A really long post about a really simple recipe

Last night I tinkered with a recipe in How to Cook Everything; and it turned out beautifully. I feel I need to write this all down before the dishes are done and the recipe goes cold in my mind.

First of all, I really like and respect Bittman’s recipes in How to Cook Everything. The illustrations, substitution ideas, and built-in timers (I have it for my Ipad) are really, really helpful for a novice like me. Also, the flavors are great. I highly recommend the purchase. I’ve made about half-a-dozen of the recipes so far and have used the cooking-technique illustrations with some regularity.

The base recipe is for cabbage and turkey breast with a slight Asian flair. I never on my own would have thought to add ginger and sesame oil to a cabbage dish (nor had I ever braised cabbage in my life!), but the nutty-ness of the oil combined with the flavorful cabbage was subtle and added a fresh tang I had not expected.

I had to tweak the recipe for three reasons: 1) my oven doesn’t have ‘temperatures’, it has ‘on’ and ‘off’ and that poses cook-time issues and can lead to dried-out meat (I did, in the end, over-cook the breast; but it was still juicy and flavorful thanks to the bacon and the tinfoil I’ll mention later). 2) Ingredients have to be altered in Cairo. You don’t just pop down to the market and find ‘fresh’ ginger any day of the week. You work with what is local and in-season. Also, I found light sesame oil, not dark as the recipe calls for; but was very pleased with the results using light. 3) I got my hands on some bacon yesterday, cut right off the hock in front of me in huge, fatty pieces - this is what one might call a BIG DEAL or, alternately, AWESOME, particularly as this is Egypt and access to quality pork products is a relatively new thing.

Ingredients:

a big ol’ Turkey Breast

a cabbage the size of a hubcap (that’s the only way they grow them here)

2 cloves of garlic, chopped

a bunch of spring onions, sliced this way and that

a few large, almost cartoon-like carrots (Bugs Bunny-style) sliced into wheels

3 tablespoons (deviation from the original recipe in that it called for tsps) GOOD olive oil (I like the stuff in the sliver cylinder)

generous drizzles of sesame oil

American Bacon; but not the pre-packaged stuff. If you can, get yourself to the butcher and watch him slice the bacon from the cured-side (side? hock? ham?) himself – you’ll thank me later.

So, here’s what I did (there aren’t any times here, because it was just ‘done when it was done’ – or, rather, overdone when it was past-done):

Turned on my oven so it could get toasty hot.

I braised ½ a head of rough-cut cabbage in 2 tablespoons of olive oil (it was a really big cabbage, as mentioned above) with two cloves of garlic over low/medium heat. The recipe said to add the cabbage first and add the garlic a few minutes later, but I like garlicky flavors, so next time I want to sweat the garlic in the olive oil before adding the cabbage. The recipe also called for ginger to be added a few minutes in, but I couldn’t get any, so I added chopped spring-onions (which are called for later in the recipe). Turned the cabbage with some salad tongs constantly to make sure it was all coated in oil and cooking evenly. When it was cooked-down and soft, I drizzled some light sesame oil on it and continued turning/stirring it over low heat for a few minutes before covering the pan and keeping it over a low flame (stirring it now and again to keep it from burning) while the breast was in the oven. The recipe says to ‘brown it’, but I kept it green on the low heat. I’m sure that changes the flavor, but I was happy with the results.

I got a ceramic casserole dish out instead of a non-stick pan. There is nothing to stick to the pan in this scenario and the thin, non-stick pan would have resulted in burnt goo. Coated the bottom of the dish in a half-tablespoon of olive oil (the recipe calls for a teaspoon here, but I really like olive oil!) laid down a bed of small-cut cabbage, placed turkey breast on top of cabbage, as per recipe. THEN, I laid three large strips of un-cooked bacon across the top of the breast and some sliced carrots around the turkey breast.

I tried to cook the breast un-covered, per the recipe; but was loosing the juicy-ness I wanted, so I covered the pan in tin-foil about 10 minutes in, which I should have done from the start. Once covered, bacon fat dripped into the cabbage and carrots and kept the breast moist in my ‘who knows what temp it is?’ oven.

When the breast should have been done, my meat thermometer said it wasn’t. Unfortunately, poking the breast with the thermometer sped up the cooking faster than I thought and a few minutes later it was over done :( Lesson learned on that one.

Anyway, the original recipe says to add the stove-braised cabbage to the pan in the oven when the breast is just short of done. I did this and the extra flavor was fantastic. Again, I re-covered it in the oven to make sure all the juices mingled instead of evaporating.

When the dish was done, I was meant to slice it for presentation, drizzle with sesame oil, and sprinkle with raw spring onions. I did slice and drizzle and sprinkle, but I left it in my pretty orange-and-brown casserole dish for serving so everything stayed warm and juicy.

For the starch, I made rustic mashed potatoes using olive oil and I can’t believe it’s not butter instead of butter and milk, and hand-mashed the potatoes. They ended up sitting a while and turning to a texture not-unlike pie crust when you cut-in the butter as it’s being prepared. This should have been a bit disastrous (Padma and Tom would not have been happy), but somehow it worked and the texture complimented the meal and my diners were happy – which is all that matters.

And that's how I made a simple recipe complicated and that’s how I made a delicious fall meal for my friends from a simple recipe! Hooray for my favorite time of year!