Turkey, goose and squirrel, Oh My!
My recipe for boneless stuffed turkey breast with cornbread, apple and sausage stuffing, plus my fun but informative article for my monthly column for Nashua Telegraph Encore, Food and Fun.
Enjoy both.
You can watch me making stuffing on NH's ABC WMUR Cook's Corner, November 2017.Vegetarian alternative cornbread stuffing also, as weather presenter is vegetarian.http://www.wmur.com/article/cook-s-corner-gluten-free-cornbread-stuffing/13810797
Boneless stuffed turkey breast
For my wedding, my father and I boned and stuffed five 30 lb turkeys. It’s actually easier to bone and stuff a turkey than a chicken. I’ve also made the ‘turducken’ - boned turkey, stuffed with boned chicken, duck and stuffing. Fun to do once.
Instead of whole turkey for Thanksgiving or just for less people, you can stuff a boneless turkey breast and cook it the day before. Much less time and stress than whole turkey. Then, you can also cook turkey legs and thighs in slow cooker or braise in oven to melting tenderness. Chilled, the stuffed, boneless turkey slices easily and can be reheated in gravy. It’s also excellent cold with salads.
fresh or thawed, 7 lb hotel style breast, remove both breasts, or get butcher department to remove for you.
2 cups gf chicken stock
¼ c sherry or wine – optional
gf cornstarch to thicken
This is enough stuffing to stuff the 2 half breasts or buy 1-1+1/2 lb turkey tenderloin and cook remainder of stuffing separately either in single dish or in regular or Texas size muffin pans.
4 slices of gf Oscar Meyer Center cut bacon or Jones Dairy Farm bacon, scissored into small strips, both labeled gluten free
1 small to medium onion, peeled and finely chopped
1 Gala, Fuji or Braeburn apple, peeled, cored and finely chopped – like shredded cheese
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 clove garlic, peeled and finely crushed
½ c craisins -optional
½ c chopped pecans - optional
1 tsp dried thyme – be careful with thyme, some of it tastes far too earthy, almost moldy. I buy mine at Penzey's, either on line or store in Arlington Ma.
2 tsp dried sage, 'rubbed' into small pieces – buy fresh in store in advance of Thanksgiving, and gently dry in oven or microwave. Store in glass jar.
½ c fresh parsley, chopped
pepper
corn muffins, to total about 10-12 oz in weight broken into small pieces. Or make homemade cornbread. link below to recipe
1. Put bacon, onion, apple, garlic and butter in a microwave safe 6-8 cup jug (I use pyrex/anchor hocking jugs) and cook in the microwave for a few minutes until bacon is giving up its fat and onion and apple are soft.
2. Add craisins and stir well so they start absorbing juices and plumping up.
3. Stir in herbs and freshly ground pepper, pecans. I personally don’t add salt since both bacon and corn muffins contain salt.
4. Mix in corn muffins. I prefer the corn muffins to be broken into really small pieces not left as chunks.
5. Place the turkey breast on a chopping board. If the skin was left on, carefully remove it and retain. Cut breast in half lengthwise, almost all the way through and open the breast up like opening a book.
6. Place a sheet of plastic wrap on top and bottom of the meat and pound the meat as flat as you can without tearing. If you bought turkey tenderloin, pound it flat. Or make individual portions or use boneless chicken breasts.
7. Remove top sheet of plastic wrap and spread stuffing out over all of the breast almost to the edges. Use the bottom sheet of plastic wrap to help you roll the breast up like a jelly roll. Don't roll the plastic wrap inside the meat. I spear the breast with about 4 short stainless steel skewers to hold it together – available in grocery store. Don't use toothpicks, the wood swells and is difficult to remove.
8. Place the breast/s in roasting pan or large skillet, cover with retained skin if you have it and pour stock and sherry over meat. Cover with foil or lid and bake in a preheated 350* oven, basting every 20 minutes for about 1+1/4 hours, but check at 45 minutes and again at one hour. Cooking time depends on coldness of meat going into oven, size of breast, oven temperature. Check the temperature of the inside of the meat with an instant read thermometer. It should read about 155/160*. Remove from oven and allow to stand and firm up, temperature will continue to rise. Overcooking will make the meat very dry.
9. Thicken the juices and pour over slices of turkey. Reheat slices of cold turkey in the gravy the next day. Serve carved very thin as part of a cold buffet
Gluten free, easily dairy free cornbread
Watch me make this on NH's ABC WMUR Cooks corner, November 2017.
Vegetarian alternative cornbread stuffing also, as weather presenter is vegetarian.
http://www.wmur.com/article/cook-s-corner-gluten-free-cornbread-stuffing/13810797
Link to my gluten free cornbread recipe at gluten free cooking with Oonagh. and then link to stuffing.
https://tinyurl.com/ycf5ryud , for full directions and hints.
My article for Nashua Telegraph Encore edition, food and fun, published Thursday 25 October, 2018.
Turkey, goose and squirrel, Oh My!
I was going to write about the differences between American Thanksgiving turkey and British Christmas turkey. But there’s been a lot of talk on local forums and with the department of Fish and Game in recent weeks about the number of squirrels everywhere, many of them dead on the highways. Some really funny, laugh out loud, quirky comments. I posted that I had a fish and game book that had recipes for preparing and cooking squirrel, but said that wouldn’t make it into the weeknight rotation!
To which, someone replied, Whew, you had me worried!
From ‘The Complete Encyclopedia for Wild Game and Fish Cleaning and Cooking.’ by Pat Billmeyer. Copyright 1983.
“All squirrels are edibles, but many are too small to make more than a bite. The gray squirrel and the fox squirrel are most commonly eaten. At any rate, the decision is yours. If it’s big enough, it will make a delicious meal”.
Apart from directions on how to prepare a squirrel, this book has recipes for fried squirrel with a comment ‘my mother’s recipe and her mother’s before her’. Some are for squirrel stew. The recipes are very similar to rabbit recipes when I cooked whole rabbit before the price escalated in grocery stores. My cousins in Ireland would shoot rabbits and we’d cook them. Rabbit in a Dijon mustard sauce is a classic French dish.
Amazingly, the book says we have definite hunting seasons for squirrel. Currently NH Fish and Game say the season is from September 1 to January 31 with a limit of 5 a day.
I thought readers would be fascinated by this menu as we have many hunters and fishermen in New Hampshire. Pat Billmeyer says in this book:
“in case anyone questions the “classiness” of eating wild game, I’d like to start this small game section off with the following menu from the April 18, 1979 (yes 1979 not 1879) meeting of the Explorers Club, which was held at the Waldorf-Astoria (epitome of class) in New York City.
Explorer’s Club 75th Annual Dinner
Exotic Hors d’Oeuvres
Antelope Mousse
Beaver Stew
Buffalo Liver Pâté
Wild Boar Hams
Buffalo Meatballs
Roast Loin of Buffalo
Buffalo Steamship Roast
Fried Catfish
Seviche of Codfish Cheeks
Mousse of Elk
Elk Meatballs
Braised Garfish
Hippotamus Meatballs
Roast Hippotamus
Quail Eggs in Shell
Civet of Chinese Rabbits
Rattlesnake Chops
Greenland Shrimp
Shark Salad
Poached Skate
Roast Shani (I couldn’t discover what this is, just references to Hindu God Shani and the planet Saturn. Wiki does show God Shani sitting on a crow, but I hardly think a crow is an exotic game meat.)
Demi Tasse of Witchitty Grub Soup. The grub is the most important insect food of the desert and has historically been a staple in the diets of Aboriginal Australians. The raw witchetty grub tastes similar to almonds, and when cooked, the skin becomes crisp like roast chicken, while the inside becomes light yellow, like a fried egg. I’d have to be pretty hungry to eat insects even though they are being presented as high protein and include flours made from insects to use in baking.
I’ve lived, worked or traveled in 28 countries so I’ve tasted a lot of very different foods - frogs, snails, eel, wild boar, venison, moose, bison, ostrich, alligator, prairie oysters, quail, shark, sea urchin and more. I did taste dolphin in Malta and regretted it when I was told what I’d unknowingly eaten.
What is strange to us is the normal food of other cultures. I used to buy game at the Hungry Buffalo in Loudon, NH. They also now have a restaurant with venison, elk, wild boar, ostrich and other game meats as well as regular burgers etc. http://www.hungrybuffalotavern.com/index.php
I actually made ostrich stroganoff on WMUR TV’s Cooks Corner years ago. Wild game is far lower in cholesterol for healthy cooking. There are wild game dinners but it seems that you have to know about them, through fire departments, churches, PTO’s, that’s how I’ve attended some in the past.
Resources
Videos of how to cook game at NH state
https://wildlife.state.nh.us/multimedia/cooking.html
Game weekend at NH state
https://wildlife.state.nh.us/barrycamp/game-weekend.html
A wild game culinary adventure weekend September each year. The website has 12 pages of recipes from this wild game culinary adventure weekend, including recipes for bear and squirrel, as well as moose meatballs in the regular cranberry jelly and chilli sauce, venison stew, venison empañadas.
Early explorers to the New World quickly acquired a taste for turkey and took birds back to Europe. By the 1500s, turkeys were being raised domestically in Italy, France and England. When the Pilgrims and other settlers arrived in America, they were already familiar with raising and eating turkey.
In Charles Dicken’s time, turkey was a greater luxury than goose. On Christmas morning, when Scrooge woke from his dream in Christmas Carol (published in 1843), he sent a boy to the poulterer to buy the Cratchit’s the prize turkey, ”not the little prize turkey, the big one. What! The one as big as me.”.
Compared to wild turkeys, domestic turkeys are selectively bred to grow larger in size for their meat.
These birds can grow to be giants, often topping out at 50 pounds. In contrast, wild turkeys only weigh in at a maximum of about 25 pounds.
