the easy way to roast a moist, flavorful turkey

Alrightey, ya turkeys– I’m excited to finally start heading down Thanksgiving road! At this point I’m going to need to run down Thanksgiving road in order to share all the recipes we tried at our Fake Thanksgiving dinner before the real thing, but for now let’s just focus on first things first. The turkey!

kitchen firsts: chicken drumsticks with hoisin glaze

I may have admitted before that as a child and young adult I always had a somewhat tense relationship with meat. I never abandoned meat entirely because of it (some things I just like too much), but encounters with gristly/bony/skin-covered/gelatinous/vein-containing meats occasionally left me teetering dangerously close to vegetarianism. My adolescent rule was always “don’t eat meat that looks like it came from an animal,” meaning that burgers, boneless skinless chicken breasts, and boneless pork chops were a-ok, but chicken or steak with bones or skin, dark meat of any kind, and ribs were all out (embarrassing admission no. 2: I’ve still never eaten ribs).

I realize that most people would argue that the list of kinds of meat I wouldn’t eat includes all of the best meats, and throughout my meat recovery program I’ve slowly started to agree. What’s more, my old policy is actually rather embarrassing now that I am trying for a more enlightened relationship with the meat I eat and the animals that produce it. But it’s hard to overcome years of self-brainwashing, so up until, well, now, drumsticks were one part of the chicken that I would avoid like the plague. While I’ve been assured that I’m wrong, they just look like they’re going to be stringy little slimeballs, and the idea of gnawing said meat off a bird’s leg bone is just not that appetizing to me. But, in the name of getting over my silly adolescent fears, and in the name of kitchen firsts, I decided it was high time to get over my aversion and make some drumsticks (read: Stephen made me).

kitchen basics: quick roasting a bone-in, skin-on chicken breast

I’d better start by admitting that I am kind of squeamish when it comes to chicken. I like eating it, but I’m kind of a baby when it comes to handling the raw stuff. Partly my mom has always instilled in me a fear of chicken germs, so I always visualize salmonella coating every surface of the kitchen, and partly it’s taken me some time to fully recover from my adolescent meat-eating policy of not eating anything that looks like it actually came from an animal. As much as I try not to let them, slimy, bony, covered-with-skin chicken breasts sometimes make me cringe. But recently I’ve been making some significant progress towards being less of a chicken-phobe and this is the simplest and best way I’ve learned to use a chicken breast to its fullest!

kitchen firsts: homemade ranch dressing + cobb-esque salad

We eat a lot of salads around here, but every time we make one for dinner I have to fight the part of me that thinks its kind of a cop-out of a meal. I mean, I totally love salads, but I kind of feel like it doesn’t count as cooking unless there is some kind of twist or extra component that beefs it up to entree level, like shiitakes and bacon, chicken and asparagus, or a really great homemade dressing. Plus, if we don’t toss is some tasty bonus ingredients, we always end up needing an after dinner snack an hour after dinner.

We’ve had a whole lot of lettuce and greens laying around for the past week, but with the hubbub of the last couple of weeks of school I really haven’t felt like cooking at all. Like, not even a bare-bones, lettuce and bottled dressing salad to go with our take-out pizza. But finally, with greens amundo getting wasted in the fridge, I decided I really had to make a salad, so we went all out and make an add-ins heavy classic, the cobb salad, with a couple of delicious twists.