Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Sunday turkey cooking - the verdict

Well, last Sunday's cooking wasn't entirely a waste of time at least.  The turkey and orange pot came out very well.  The turkey wings were quite fatty though so when it was cooked, I fished them out of the pot and stripped the meat from the bones and just put that back into the pot.  There was a surprising amount of meat actually and I divided it up into four generous portions.  Three went straight into the freezer and one is in the fridge to be used up this week.  I didn't bother with the final step of topping it with bread yet, that can wait for when it's being heated up.  I'm not a big fan of soggy bread you see.

Unfortunately, the other dish was not as successful.  This is partly due to the fact that I think the method of cooking really was more suited to chicken breast than the tougher turkey legs.  Certainly what I reheated yesterday, where the turkey was a bit more submerged in the sauce while heating up, was less tough and stringy than the day before.  The legs were also very fatty so for storing for the leftovers I put the stuffed legs in one container and the sauce into another.  That meant that yesterday I could just remove the layer of fat on  top of the sauce and get rid of it and just enjoy the wonderfully gelatinous sauce that was left over.  This dish also wouldn't lend itself well to freezing so I'm just going to have to eat it all this week.  The third portion is heating up as I type.  In the end I was actually too lazy to cook either rice or pasta and I just had it with a couple of slices of bread, always nice for soaking up the last bits of sauce.  My big thumbs down for this recipe however, comes from the fact that it just didn't go together well.  The meat stuffed with creamcheese and kale is okay and the tomato and olive sauce is lovely.  But the two, in my opinion, just don't complement each other at all.  I felt like I was eating two separate meals on one plate.  So, a bit of a fail for my substitutions and my cooking but also a bit of a fail for the recipe.

Next up from that book will be a spicy lentil and carrot soup - I'm looking forward to that.

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