The Big V

A couple months ago, around easter, Safeway had a deal where if you bought a turkey under 16lbs you could get it for 99cents a pound.  This price was too good to pass up so Melisa and I immediately trekked out and procured a 15lbs bird, obviously wanting to make the most of this sale.   Since then this turkey has been sitting in our deep freeze, waiting for it’s time to shine, and today it shined so bright.

In preparation for today’s feast yesterday over lunch I bought ingredients for the stuffing.  (a good homemade stuffing is the key to a turkey dinner)

16 or so nice big fresh mushrooms, a couple onions, some celery, and the pièce de résistance:

2 fresh challah loaves.  If you have never had stuffing made from challah you are missing out.

The turkey itself spent about 24 hours hanging out in the sink taking a nice bath in cold water, here’s a look at the little guy:

He was such a champ!

Next it was time to cut up the veggies, fry them up, and then cube the bread:

We were a bit ambitious on the amount of stuffing we wanted to make but it’s just so delicious.

After the turkey finished its thaw we rubbed it down in salt, pepper, rosemary, and a healthy portion of paprika.

I forgot to take a picture of the ‘process’ of combining the stuffing mixture together but through the help of a couple cubs of chicken broth and a couple eggs and a bunch of poultry seasoning (it got a bit messy) the mixture was ready to be stuffed into the turkey like so:

It was a tight fit but we managed to get it all in there! (again a bit ambitious with the amount of stuffing!):

Turkey and stuffing just barely fit into our roaster, the lid wouldn’t exactly close all the way but that was no problem.  We cooked the turkey at 325 for an hour and a half and then basted it with it’s juices every 30 minutes.  After 4 hours total he was ready.

Holy cow, does that look good or what!  Also if I didn’t mention it already we were a bit ambitious with the amount of stuffing we made:

There was still more in there that I didn’t discover until the carving process!  I tried a new method of carving today where you slice the legs right off and then slice the breasts off the turkey before slicing up the breasts themselves:

I think it turned out pretty well!:

Here’s the full spread!  Melisa made way too many mashed potatoes, there were still some in the pot that didn’t even make it into the bowl.

After carving the rest of the carcass we had an insane amount of leftovers:

Good thing turkey sandwiches are so delicious!

For the past few years Melisa and I have been living in apartments that either don’t have balconies or don’t allow barbecues, this has not gone over well with my stomach as I love to BBQ.  I’ve been searching for ways to successfully cook up a good steak indoors and thus far have always met with failure.  This failure finally ended tonight after cooking The Butter Steak.

Unfortunately I don’t own a Cast Iron Skillet and have never gotten around to finding a good place to buy one in Vancouver, further to that I have no idea where the broil pan is that came with my stove so the two common high heat short cook time methods of indoor steaking have never been an option for me.  I’ve tried numerous times to cook a steak on the stove top in a nonstick pan but it has never worked out, yesterday though in the Something Awful forum’s ‘Goons with Spoons’ section I stumbled across a thread dedicated to steaks and therein lay my answer, a medium heat long cook time approach to steak that I have never heard of before.  Basically it involves using the maillard reaction through butter to give the a nice crust even at a medium heat but also to keep the meat rare to medium rare with a long cooking time.  For a better explanation of the cooking process as well as instructions and fancy pictures I highly recommend you visit The Paupered Chef’s page dedicated to the process.  This in turn will lead you to an egullet article on the methods that started the ball rolling and has more info on how to cook the perfect butter steak.

I used a boneless rib eye (bone ins aren’t yet ‘in season’ at Save On apparently), slightly more than 1 pound in weight that was maybe an inch and a quarter thick and paired it with Baked Potato and Asparagus.   Here’s what happened (sorry for crappy pictures, blackberry took them, you can click on them for bigger versions though!)

So here we have the piece of meat itself, it has a nice amount of fat on it but right in the centre you can see large circle of fat that was almost disaster, the steak practically tore itself in half under it’s own weight when it was first down and searing on it’s side.

Luckily everything turned out ok and below you can see the steak cooking nicely on one side, notice the butter, or in my case margarine, pooling on the bottom of the pan, this is essential, check the links I posted above to learn why!

Here are the finished sides, the asparagus was a touch overcooked but still ok and the baked potatoes turned out great!

And here we have Melisa’s plate, my plate is a duplicate although the part of the steak I had was a bit more fatty and rare (and had a little more steak…).

Everything turned out great!  The only thing I would change is to actually use butter instead of margarine, I thought we had sticks of butter in the fridge but alas we did not!  The margarine worked well enough but didn’t provide the steak with as crunchy of a crust as real butter would have.  We’ll definitely be cooking steaks this way in our house from now on.

Do you like the Olympics? (Which are going on right now in my home city of Vancouver!) Do you like hockey? Do you like Beer?  If the answers to those questions are yes than do I have the podcast for you!  This week I was the guest on the Hops & Hockey podcast to bring a little Canadian perspective onto the weekly show now that the Olympic hockey tournament is in full swing.  So if you want to hear my voice again! (and why woudn’t you) you can check it out here.

So speaking of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics they have been pretty awesome so far.  It’s quite neat to be living in the city where they are going on and I managed to go to a Women’s Hockey game last week which was quite the experience. (as a side holy cow is women’s hockey terrible unless you are on the Canadian or American team)

A couple of weeks ago I made a special guest apperance to fill in on Some Other Podcast, want to hear my voice and my opinions on post E3 gaming news?  Of course you do!  Just go right here.

With the release of Battlefield: 1943 this week I even got all misty for the series and managed to write a second article for my Jaded PC Gamer “column” which you can see over here.

I should probably write more but it’s just so easy being lazy.  My wife is currently on a 3 week trip to Italy and London, you’d think I would have lots of free time for things like “writing” or “not being an asshole” but man it’s tough, plus my mom came out and visited me this week.  Well she’s leaving tomorrow and I still have one week of freedom left so maybe I can do something productive, we’ll see!

Just s a quickie but the first post of my new weekly column is up over at some other castle which you can find here.  As time goes on a history of my column will be available at this link.

We’ll see how this goes!

Well that’s it for Battlestar Galactica.  I liked the finale overall but I have a lot of problems with it, here are my random thoughts about those problems that I sent in an e-mail to my wife just now (she liked it more than me):

- opera house meaning hardly important, hera was walking into CIC anyways
- why was the opera house teased at use for 4 seasons?
- no idea what starbuck is (an angel?)
- Head Baltar and Head Six are also what, angels?
- “god did it” is a terrible explanation for all the questions left unanswered in the series
- convinced 38,000 to just give up everything
- fact that they did give up everything, all those raw materials
- anders didn’t get a choice to fly into the sun and die or not
- adama had to leave for some reason?
- everybody decided to settle way apart from each other
- robot montage/current day footage way too heavy handed
I liked it a lot on a macro level, stuff was wrapped up, but when you look down on a micro level at the various events it falls apart for me.  Sure stuff wraps up but I don’t like the explanations for how they got wrapped up.

Ah well, at least Baltar gets to be a Farmer now

My friend Andy wrote what might be his best piece of literature ever today, I highly recommend people go and check it out, so for the 2 people who might read this here is a link – World for Willies And Wangs

Also this is Andy’s tooth, he’s a pretty gross dude.

Small update today. I fixed a couple things that were bothering me and cleaned up the right frames a bit.  The big new feature is that I’ve added my twitter to the page (oooo aaaaah).  So that is kinda neat, there is a pretty decent plugin to wordpress that snaps right in.

I also added the my blogroll back onto the right side, that was giving me problems a couple of weeks ago but today I realized what I was doing wrong and boy do I feel silly.   In any case now there is a link to say Ben’s page, my sentiment in the post below still stands.

SCREW YOU!

Back in June I wrote up some thoughts on Battlestar’s season 4.0 finale.  I didn’t really like the episode at all and felt it was really just a large let down.  Well 8 months later I still agree with most of that post and a lot of that sentiment carried over into the season 4.5 opener.

Overall I thought this was a good show but boy did it move slow as molasses.  It was worth watching and I’m very curious to see how things unfold this season.  I really enjoyed how the 5th cylon was unveiled and I have a number of theories about it that I’ll keep to myself for now.  There is a major thing though that I don’t like about this season that I mentioned in the last post.  What is with all the chumminess between the Cylons and Humans? Also Tory continues to be the least interesting character on the show and the dumbest choice as a cylon, she murdered Cally and it doesn’t seem like there will ever be repercussions for that, which is really a shame.

The preview for next’s weeks show made it seem like it was going to be action packed so I have high hopes, we’ll just have to wait and see.