Turkey Soup

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By Lisa

Making turkey soup in the days after Thanksgiving is one of the very few generations-long family traditions we have in my family.   Certain aspects of our seasonal and holiday meals have evolved and morphed over the years, but this soup is not one of them.  It derives from my father’s side of the family, from my beloved Pop-Pop and his wife, Lucy, who died before I was born but whom I’m led to understand was a terrific cook.  As long as I can remember, my family made turkey soup, and it seemed to be my dad’s thing, though I’m sure my mom helped to finish it.  There is no recipe, just a series of ad hoc steps that make it easy and adaptable.  And although it takes time to make the broth, the actual active time is maybe 20-30 minutes, spread out over a few days.

So here, offered to you, is our very humble family recipe for


Harper Turkey Soup

  1. After the turkey is carved, take all of the fat, skin, and most of the meat off the carcass, but make sure to leave some meat on the carcass.  Leaving meat on the bone is essential to flavor.  Put the carcass cage into your largest stock pot.  If you have carved the legs and thighs, throw those bones in as well.
  2. Cover the bones and carcass with cold water.
  3. Leave the pot to sit overnight in a cold place.  (My father would always leave the pot in front of our side door, which was a frigid alcove. He said this was to foil any robbers who happened to break in the evening after Thanksgiving. Of course, I always wondered what made that night more vulnerable in our house than any other, especially since we never had any robbery of any sort… Finally I figured out it was simply because there was no room in our refrigerator. I’m sure you can find your own cold-ish place where you can regale your small children with stories about the virtue of culinary procedures to law enforcement.)
  4. The next day, if any fat has formed on the top, skim it off and discard.
  5. At this point, if you like, you may add your aromatics: a quartered onion, 1-2 large carrots, 1-2 bay leaves, 8 peppercorns, a spalsh of white wine, a tablespoon of salt. Or you may simply leave the carcass as is and boil it naked, as it were.
  6. Bring the water to a gentle boil, then lower the heat and let it simmer, simmer, simmer for a few hours.  If you only have 2 hours, you may turn off the stove and let the carcass steep in the hot water for another hour. Or more.  Like I said, this is an art, not a science.  As the broth simmers, if you see foam on the surface, skim it off. Skim, and skim, and skim. This will help clarify your broth.
  7. Once the broth is done, let it cool.
  8. Strain out any bones and aromatics.
  9. Pick the meat off the carcass and return it to the broth.
  10. At this point, you may add whatever vegetables you like: leafy greans, spinach, broccoli, green beans, carrots, frozen peas…anything you have or want to use and like is fair game. Fresh or frozen.  One necessity:  We always add a drained can of whole tomatoes right at the beginning of this last stage, which we chop before adding.  Add the longer-cooking vegetables first (carrots, chard stems celery, kale, etc, them add the tender greens, beans, peas, etc.) Simmer until the vegetables are cooked–we like them tender crisp for the first batch. They soften up over the days, so don’t overcook.)
  11. In a separate small pot, cook your noodles until they are almost done.  Egg noodles are by the far the best, and traditional, but if I’ve forgotten to buy them and don’t want to make them, any wide noodle will do, as will letter pasta or penne…use what your family likes.
  12. Add the cooked pasta to the soup and continue simmering a few minutes longer.
  13. Of course you can eat this right away, but it gets better and better every day after that, which is good, because one turkey will make a lot of soup. Enough for a week of leftovers.

A few notes: This year, I had a heritage turkey, with little fat. This produced a great, clear broth, with very little fat and no need to skim.  My mother never added salt, but I’ve found that adding a tablespoon to the initial cooking helps with the final flavor of the soup. You can add extra meat at the end if you like, but I always leave enough on the carcass to fill out the whole recipe.

I’m sure many of you have your own versions, & I’m sure we’d all love to hear what they are.

turkey soup

This year’s soup, just before the final cooking

The Three Day No Cooking Feast

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by Lisa

By all accounts, Thanksgiving was about not cooking around here. That’s one reason for the dearth of posts about turkey.

The other reason is because the rest of the family was busy making the Thanksgiving movie, which I know all of you have been awaiting as eagerly as a new James Cameron flick, and the computer was tied up.  However, the computer crashed last night during the final render, so you just have to wait another day…but I promise you, it’s really funny. And historical.

But we did institute some new traditions around here and revive some old ones.  First we are now officially celebrating for 3 days, just like the Pilgrims.

Day 1:  We feasted at my husband’s parents new home with 4 generations, and it was a lovely day. I am very grateful to my mother- and grandmother-in-law for their cooking and hospitality. We brought them a bag of gorgeous Indian corn that we picked at the Fall Harvest Festival at Ardenwood farms, and big bouquet of Chrysanthamums, after Capote’s The  Thanksgiving Visitor, which Ella and I read in the weeks leading up to the holiday. It’s a gorgeous story, beautifully written, and even if it’s a little sophisticated in its language and content, it’s a story to grow on.

Day 2: We hosted old friends for a very casual afternoon of turkey sandwiches. I roasted what was probably the best turkey of my life, made stuffing from a box (which I would not do again).  Ella had made cranberry sauce in school, and we just set everything out on the counter and let people eat what, how and where they wanted.

The turkey recipe is simply this:

  • Take one heritage turkey, throw 3-4 whole bulbs of garlic and one bunch of sage inside the cavity.
  • Make garlic butter by mashing salt, 6-8 cloves garlic and about 6 tablespoons of butter, and rub this under the skin of the turkey all over the breasts and legs.
  • Add 3-4 more bulbs of garlic around the outside of the turkey in the pan, add 1/2 cup of wate.
  • Roast your turkey.  I am not going to weigh in on the high heat/low heat controversy regarding heritage turkeys. This year I did high heat (425 for just under 2 hours for a 12 pound turkey. I think it was too long. Next time, I’ll try slow & low.)
  • Pour off all of the fat and drippings. Get rid of most of the fat but save the drippings.
  • Make a quick pan sauce by deglazing the pan with white wine.  Add the drippings back in. Serve warm.

The flavor of this turkey is incredible: simple and slightly garlicky, with a nice hint of sage.  Aside from putting on the soup, which takes maybe 20 minutes total, this was the sum total of my cooking for the long weekend.

Even so, the highlight of the afternoon was definitely the desserts broughy by our incredibly talented friend, Lisa Chan. On offering were:

anchor steam porter cupcakes

Mini Chocolate Anchor Steam Porter cupcakes with Bailey’s Cream Cheese Frosting

apple_cupckaes

Mini Pumpkin cupcakes with cinnamon cream cheese frosting

apple tart

Individual apple tarts

pumpking tart

Individual pumpkin pie tarts, with fresh roasted pumpkins and dulce de leches

lisa_chan

Lisa Chan, baker of extraordinary bite-sized desserts.

Contact her at mama_chan@yahoo.com for your next event. You will not be sorry. She’s not just our friend, she has real clients, too!

To be quite honest, the kids ate dessert for dinner.

It was excellent to see our old friends again, with whom we’ve spent many Thanksgivings, and we’ve all agreed to get together every year on Day 2, if not Day 1 of this holiday. Growing up, my family spent every Thanksgiving with my mother’s best friend from grammar school and her very fun family. We alternated homes, ate a lot, and played an annual football game, christened the Turkey Bowl, for which we had a small trophy that was passed back and forth between the families.  There was  a lot of football watched, a lot of joking and convivial good humor (4 adults and 8 kids will do that) and a long, satisfyingly fun day.  So I love the idea of saving some of this holiday to spend in a very laid back way with old and dear friends.

Day 3:  We did nothing.  The soup simmered, Kory worked on the movie, Ella & I went to Nutcracker rehearsal, and later, we ate the first batch of soup and watched The Nightmare before Christmas. Finn had a meltdown because he can’t really eat and watch a movie at the same time, so some movie privileges were lost, and it was a very sad end of the day for him, but one meltdown in 4 days is really a success, and on the whole we had a very lazy, very relaxing, very peaceful, and very lovely holiday.  And for that we are grateful.

Tomorrow: Turkey Soup.

Soon: The Movie.

On Being Grateful for Not Cooking

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By Lisa

Thanksgiving is my least favorite holiday.  I love the long weekend. I love the movies Kory and the kids make.  I love spending time with whatever friends and family gather around the table with us, but the food and the origin pale for me in comparison to other feasts.  A turkey (and I’ve cooked organic, heirloom, local, etc….) just isn’t a leg of lamb and can never be a beef filet. The side dishes are okay, but I always like them better leftover, on sandwiches. It’s just always seemed like a helluva a lot of work for not enough payoff. Culinarily-speaking, that is.  I’ve done homemade pumpkin raviolis, pumpkin risotto, all manner of innovations, and the meal just leaves me tired and underwhelmed. In other words, the day is fine, the cooking I could do without.

So, I was especially grateful to spend the day with Kory’s sister last year, and this year we’re going to Kory’s parents new home, where 4 generations will gather and feast and I will not be cooking.

BUT, The catch is that much as I hate cooking Thanksgiving dinner, I am messianic about my Turkey soup, which is the most essential, most traditional, most important part of Thanksgiving food for us.  To not have a carcass for soup would just ruin my year. Last year, I took my sister-in-law’s turkey carcass home in the trunk of our car.

And this year, because our movie will be an historical one, about Pilgrims and which I will post as soon as it’s done…but you can read about the what and the why here we have learned that the first Thanksgiving was actually 3 days long. So, we’ve begun a new tradition: Day 1 is for extended family. On Day 2, I will roast a turkey–and only a turkey–and a few friends will join us for sandwiches and I will have my carcass for soup.  Day 3 will be our family + soup + watching movies instead of making them.

The soup has a  long, honored, idiosyncratic, patriarchal tradition in our family, and I’ll post it, with pictures.  And the movie.  Soon.

In the meantime, we’re thankful here for our family, our health, our friends, the abundance of good food on our table.  And the Pilgrims.

Recessionary Date Night

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by Lisa

Sometimes, you just have to compromise.  Thanks (many thanks, Paul) to a very old friend who also happens to be a sommelier + beverage director par excellence,  Kory and I got a last minute invitation to the first (free) test dinner at the soon-to-be opened Frances-SF the new endeavor of Melissa Perello.

We were lucky enough to find a last minute sitter, and made our way up to the city.  The thing is, I had been gone all afternoon at another function in San Francisco, which meant I had an hour in between arriving home and heading out again.  Which was, honestly, fine by me, but I was not going to spend that time cooking, and I did not want to pay for take out (the point being that this was that rarest of beasts–an inexpensive date night).  So the kids ate frozen pizza (not the good kind, but the mini ones I stash for Ella’s school lunch), broccoli, and strawberries for dessert.  I’m sort of chastened by the thought, but the kids were of course very perfectly content.  You should note that my standards are falling: they had eaten frozen pizza and (homemade) Caesar salad on Friday night (my house had just been cleaned so there was no way I was making my own pizza.  Also Kory and I have developed a minor addiction to TJ Frozen Tarte D’Alsace, a really excellent concoction of carmelized onions, cheese, ham on a pastry. It’s a great quick meal for us with a salad and a nice bottle of wine).

But it was all worth it, because we haven’t had a date night in a long time, much less at a great restaurant.  And aside from paying the sitter, the night was free because this was practice run for the staff.  But, even so,  even had we paid, I would be writing that the meal at Frances was terrific, and there were many, many highlights, among them a semolina gnocchi with duck confit and kale, which just might be one of the best dishes I’ve ever had. The pillow-like gnocchi were light as   air, the confit perfectly cooked. I could eat a big bowl of this everyday with a big glass of rustic Italian wine.  Also on offer were applewood bacon beignets, which were maybe the perfect party food:  smoky little bites of fried dough dipped in chive creme fraiche; and a lovely duck liver mousse.  There was more, and it was all good, and as soon as it’s opened if you’re in the Bay Area, you should go. Prices are moderate. And the house wine will be sold by the ounce.

What we learned: that there’s a lot that goes into opening a restaurant, that a new kitchen is sort of like a well-oiled machine in that it takes practice to get all the parts running together, on time, in exactly the way you want them to; that it’s okay once in a while to give your kids the equivalent of a TV dinner–especially if it means that mom and dad get to go out on the spur of the moment alone;  and it also reminded us that in these tough times, we should remember to support all the local arts as much as we can, including the culinary ones.

frances

ocean trout with celeraic puree, cumin, roasted cauliflower

Thanksgiving Without An Oven?

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by Caroline

oven
We alternate Thanksgivings either back east with my family, or in a beach rental here in California. For years, we shared the beach rental with my late mother-in-law, who would scout the rental kitchen ahead of time and pack boxes with good knives, mixing bowls, and her big white KitchenAid mixer, not to mention all the food. After she died, the kitchen scouting fell to me, and if I couldn’t check out the kitchen in advance, I channeled Nancy and presumed it was inadequate, packing my own rolling pin, pie pans and other baking dishes. I measured out the dry ingredients for breakfast pancakes, muffins, and pie fillings into Ziploc bags so that I didn’t have to bring many cookbooks (or count on finding measuring cups), carefully counted eggs (4 for pancakes, 3 for one pie, 2 for another – ah, better just bring two dozen) and made sure we had plenty of parsley and lemons for Tony’s stuffing.

But Thanksgiving back east is, logistically, easy. It’s a long trip, for sure — whether it’s at my parents’ or my sister’s, we travel 12 hours, door to door – but once we arrive, we can count on a well-stocked kitchen, good nearby markets, and lots of willing and talented cooks to help prepare the meal. Like any family, we have standard dishes we all want to see on the table (Mom’s brown and serve wheat germ rolls; whole berry cranberry sauce; an uncomplicated pumpkin pie) and we try new things every year, some of which join the annual menu (Sweet Potatoes Anna) and some of which just don’t (lentil and mushroom timbales).

This year, I’ve been really looking forward to Thanksgiving at my sister’s. I took the final issue of Gourmet to bed with me and started dog-earring recipes; we emailed a couple ideas back and forth. And then, she wrote that the oven had broken. It took a while to realize what was wrong; a nicely-browned cake turned out to be all gooey on the bottom, so she just flipped the thing over and baked it the rest of the way. It took a bit more cooking to realize the lower heating element wasn’t working. So while my sister put in calls to the repair people, tried to find a replacement part for her twenty-year-old oven, and polled her friends to see who wouldn’t be using their ovens on Thanksgiving, I started thinking about an ovenless Thanksgiving: barbecue the bird; make a hearty salad with pickled beets instead of roasted vegetables; bake individual pies in the toaster oven (I still might vote for individual pies: more crust!). My sister started pre-baking batches of Mom’s rolls in the toaster oven, and I considered making a vegetarian main dish soup instead of our usual roasted vegetable pot pie.

Today, my sister wrote to say that the oven is fixed. We won’t have to walk several blocks to use her friend’s (thanks for the offer, though!). We’ll be able to enjoy the smells of roasting and baking at home all day while we chop and stir together. We’ll only have to clean up one kitchen at the end of the day, not two. It would have been fine, and it would have made a great story. But this will be easier, and will likely also generate some great stories, since being together always does. Come back later next week, and I’ll share the final menu (here’s last year’s) — plus, of course, some recipes.

Happy Thanksgiving! Wishing you all a great meal and wonderful company.

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