke of genius came when I held the rack up against the side of our metal Seville shelf from Costco, and realized that the *back* of the knife rack was magnetic too, and was now stuck, quite securely to the metal shelf!

Unfortunately, knives are made of metal too, and while the magnets in the knife rack were strong enough to hold the shelf in place under normal conditions, they were not quite strong enough to keep it there when a metal knife was being pulled off the rack.
And so a strip of wood found under the sink, and zip-ties (second only to duct tape on the quick-fix-for-everything scale) were employed to restrain it. Success. Elegant? No. Functional? Very much. A hack? Totally--but a damn sight better than two-sided tape.

I realize this is not terribly exciting to most people. But I thought I owed it to the internet at large to offer a better solution to the magnetic knife rack dilemma than two-sided tape. So there.

Deliciously Vicious Cycle

I believe xkcd said it best:


This is where I have been for the past week, although lucky for me, my cycle has involved more diverse (and nutritious) fare than cheese and chips.

It all began with a butternut squash soup that I made before I started my new job last week (figuring it would be the last chance I'd have to cook for a while). I bought a fairly massive squash, and ended up using only half of it in the soup. Now, given how long it took me to peel, cut and clean that squash, there was no way I was only using half of it. And so the cycle began.

The answer to the squash dilemma lay in the latest issue of Fine Cooking. A recipe for a quick and simple autumn soup that involving tomatoes, squash, chick peas, onion, carrots and kale (although I think one could substitute just about any autumn veggies in here and it would work just as well). This particular combination makes for a very festive colorful soup though.




The more I cook, the better I am getting about judging weights and quantities of things that don't easily fit in measuring cups (herbs, veggies, etc.), or maybe its just that I can't be bothered to measure out exact quantities anymore, and am content just to ballpark it. However, there is one area that still illudes me entirely: Leafy greens. I once took a guess at how many bunches of spinach it took to make 1lb, and was off by a factor of 3. Pathetic. It's no surprise then, that I ended up with excess kale after making the autumn soup. And so the cycle continued.

There are a *ton* of cool things you can do with kale (although I'm not big on the kale smoothie), but since the last few culinary projects had been predominantly vegerarian, I decided to change it up a little and revert to an old favorite:

Roasted chicken legs with potatoes and kale is one of my standbys because it's just so *simple*. Tear up some kale, chop up an onion and some potatoes, and toss the whole lot in a roasting pan with 1/4c of EVOO and some salt and pepper. Then, season chicken legs with salt, pepper, and paprika and nestle them on top of the veggies. Pop the whole thing in the oven and roast it 450 for 20 min covered, and 30 min uncovered. The result is that the chicken gets nice and crispy, but still moist inside, the potatoes get infused with onion, kale and chicken-ness, and the kale becomes nice and tender. Its a full meal (meat, veggies, and potatoes) all in one pot. True comfort food.



Of course now we have leftover chicken legs and potatoes, which can only mean one thing: curry. The cycle continues...actually come to think of it, maybe cycle isn't the correct term, maybe it's more of a "sprint".

A Tribute to Julie, Julia, Canadian Thanksgiving and My New Kitchen

First of all, can we all just take a moment to admire the awesomeness of my new kitchen? I am fairly certain that this kitchen has more counter space, and more cabinet space than all of my previous kitchens combined. Not to mention a gas stove! Prior to this weekend, I had only attempted minor cooking feats in this kitchen. But even on a small scale, I was impressed by how quickly and easily things got done. Pasta was once again a quick fix (as the water boiled in 15 min. rather than 45 min.), stews could be made to simmer (as opposed oscillating between a rolling boil and not boiling at all), ingredients could be kept within arm's reach of the stove, but not on it, etc. etc. It was all very exciting.

And so, I decided to celebrate both my kitchen and Thanksgiving (the Canadian one!) by cooking a turkey dinner. A whole turkey seemed a bit overkill though (especially since it was only feeding 4 people) and so, I took a page out of Julie Powell's book (or rather, an entry out of her blog and a page out of Julia Child's book) and attempted to make Boned, Stuffed and Roasted Turkey Breast.

Now, full disclosure here, this recipe does not come from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I am not that brave. Instead, it comes from The Way to Cook, in which Ms. Child has toned things down a notch. Further full disclosure: I toned things down a few more notches. Amongst other sins, I simplified the stuffing (you really don't need anything but bread, onion, sage and spices), I basted with chicken broth rather than butter, I made a gravy base with chicken broth and added the juices from the turkey to it at the very end (turkey breasts really don't have the juice to make enough gravy for 4 people), and I skipped the deglazing business when I made the turkey stock from the bones (personally, I think I should get points for even *making* the stock).

Ok, so after that rap sheet of culinary short cuts, what I am about to present probably doesn't seem quite as impressive, but I'm proud of it, so I'm going to write about it anyways.

The first challenge of this culinary endeavor began outside of the kitchen. I had been warned that unless it's X-mas or Thanksgiving (which its not, in the US right now), that turkey breasts can be hard to come by. So when I found one in a store on the other side of town, I bought it immediately, without giving any thought as to how I might haul it home. Well, I made it about as far as UW on the bus, before giving up and calling for reinforcements (and a ride) to get myself and the turkey breast home. They are heavy little buggers.

Then came the skinning and deboning. This was actually not as scary as I expected it to be. A good knife, a large cutting board, and an extra pair of hands proved very useful.


After some careful knife-work, I was left with two massive boneless skinless turkey breasts, and an equally massive breast bone (which went directly into the stock pot, no questions asked).


Now we come to the fun part: stuffing and wrangling. I say wrangling because that is truly what it is. It took two of us, poking excess stuffing into the cavity and yanking at the cheese-cloth to beat the thing into submission. Afterwards, just to be sure, we secured it with some embroidery thread and a few knots I remembered from sailing (actually, I think it was mostly just a creative use of half-hitches). Anyways, Julia suggested sewing it...really? Sewing cheese-cloth? I think not.


(Turkey breast wrangling: before and after)

I was truly amazed that we'd made it this far without anything exploding, and the kitchen, considering the carnage that had just taken place, really didn't look that bad. However, we'd reached the part of the recipe that scared me the most: the cooking part.

I like stews. You begin by sauteeing some veggies, add some sauce or broth, some spices, maybe some meat and a few more veggies, and let the whole lot cook. Its a very gradual process, and if at some point in that process you decide the stew needs more salt, or cumin or whatever, you just add it in, and to test when it's done, you can try little bits of it. Roasting anything (especially meat or poultry) requires a certain leap of faith that just doesn't exist when you're cooking a stew. For me, this is the most terrifying part of roasting a turkey: that 2.5 hour stretch where you sit there, basting and checking diligently as the recipe tells you to, and praying to the culinary gods that you don't undercook, or worse yet, overcook the turkey. A meat thermometer is a huge help in such situations, but really there's no way to know for sure until you haul the bird out of the oven, remove all the hardware used to hold it together, and cut the first slice.

Luckily, the culinary gods were smiling on us that day, and we managed to get it just about right. We even timed it so that the potatoes, the turkey and the green beans were all ready at about the same time. It must have been beginner's luck.