It's All About the Goddamn Bird
Before I even crack the spine of our new cooking textbook (yes, it is a textbook complete with "thought questions" and quizzes. I keep carrying it around the house like I'm a student late for class), I have to deal with the more pressing issue of Thanksgiving. And keep up the ruse that I know what I am doing, Mum, and I don't need your help.
I do need your help, Mommy.
Since deciding that we would cook Thanksgiving dinner this year--a first--I have been watching the Food Network religiously, taking copious notes (and crossing out copious notes) on cooking the turkey. The turkey is my first big source of stress (please refer back to the fact that I am a kosher vegetarian). My second big source of stress (again, the kosher vegetarian thing) is the fact that I have pretty much no "fleshig" (a.k.a. meat) equipment--just a few ugly dishes from Bed Bath and Beyond, the cheapest pots I could find, and a very nice Calphalon frying pan that cannot help me right now.
A quick lesson about Kashrut (a.k.a. keeping kosher): the rules were not only designed to be humane, but to make cooking as difficult and as expensive as possible. You need to have two sets of everything because you cannot use measuring cups that have had dairy inside them when creating a meat meal. And while measuring cups are small and cheap, big stock pots are not, but you still need to have a dairy one for your cream soups and a meat one for your...meat soups. In addition, you sometimes have to side-step around recipes because they mix meat and milk--basting the turkey with butter, for instance. And sometimes you cannot make a recipe at all because it cannot be kosherized.
This is not the time to ask me why I do this.
The first dilemma is actually more problematic because I do not have a real game plan. I'm more at the stage where I'm going to go racing onto the court and try to blindly shoot the ball into the basket by throwing it over my shoulder. If it gets in, great. If it doesn't, I'll just sit down on the floor mid-court and sob.
I had a game plan. My game plan included brining the bird. Then I read through Joy of Cooking last night (mostly because the woman on Grey's Anatomy was reading Joy of Cooking and it seemed like a good idea even though I am soooooooooooooooo beyond Joy of Cooking and now in the realm of professional cooking school) and discovered that one does not brine a kosher turkey because it has already been salted. I called a butcher this morning who said in a decidedly vague tone of voice that "suuuuuuuuuuuuuure...I mean...yeah, you can brine a kosher turkey...what do you mean by brine?"
Which leaves me back at square one. No roasting pan. No cooling brining technique. And a bird ready for pick-up Wednesday morning.
I do need your help, Mommy.
Since deciding that we would cook Thanksgiving dinner this year--a first--I have been watching the Food Network religiously, taking copious notes (and crossing out copious notes) on cooking the turkey. The turkey is my first big source of stress (please refer back to the fact that I am a kosher vegetarian). My second big source of stress (again, the kosher vegetarian thing) is the fact that I have pretty much no "fleshig" (a.k.a. meat) equipment--just a few ugly dishes from Bed Bath and Beyond, the cheapest pots I could find, and a very nice Calphalon frying pan that cannot help me right now.
A quick lesson about Kashrut (a.k.a. keeping kosher): the rules were not only designed to be humane, but to make cooking as difficult and as expensive as possible. You need to have two sets of everything because you cannot use measuring cups that have had dairy inside them when creating a meat meal. And while measuring cups are small and cheap, big stock pots are not, but you still need to have a dairy one for your cream soups and a meat one for your...meat soups. In addition, you sometimes have to side-step around recipes because they mix meat and milk--basting the turkey with butter, for instance. And sometimes you cannot make a recipe at all because it cannot be kosherized.
This is not the time to ask me why I do this.
The first dilemma is actually more problematic because I do not have a real game plan. I'm more at the stage where I'm going to go racing onto the court and try to blindly shoot the ball into the basket by throwing it over my shoulder. If it gets in, great. If it doesn't, I'll just sit down on the floor mid-court and sob.
I had a game plan. My game plan included brining the bird. Then I read through Joy of Cooking last night (mostly because the woman on Grey's Anatomy was reading Joy of Cooking and it seemed like a good idea even though I am soooooooooooooooo beyond Joy of Cooking and now in the realm of professional cooking school) and discovered that one does not brine a kosher turkey because it has already been salted. I called a butcher this morning who said in a decidedly vague tone of voice that "suuuuuuuuuuuuuure...I mean...yeah, you can brine a kosher turkey...what do you mean by brine?"
Which leaves me back at square one. No roasting pan. No cooling brining technique. And a bird ready for pick-up Wednesday morning.
posted by Mum at 9:37 AM
3 Comments:
Came this way via NFPD's site. When I saw you were using "On Cooking", I just had to comment!
I'm in culinary school and the book we used for the first hands-on class was "On Cooking". Our chef, the first day, said she didn't much like the book but that it was the best one out there at the time (this was a few years ago). I hope it's a different edition than the one we used; it was pretty mediocre. The Culinary Insitute of America has a great book, though all its recipes are volume.
Anyway, I have a great recipe for brining, from Alton Brown, if you're interested. We use it every year and it's fantastic.
I concur. The Alton Brown brining recipe is very good.
So, is the turkey going to be a Tofurkey or the real thing?
We keep a kosher kitchen too. It wasn't terribly difficult for us because my husband had a whole set of dishes, pans, etc and I had a set so when we got married, we simply reorganized his kitchen and had a rabbi come to help us kasher it. We designated the dishwasher and stove for milk stuff and the BBQ fleshic. Oh, and hubby installed a second garbage disposal in the other side of the kitchen sink for me!
Neither of us has done this before, but it wasn't nearly as difficult as we had anticipated. The most difficult thing was giving up the varieties of non-kosher cheese. Kosher cheese just doesn't compare.
I imagine it would be quite difficult for a kosher vegetarian to make a thanksgiving dinner without all the duplicate equipment and all. Good luck!
Me? I'm 27 weeks pregnant and have no intention of cooking a turkey (never mind that I have a strong aversion to poultry right now) so we're bumming off someone else's Thanksgiving table and will just bring a home-made pie.
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