Veritable Quandary, Portland, OR

I have been skiing vigorously all day, and I’m as tired as a dog – so what you’re getting here is going to be a spot shorter than usual. Veritable Quandary (VQ to locals) is a bar and restaurant serving killer-fantastic cocktails, and food which is thoroughly decent if not extraordinary. It’s right next to the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland, with an excellent view of the Willamette river. Look out for the portrait on the inner wall of the conservatory featuring someone looking like a female, Victorian Charles Atlas.

The drinks are simply fantastic. At the top of the page is a VQ-8 – the house Bloody Mary, made with a home-infused beet vodka, making it a gorgeous, lurid magenta and giving the whole drink wonderfully earthy depth. Try the aromatic martini made with limoncello and a lavender-infused vodka (again, made in the bar) – wonderful stuff.

Another time, I think I might be tempted to visit VQ for their drinks and bar snacks alone. I had one of those bar snacks as a starter – these dates (left), wrapped in pancetta and stuffed with goat’s cheese and Marcona almonds. Lovely sticky, sweet, salty, crispy, squashy things to nibble alongside a drink. Dr W’s snackish starter was a very tasty rabbit terrine (below), served with huge hunks of fresh, toasted brioche, a couple of mustards and some chutney.

Main courses thrilled me less. Barbecued boneless beef short rib was always going to be unsophisticated, but the saucing was altogether too much, and the meat itself felt sad and overdone (although this could have been a result of a too-fierce sauce masking the joint’s own flavour). The barley risotto it was perched on top of, though, was great, full of chunks of apple and roast butternut squash. Dr W’s steak was…a steak. A perfectly nice steak, although we both felt we could have happily swapped it and the short rib for a few more of those far more interesting starters.

Full of meat and cocktails, we had two $1 truffles for dessert. They were sticky, dense and coated the inside of your mouth beautifully. I’ve since heard from friends that other desserts are also great – the home-made ice-creams and sorbets (look for flavours like roasted hazelnut, spiced cider and red wine-pomegranate) and the souffles got a particular mention. Head to VQ for views, cocktails, dessert and nibbles – and, like many other Portland restaurants, uncommonly attractive waiting staff. What’s going on there?

Tanuki, Portland, OR

Two pieces of background cultural information before we begin. First up, a Tanuki is an alcoholic, raccoon-dog, Japanese trickster god, who (as in the picture to the right) has a habit of using his scrotum as a disguise, an umbrella, a weapon, a makeshift bivouac and so forth. (If you’re one of those for whom one classical Japanese scrotum-humour Tanuki woodcut is not enough, see this page to get your fill.) He’s also a patron god of bars…which leads us to point two. The Portland joint named for Tanuki is not exactly a restaurant. It’s a very tiny izakaya – a sake bar offering salty, spicy foods to accompany the drinks. And woe betide you if you turn up here expecting sushi, because you’ll be a) disappointed and b) liable to be beheaded by the angry whirling blades of Janis Martin, a chef who just happens to offer one of the best-value and most aggressively delicious omakase menus I’ve sampled. (Janis says it’s not, strictly, an izakaya, but an akachochin – a sort of dive bar. Don’t believe her. This is top-quality dining in a place that just looks like a dive bar.)

We pushed open the door to find a little room seating only 16, lighting that felt like a photographic darkroom, a blue fug of savoury, perfumed steam coming from the kitchen, a soundtrack of post-punk theremin music, and a TV balanced on top of the sake fridge showing a Japanese chef disembowelling herself. (Comedy, I think. These things don’t necessarily translate, but they’re sure as hell fascinating.) I am not usually prone to snap judgements, but from the moment the picture on the television changed to three rubberised Japanese zombies whose eyeballs kept falling out, I was pretty sure I was going to like Tanuki.

The menu embraces Okinawan, Japanese and Korean dishes, all designed to complement (and get you to order more) sake and beer. If you’re familiar with Korean seasoning and heat, you’ll be at home with what’s going on on the plates here. What’s on offer changes daily, but you can expect to find tofu made fresh in-house, real grated wasabi, local and impeccably raised meats, home-made pickles and some extravagantly weird spicing on the list every day.

Tanuki is pretty uncompromising; this is not a menu that panders to the daft and squeamish. ‘Crab brain’ miso, Japanese drinking vinegars and tiny duck hearts threaded on a bamboo skewer take pride of place. The bar is in-your-face scuzzy, the food designed to cram every taste bud you own with sensation. I chatted briefly with Janis about the off-beat setup here, and she mentioned something that drives me mad in Europe and clearly drives her mad in America too – the tendency of new ethnic restaurants to cater solely to high-end, top-class diners. None of your gleaming walls, shimmering waitresses and horrendously overpriced sushi here, more’s the joy. Somehow, I suspect that eel on a stick simply wouldn’t taste as good with a cloth napkin, anyway.

Order sake, and plenty of it. We chose a Korean gukhwaju – a rice wine flavoured with mountain chrysanthemum. Those intimidating-sounding drinking vinegars are actually delicious, and are a good non-alcoholic way to calm burning tongues; there’s only the slightest hint at an acidic fermentation behind a sweet mulberry, plum or strawberry syrupiness that seems designed to quench and soothe.

You can order directly from the menu, or pick a price-point for an omakase meal selected by the chef. We asked the waitress (helpfulness in human form – what I wouldn’t give for a dose of American service culture back in the UK) what sort of amount she recommended two hungry people spend, and she said that $20 a head should be plenty for a full meal. Ten courses later, we left reeling and plump. Two dollars a course per head!

Dishes seemed to get larger as the night progressed. We opened with a soft and meaty hamachi tuna sashimi, seasoned with some of that fresh wasabi and shoyu. We’d barely finished it when a dish of creamy and impeccably fresh uni sashimi (alive, says Janis, until the moment she orders it), on paper-thin slivers of lemon with sweet soy and more of that wasabi arrived. Hoshi kyui, a jellyfish, cucumber and wild herb salad in a hot and sour dressing, packed a fish-sauce umami bite that had us reaching for the drinks and then dipping straight back into the salad the moment we’d swallowed every mouthful. Skewered eel fillets in a sweet soy glaze, oily, salty and crisp, arrived fresh and hot from the grill, accompanied by some of the pickles that are made weekly in the kitchen.

Nasu to ebi nikkei was one of the larger dishes, and came with pearl-like sticky, short-grain polished rice. Elegantly de-veined shrimp, so fresh that they gave to the teeth with a crunch, were poached in a cinnamon tea, and served with a miso-dense eggplant and bok choi preparation. Things were starting to get seriously spicy by now, and our thoughtful server arrived with a pitcher of iced water.

The kitchen uses a huge number of different soy sauces. Shiro, tamari – you name it, it’s probably represented somewhere on the menu. We had two delicate, light meat balls made from wild boar, which came drenched with a gummy, sugary Korean soy.

Suki wagarashi nearly had me beaten. These pork ribs, cooked until the meat was falling stickily and glutinously from the bone, were rubbed in a Japanese mustard and sesame marinade that packed so much heat that I stopped being able to feel my lips. Fortunately, the next couple of courses stepped back from the spice a bit – lonngganisa, a fatty, porky Pinoy sausage, came sandwiched between two deliciously crisp and cooling slices of fresh grilled lotus root. And joy of joys – a baked char siu bun.

They saved the best, spiciest, saltiest and largest dish for last. Jajang bop – a huge claypot stuffed to the brim with steaming hot rice layered with shredded, salted, gelatinous pork, cubes of the kitchen’s fresh tofu and some unbelievably tasty fermented black beans. A raw egg lay on top with a generous portion of kim chee, dosed with a sinus-clearing amount of chillies, some fresh herbs and fat, long beansprouts. We stirred the bowl with chopsticks to scramble the egg through the hot rice, and kept on eating long after our distended stomachs and burning tongues were screaming to our brains to stop.

The lighting (and my fear of chefly beheading – Janis seems quite strict) stopped me from taking any pictures of what we ate, but there are plenty on Tanuki’s own website if you want to get a feel for the look of things; they’re very accurate depictions of what you end up eating. I only get to spend about one week a year in Portland, if that, and it’s fast becoming one of my favourite cities for eating in the world. Something has to be done about this parlous state of affairs; I wonder how the guys at Tanuki would feel if I turned up in their garden with a raccoon-dog-scrotum tent and set up house?

Pommes Sarladais – French garlic potatoes

In my mental spreadsheet of The Very Best Things You Can Do With A Potato (everyone should have one of these), Pommes Sarladais come in near, if not at, the very top. If you visit the Dordogne region of France, you’ll find these on every menu; in this area where duck and goose farming is so common, and the fat from those birds so ubiquitous in cookery, this preparation of potatoes comes as naturally as breathing.

This is an intensely rich, garlicky recipe. The peeled potatoes are par-boiled, then sautéed in generous amounts of duck or goose fat until golden and crisp. In the last few minutes, pulverised garlic is briskly stirred through the hot fat and crunchy potatoes, and finally the finished dish is tossed with a handful of aromatic, fresh parsley. This is an ideal accompaniment for duck confit, roast chickens, dense and boozy stews – almost anything rich and European. (Insert Silvio Berlusconi joke here.)

Choose a floury potato for this recipe. I like King Edward potatoes here – if you can’t find any, try Desiree, which have a pleasant sweetness that works well against the robust flavour of the garlic. I’m recommending a more generous amount of potato per person than you might expect here, simply because this is so tasty that people do tend to overeat. The semolina dusting doesn’t make it into the standard French recipe, but I gave it a whirl after hearing about the Nigella Lawson semolina trick with English roast potatoes, and found that it raises the golden crispiness to a simply heavenly level around the soft interior of each bite – this dish is the mouth-feel equivalent of about 80 naked, silky angels bopping lewdly to the best bits of ABBA. Admittedly, Pommes Sarladais are full of all those things you’re meant to be avoiding after Christmas like animal fat and carbs, but I’m convinced that the joyful endorphins you’ll produce while munching on them more than make up for that. So to serve four, you’ll need:

1kg King Edward or Desiree potatoes
5 heaping (and I mean heaping) tablespoons duck or goose fat
5 large, juicy cloves garlic
1 large (hand-sized) bunch flat-leaf parsley
1 tablespoon semolina flour
Generous amounts of salt

Peel the potatoes, and cut them into squares of about 1 inch. Bring a large pan of water to the boil and drop the potatoes in. Bring back to the boil and simmer for four minutes. While the potatoes are simmering, bring the duck or goose fat to a high temperature in your very largest frying pan. (If you don’t have one large enough to house all the potato chunks in a single layer, split the dish between two pans.)

Drain the potatoes well in a colander, and return them to the saucepan you parboiled them in. Sprinkle over a heaped tablespoon of semolina flour and toss the potatoes well. The semolina should be coating the potato chunks unevenly – tossing the potatoes will have caused their edges to bang up against each other and become craggy and fluffy.

Ladle the semolina-coated potatoes into the hot fat in a single layer. Cook, turning every few minutes, until the potatoes are evenly crisp and gold (about 20 minutes). As you turn, you may feel that the pan is becoming dry – if this is the case, add another tablespoon of duck or goose fat.

While the potatoes are cooking, pulverise the garlic by crushing or grating. When the potatoes are gold, add the garlic to the pan and toss the potatoes around the pan for four minutes to make sure all the garlic cooks and is distributed throughout the whole dish.

Remove the cooked potatoes to a large bowl and toss with the chopped parsley and a generous sprinkling of salt (these can take a lot of salting, which is an excellent excuse to do some tasting as you season). Serve immediately.

Garlic butter roast chicken

I’m back in Portland for the week (and I’m spending the next few weeks in the US too, so look forward to some restaurant reviews). I’ve a couple of recipes from last week to post, and in the meantime I am applying myself assiduously to Portland’s fantastic cafés, in order that I can supply those of you who visit the city with a good round-up of places to pootle around in an intellectual fashion, getting caffeinated and taking advantage of free wireless internet.

Anyway. The chicken. This is a chicken flash-cooked at a very high temperature with a garlic butter under the skin. This technique results in a moist, juicy bird which you don’t need to baste or turn, and a gorgeously crisp, garlicky skin. The pan juices are fantastic for making a gravy with, but they’re also delicious just drizzled over the carved chicken as they are.

The cooking time below will be good for a bird weighing about 1.5kg (3lb) – enough to serve three or four people. To roast one chicken, you’ll need:

1 chicken weighing about 1.5kg
5 large, juicy cloves of garlic
Zest of 1 lemon
125 g softened salted butter
2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley
1 tablespoon olive oil
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 230°C (450° F). Crush the garlic (I used something called a Garlic Card – a little grating device the size of a credit card which my mother-in-law Santa gave me for Christmas), zest the lemon and chop the parsley, and blend them with the butter using the back of a fork.

Starting at the neck of the chicken, use your fingers to loosen the skin from the breast. You should be able to separate it from the flesh by pushing with your fingertips until you’ve made a pocket that covers the whole breast. Take the softened garlic butter mixture and push it into the pocket you’ve made, making sure it covers the breast evenly. Reserve two teaspoons of the butter, and push them into the space between the bird’s legs and body. Salt the outside of the bird generously and drizzle it with olive oil.

Put the chicken on a baking tray high in the hot oven, and roast for one hour. Check that the chicken is cooked by pushing a skewer into the fattest part of the bird, just behind the thigh. The juices should run clear; if they are still pinkish (which is highly unlikely), roast for another ten minutes and repeat the test.

Rest the bird for ten minutes before carving. I served this with Pommes Sarladaise, a wonderful garlicky French potato dish – watch this space for the recipe!

Recipes of All Nations

Regular readers will be aware that I’m a bit of a sucker for old recipe books – the odder, the better. Over Christmas, I was pootling around a second-hand bookshop in Yorkshire, when I came across this fabulously racist dust jacket. Flicking through it, I found some really interesting recipes, and started to wonder. Who was this Countess Morphy? Had she ever met a toque-wearing, pirate-earringed, Indian chef in real life? It was £8.50, so I snapped it up.

A bit of Googling reveals that the author wasn’t a countess at all. Marcelle Azra Hincks, born in 1883, was brought up in New Orleans and moved to England some time in her early twenties. She published a few articles and a slim book on modern and foreign dance, and then reinvented herself as a food specialist, complete with a new pseudonym and made-up title. Calling herself a countess was a stroke of genius; the British love a titled lady, and Recipes of All Nations, published in 1935, sold in huge numbers, remaining in print for decades.

There’s a proud little note in red inside the dust jacket: “This is the book that was consulted by the caterer to the London conference of the United Nations.” The book’s exotic credentials don’t stop there; Countess Morphy has drafted in the help of a Mr SK Cheng of the Shanghai Emporium and Restaurant in London’s Chinatown for her Chinese chapter; the proprietor of a London Greek restaurant and “former chef to members of the Royal Family of Greece” helps with the Greek chapter, and a friend at the Polish Embassy selects his favourite recipes for the Polish section. This book, with chapters on food from Equatorial Guinea (iguana fricassee) to Java, must have been outlandishly exotic in 1930s Britain – it was written more than ten years before Elizabeth David introduced Mediterranean cooking to wide-eyed Britain, at a time when we were all munching miserably on suet and mutton.

Countess Morphy takes us on a tour of classical European cooking; the French chapter is the longest and quite gorgeous, full of dishes enriched with yolks and cream. Alongside all this, though, there’s a pleasingly complete treatment of Scandinavian cookery, with Norway, Sweden and Denmark meriting a chapter each. Eastern Europe is covered in detail too, and the Russian chapter (on which a Madame N Wolkoff from the Russian Tea Room in London consulted) has me salivating – sturgeon with sweet wine and cherries, beef Strogonoff and stuffed grouse with soured cream.

A middle-class upbringing in New Orleans would have seen classical French food as standard, but there’s also a section towards the back of the book, quite distinct from the chapter on American food, devoted to the Creole cookery of New Orleans itself. I’ll leave you with Countess Morphy’s recipe for Creole breakfast fritters and its sadly nostalgic introduction – there’s something of a sense of homesickness in this recipe. These fritters, made from rice and raised with yeast are quite unlike anything I’ve come across before, but they sound delicious.

Calas (Breakfast rice fritters)

These delicious breakfast fritters or cakes were sold by the old Creole negro women, and their familiar and harmonious street cry of “Bel calas, bel calas, tout chauds!” was heard in all the streets of the French quarter at breakfast time. They went their daily round carrying on their heads a covered wooden bowl containing the hot Calas – picturesque figures they must have been, with their brightly coloured bandana tignons or head-dress, their blue check dresses and their spotless white aprons. The negro cooks would dash out to secure the freshly made hot Calas, which were eaten with the morning cup of coffee. The following is the traditional recipe for Calas:

Ingredients: ½ a cup of rice, 3 cups of water, 3 eggs, 3 tablespoons of flour, ½ a cup of sugar, about 1 oz or a little under of yeast, lard or oil.

Method: Put the water in a saucepan, bring to the boil and add the rice. Boil till the rice is very soft and mushy. Remove from the saucepan and, when quite cold, mix with the yeast dissolved in warm water. Set the rice to rise overnight. In the morning, beat the eggs thoroughly, add them to the rice, with the sugar and flour. Beat all well and make into a thick batter. Set aside to rise for another 15 minutes. Have ready a deep frying pan with hot oil or lard, drop into it 1 tablespoon of the mixture at a time, and cook till a light golden colour. When done, remove them from the fat, drain well by placing them on a sieve or in a colander, sprinkle with sugar and serve very hot.

Basque chicken

I seem to get through an awful lot of bell peppers at this time of year, when sunshine is a dim and distant memory. This dish is a rich and glossy version of the traditional Poulet Basquaise, where the sweetness of the peppers works deliciously against tiny pieces of salt pork and the savoury chicken.

I got hold of a strip of salt pork from the Polish deli in Newmarket. (Just off Fred Archer Way, by the short-stay carpark on Wellington St.) A lot of towns, especially here in East Anglia, now have Polish stores selling some really fantastic preserved meats like smoked sausages and fat salt pork. I’ve also been using our local one to stock up on soused herrings, some great pickles and the holy grail – cartons of cherry juice. If you have a Polish shop near you, go in at the weekend and have a rummage; you’ll find some really interesting ingredients and, if you’re lucky, will discover a new addiction to that cherry juice.

Salt pork is much fattier than English bacon, and it’s not smoked. Stock up if you find some; it keeps for months in the fridge. There should be more fat in a slice than meat. Here, I’ve rendered it down into crisp little nuggets, and have used the rich rendered fat to brown the chicken and soften the vegetables in this dish. If you can’t find salt pork where you are, fatty pancetta or even fatty bacon lardons will do the job nicely. To serve four, you’ll need:

100g salt pork
4 large chicken breasts
½ teaspoon caster sugar
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon pepper
2 tablespoons paprika
1 teaspoon fennel
3 bayleaves
1 teaspoon dried pimento chillies

2 red peppers
2 green peppers
1 yellow pepper
4 cloves garlic

1 banana shallot
1 medium onion
4 stalks celery
2 glasses wine
2 glasses chicken stock
500g passata
1 tablespoon tomato purée
2 tablespoons crème
fraîche
Salt and pepper
Parsley to garnish

Slice the peppers into strips, and put them aside in a bowl. Put the diced shallot and onion and diced celery in another bowl with the crushed garlic. Rub the chicken breasts with the sugar, salt and pepper.

Cut the salt pork into small dice (about half a centimetre) and put in a large, heavy-based casserole dish. Cook over a low to medium heat, stirring occasionally, until all the fat has rendered out and the dice of pork are tiny and golden. Turn the heat up to medium-high and brown the whole chicken breasts on all sides in the fat. When they are golden all over, remove them to a plate with a slotted spoon. Turn the heat back down to medium-low.

Add the paprika, bay leaves, crushed chillies and fennel seeds to the pan with the shallots, onion, celery and garlic. Sauté in the remaining fat (adding a little olive oil if you think it’s necessary) for about five minutes, until the vegetables are soft. Add the peppers to the pan and cook for another five minutes, keeping everything on the move, then return the chicken to the pan along with any juices, stirring well so the paprika mixture coats everything.

Add the wine to the dish, and let it bubble up to a simmer. Pour in the stock and passata and stir a tablespoon of concentrated tomato purée through the mixture. Put the lid on and simmer for 30-40 minutes. Stir through the crème fraîche just before serving, and garnish with parsley.

I served this with sautéed potatoes. It’s also great with buttered rice and a salad.

Christmas stuffing and chipolatas

I mentioned the other day that you’re best off not stuffing the cavity of a turkey or, for that matter, a chicken – it increases the cooking time to an unacceptable length, and quite honestly, stuffing is just nicer prepared outside the bird, where it has a chance to go crispy on the outside. The trimmings are one of the most important parts of a Christmas dinner, but they can be a bit of a faff to prepare, so I like to assemble and cook mine on Christmas Eve, and heat them up at the last minute on Christmas Day – you really can’t tell that the stuffing and chipolatas have been reheated, and they’re absolutely delicious.

Buy the very best chipolatas you can find. I was in Yorkshire for Christmas, and went to Booths, which is a simply fantastic supermarket. Quality and choice here is better than at any of the supermarkets we have here in Cambridgeshire (even Waitrose); I ended up with a pack of chipolatas flavoured with chestnut purée which were as good as any butcher’s sausage. Unfortunately, Booths only operates in Lancashire, Cheshire, Cumbria and Yorkshire, so the rest of us are stuck with having to make a trip to the butcher’s for the chipolatas and for the sausage meat which goes in the stuffing, which should be of the best quality you can find.

For Christmas trimmings (or trimmings for any poultry or game you happen to be roasting for a non-Christmas occasion) you’ll need:

Stuffing
85g Paxo sage and onion stuffing mix (I know, I know – bear with me here)
250g good-quality sausage meat
1 Braeburn apple
2 banana shallots
1 pack vacuum-sealed chestnuts
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh sage
75g butter
Boiling water
Salt and pepper

Chipolatas
16 chipolata sausages
16 strips pancetta

Paxo stuffing mix? Well, despite the memories you may have of childhood Paxo made up by your grandmother to the packet instructions (dusty, squashy and very little fun), it works really, really well when you combine it with sausage meat. The recipe for Paxo is more than a hundred years old; it was invented by a Manchester butcher in 1901. I’m using it here because the wheat and barley rusk that forms the crumbs contains a bit of raising agent, which will make the texture of your stuffing very light, with a crisp outside – and the dried sage and onion are actually really good against a porky background.

Put the stuffing mix in a large mixing bowl with the butter, and pour over boiling water, according to the packet instructions. Stir well and cover with a teatowel while you chop the apple, shallots and chestnuts into small, even dice, and chop the sage finely. When you’re done, the stuffing mix should be cool enough to handle. Use your fingers to mix the sausage meat very thoroughly with the stuffing mix, then add the chopped apple, shallots and chestnuts and sage with a little salt and some pepper, and mix with your hands until everything is evenly distributed. Form into spheres about the size of a ping-pong ball and lay on well-greased baking trays. (The stuffing balls will almost certainly stick a bit, but you can prise them off relatively easily with a stiff spatula.)

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Wrap each sausage in a strip of pancetta. You don’t need to secure these with a toothpick (as well as saving you time, this also avoids any Christmas day toothpick-embedded-in-palate accidents). Arrange the sausages on another well greased tray.

Bake the sausages and stuffing balls for between 35 and 45 minutes (the cooking time will depend on the characteristics of the sausages and sausage meat you have chosen). The stuffing balls should be browning and crisp on the outside, and the pancetta crisp and golden. Remove from the trays when cooled, and move the stuffing balls and wrapped sausages to oven-proof bowls. When you come to serve them, just reheat at 180°C (350°F) for 12 minutes.

Cranberry sauce and bread sauce

These two sauces, one American and one thoroughly, thoroughly English, are an essential part of my Christmas dinner – it’s just not Christmas without them. Cranberries are incredibly tart when raw, and I consider them pretty inedible (despite the Finnish habit of eating them raw, with shaved ice and caramel). This recipe is very easy, and it transforms them; cooked until they pop with sugar and a lovely lemony liqueur, a lot of the bitterness vanishes. The sauce is the perfect accompaniment to your turkey or goose on Christmas day, or to some Christmas Eve ham.

If your only experience of bread sauce so far is the stuff you reconstitute from a packet, you are likely to have read the title of this post, pulled a face and sworn never to make it yourself. You’ll be missing a treat – made properly, it’s a creamy, fragrant cloud that you’ll find yourself slathering all over a good roast dinner, potatoes and all. The trick is in infusing the milk with aromatics like bay, shallots and plenty of cloves for a good long time, so that the sauce is rich with flavour. (A bad bread sauce is a bland nightmare.) I make this year-round, and it’s great with any roast poultry or game birds. It’s also extremely good cold as part of a Boxing Day leftovers sandwich.

The cranberry sauce can be made well in advance, and keeps for weeks, covered, in the fridge. All the preparation for the bread sauce (setting the milk to infuse, making the breadcrumbs) can be done the night before you eat, which means that you won’t be in such a rush to pull the different elements of your meal together on Christmas Day.

To make the cranberry sauce you’ll need:

350g raw cranberries
200g sugar (granulated or caster)
30ml Limoncello liqueur
zest of 1 lemon
60ml water

This is hopelessly easy. Just stick all the ingredients in a small saucepan, bring to a brisk simmer and cook for 10-15 minutes, until all the cranberries have popped. You’ll be able to hear the individual berries pop as they heat up, which is somehow rather pleasing. The cranberries are full of pectin, so the sauce will solidify as it cools. Keep it in the fridge until you need it, and stir through briskly before serving so it doesn’t look like a chunk of jelly.

To make the bread sauce, you’ll need:

1l full-fat milk
200g fresh breadcrumbs (just put 200g of crustless white bread in the food processor and whizz)
3 bay leaves
1 sprig thyme
2 shallots
20 cloves
10 black peppercorns
100g salted butter
100ml double cream
1 teaspoon salt

Cut the shallots in halves and press the cloves into them. Put them in a large saucepan with the milk, bay leaves, thyme, peppercorns and salt. Warm the milk to the barest simmer – the milk should be shuddering rather than bubbling. Remove from the heat, cover the pan and leave it in a warm place overnight. (I put mine on top of the boiler.)

About an hour before you plan to eat, sieve the solid ingredients out of the milk and return the liquid to the pan. Bring to a gentle simmer and stir in the breadcrumbs and cream. Remove from the heat again and lay a piece of cling film right on top of the sauce (this stops it forming a skin). The breadcrumbs will swell with the milk, stiffening the sauce. When you are ready to serve the bread sauce, bring it up to a simmer again and stir in the butter. Taste for seasoning, adding more salt if you think it needs it.

Roast turkey

Only twelve months early for your Christmas turkey, and eleven months early for your Thanksgiving turkey, here’s a roasting technique that will make even the most fibrous, leaden bird a moist, crisp-skinned joy. (Not that this one started out either fibrous or leaden – Dr W’s parents bought it from Lishman’s in Ilkley, which is one of those butchers that has almost as many awards as they do pork chops on display – and with good reason. This was a beautiful turkey.)

Turkey is a troublesome meat. It seems that whoever designed the bird constructed it to be difficult and dry – the fibres in the meat are very long and can tend towards stringy; and any bird this large (ours was 14 pounds, which is heavier than both of my cats put together) is at risk of drying out while you try to make sure it’s cooked through. There are, however, some features of the turkey which make it really worth cooking at least once a year, not least its fantastically delicious skin, which, if cooked like this, will turn mahogany-brown, caramelised and crisp. I caught several members of the family peeling skin off the carcass and eating it standing up in the kitchen, which is always a good sign. The bird’s liver is also excellent. It’s rich and creamy, and is really worth saving to enrich your gravy with (of which more later).

So what’s the trick to achieving a moist flesh and crisp skin? It’s as easy as anything – remember that post from 2008 about my experiments with brining? I scaled things up from the jointed chickens I’d been working with earlier, and brined the whole turkey in a savoury, Christmas-y, spicy mixture for two nights. You’ll need a big vessel to do this in. I bought a cheap dustbin from the hardware store, and thought I was being original and clever until Dr W’s Dad, whose own father was a butcher, said that bins were the brining vessels of choice when he was a boy in his Dad’s shop, helping to brine huge cows’ tongues. There’s nothing new under the sun. The really good news about the brining is that it makes the flesh so moist you won’t have to turn the turkey onto its breast partway through cooking. (Anybody who has ever tried to turn a searingly hot turkey partway through cooking will be punching the air with joy on reading this.)

Put your turkey in the brine two nights before you plan to cook it. This amount of brine should be sufficient to cover turkeys up to 20+lb – and if you’re cooking a turkey bigger than that, I have news for you. That’s not a turkey. It’s a pterodactyl. Ours was 14lb, and was submerged nicely. To make the brine, you’ll need:

9 litres cold water
325g salt
300g sugar
Zest and juice of 1 lemon, 1 lime and 1 orange
4 tablespoons cider vinegar
8 tablespoons maple syrup
8 tablespoons honey
1 large onion, grated
1 large knob ginger, grated
6 cloves garlic, squashed
1 handful each oregano, parsley, tarragon, chives, ripped and squashed with your hands
10 peppercorns, crushed
2 teaspoons fennel seeds, ground in mortar and pestle
1 large tin pineapple in juice, crushed with masher

For the inside of the bird, the glaze and the giblet stock you’ll need:

1 large onion
1 lime
1 tangerine
1 lemon
200g salted butter plus a tablespoon for frying the liver
4 tablespoons maple syrup
giblets from the turkey
1 shallot
1 carrot
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon flour
1 glass red wine
salt and pepper

Combine all the brine ingredients in your carefully cleaned bin, and stir with a wooden spoon until all the salt and sugar have dissolved. The pineapple is important. It has an enzymatic action on the protein of the turkey, making the flesh softer and more moist – it also tastes fantastic. Lower the turkey in carefully (don’t drop it in – it’ll splash and you may tear the skin) and leave the bin, covered with a sheet of cling film and its lid, in a cold place until the morning you want to cook it. Outside the back door should be fine in cold December, unless you live in an area with foxes, in which case the coldest part of the garage is probably preferable.

Turkey, brined or otherwise, is at its best when cooked quickly. Don’t stuff the bird (not even the neck) – this will just make the cooking time unacceptably long. I’ll be providing a recipe for stuffing cooked separately later this week.

Remove the turkey from the brine two hours before you intend to cook it to allow it to come to room temperature. Push a quartered large onion, a halved lime, a halved tangerine and a halved lemon into the bird’s cavity. Preheat the oven to 220°C (430°F) when you are ready to start cooking, and make a stock by simmering all the giblets except the liver (which you should save in a bowl until you make the gravy) in a litre of water in a covered pan with some salt, a halved shallot, a peeled carrot and a bay leaf while you cook the turkey. Melt together 200g of salted butter and 4 tablespoons of maple syrup, and use the mixture to baste the turkey before it goes into the oven. Cook at this high temperature for 30 minutes. The turkey should already be turning golden brown. Baste again, cover with tin foil, and lower the temperature to 180°C (350°C), basting every twenty minutes or so with the butter and maple syrup mixture. For the last 15 minutes of cooking, remove the foil and baste again.

Cooking times for different weights of turkey are as follows:

  • 5lb – 1½ hours
  • 8lb – 1¾ hours
  • 10lb – 2 hours
  • 12lb – 2½ hours
  • 15lb – 2¾ hours
  • 17lb – 3 hours
  • 20lb – 3½ hours
  • 25lb – 4½ hours

Poke with a skewer behind the thigh joint to make sure the bird is done (if it is, the juices will run clear – nay, spurt, if you’ve brined it – they should not be pinkish), and rest the finished bird for 20 minutes before serving. This will give you time to make the gravy. Sauté the liver in a tablespoon of soft butter until it is just cooked, and use the back of a spoon to push it through a sieve into a bowl. Skim all but a few tablespoons of fat from the pan juices from the turkey and discard, and with the roasting pan on a low heat on the hob, whisk the flour into the remaining fat and the meat juices. When the flour is blended with the fat, tip in the wine and whisk as it bubbles up. Add a couple of ladles of the giblet stock until the gravy is the texture you want, then whisk in the sieved liver. Add any more juices which have come from the resting turkey, and season to taste.

Over this week, I’ll be posting all the trimmings you need to go with your Christmas dinner – bread and cranberry sauces, stuffing balls, chipolatas in pancetta, some really fantastic roast potatoes and (cough) sprouts. I realise it’s early in the year, but these are all fantastic with roasts year-round, they’re fresh in my mind, and you have a bookmark button if you want to save all this to read for Christmas 2009.