We couldn't wait.  We had to have Thanksgiving dinner a bit early.  

In particular, we just couldn't wait to make Sourdough Stuffing with Sausage and Apples, Buttermilk Mashed Potatoes, and Ginger Cranberry Sauce.  Especially the stuffing.  In our family, it is always about the stuffing.

I won't be cooking on the actual Thanksgiving Day, but I couldn't resist making a few old favorite recipes to kick off the holiday season.

If I were hosting the big spread this year, the first thing I would do is make some Cayenne Pepper Wafers.  My mother's recipe for this spicy gruyere cracker is a must for that first toast of Champagne.

If you need vegetable inspiration, I would turn to the blog Orangette, and check out her recipe (actually Molly Stevens' recipe) for Cream-Braised Brussels Sprouts, which I dress up for the holidays with some pomegranate seeds. 

 
For a unique salad, I would make the Kale Salad with Apples and Walnuts from Tori Ritchie's blog Tuesday Recipe.  I have not made this yet, but my friend Catherine made it for me, and I couldn't stop eating it.  It's crunchy and fresh, the perfect Thanksgiving salad.

For dessert, I would skip the pie crust from scratch, and the 3 kinds of pie for a simpler end to the meal.  Have you seen all that snow out there, by the way?  Don't you want to be spending a lovely chunk of the day out in it?  I would simply poach red wine in figs (see last post), and serve it with ice cream or sweet ricotta.  Since there must be pie, I would pick up a Pear Frangipagne Tart from the Persephone Bakery here in Jackson. When it comes to pie, it just doesn't get any better than this.

Thanksgiving can get complicated.  Stuffing should be simple.  Here's my tried and true recipe for stuffing that can be doubled or tripled.  It gets its personality from the type of sausage you choose...spicy Italian, sweet pork, you decide.  

serves 10-12, easily doubled

This recipe was adapted from that of Pam Anderson in her book Perfect Recipes for Having People Over.

I know you will want to make these Tuscan Lemon Muffins as soon as you come in from the snow, so make sure you have some ricotta cheese and a nice lemon or two around the house.  If you can splurge on a few of those organic Meyer lemons that are in the grocery now, all the better.  The rind is what makes this muffin so lemony.

I have a weakness for any baking project that involves lemon zest, olive oil and ricotta.  Although I don't ever recall having a muffin like this in Italy, the flavors are there, and that's all that matters.  

You will need less than a cup of ricotta cheese for the muffins, so you will likely have some leftover, unless you keep making muffins every day like I did.  The leftover ricotta can be transformed into a ridiculously easy dessert of Sweet Ricotta and Wine-Poached Figs, which I was inspired to make after hiking with a friend the other day.  


Hiking with girlfriends has always been a great source of recipes for me.  I've known Renee for a long time, but until we hiked I did not know that:  a. she is a foodie and an amazing cook, b. she was raised in an Italian-American household, and still makes pasta with her dad, and c.  she has a passion for ricotta which, like me, she prefers homemade, but uses so much of the stuff that she often resorts to store-bought.

Renee makes this quick dessert by mixing ricotta with sugar (not too much), orange zest, and the scrapings of a vanilla bean.  She serves it with a fresh berry compote, and slices of ciabbata bread that have been toasted with cinnamon and sugar.  Yes, like a cinnamon toast bruschetta!

I didn't have any berries, but I did have these figs, which I had been rationing out two at a time for breakfast, atop toast smeared with ricotta.  I had just enough left to make a compote to go with my new sweet ricotta dessert.

I don't have a formal recipe for the poached figs, but you don't really need one.  I took the remains of last night's red wine (about 1 1/2 cups), some honey, a cinnamon stick and a few whole star anise.  I simmered it until it became quite syrupy, and then added the fresh figs, and cooked them in the poaching liquid at a very low heat for about 10 minutes.  I don't see why you couldn't use dried figs for this, and just poach them a little longer. 

Poaching fruit in red wine and spices will fill your house with a nice holiday vibe, which will hopefully get you into the right frame of mind for all that cooking you will no doubt be doing in the next few weeks.  Embrace it. 

Makes 24 regular muffins, or about 36 mini muffins.

I have made this muffin with both whole milk ricotta and part-skim ricotta, and it always turns out with a perfect, tender crumb.  The original recipe from Cooking Light magazine calls for part skim ricotta, no doubt to get the calorie count down.

I have made no alterations for altitude.  Next time I think I will add orange zest and vanilla, and call them Sicilian Orange Muffins.


This recipe was written by Maureen Callahan, and published in the May 2011 issue of Cooking Light.  

•  1 ¾ cups all-purpose flour (8 ounces if you like to weigh)
  
•  ¾ cup sugar
  
•  2 ½ teaspoons baking powder
  
•  ¼ teaspoon salt
  
•  ¾ cup part-skim or whole milk ricotta
  
•  ½ cup water
  
•  ¼ cup olive oil
  
• 1 medium or 2 small lemons to make: 1 tablespoon lemon zest  and 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
• 1 large egg, lightly beaten
•  cooking spray
•  2 tablespoons turbinado sugar (such as Sugar in the Raw)

1. Preheat the oven to 375ºF.

2. Prepare the muffin tin by lining with cupcake liners, then spraying the whole pan with cooking spray.

3. Scoop the flour into the measuring cup, then level off with a knife.  Place into a medium mixing bowl.

4. Add the sugar, baking powder, and salt to the flour and mix well.

5. Measure the ricotta into a liquid measuring cup, and then add it to the flour mixture.  Add the water, olive oil, lemon zest, lemon juice, and egg, and stir just until moistened and all the flour has been incorporated.  Don’t overmix.

6. Divide the batter between the muffin cups, and sprinkle with turbinado sugar. 

7. Bake for 15-18 minutes for regular muffins, or 11 minutes for mini-muffins. Use a  wooden skewer to test for doneness.

8. Cool, and sprinkle with a bit more turbinado sugar.

Like most of you, I've been getting very picky about where my meat comes from.    Hunting and harvesting wild game is relatively straightforward, compared to buying meat from the supermarket these days. 

Are you no longer content with cling-wrapped cuts of meat on foam trays with cryptic labels, such as "contains pork products from Canada and the USA"?  Unless you subsist only on game meat, like many in Wyoming and Idaho do, it's time to get to know a butcher.

I recently attended a demonstration of butchery at the Aspens Market here in Jackson.  If I had never fully grasped the meaning of "nose-to-tail" meat processing before, this two hour class, in which we watched Josh and Morgan butcher a freshly harvested pig, surely drove the point home.

This pig was raised just outside of Teton County at Robinson Family Farms in Bedford, Wyoming.  You may have met the Robinson family at the Jackson Hole Farmers' Market on the Town Square this summer. One of their pigs was the star attraction at a pig roast I attended last summer, where it was barbecued all afternoon in an aluminum box (La Caja China) under a bed of coals, but that's another story.

Seeing all the meat that comes from butchering a pig is an eye-opening experience.  This pig was raised humanely, put down gently, and almost none of it will go to waste.  Only 3 pounds of our over-300 pound pig ended up in the trash; apparently there are some porcine glands that you just don't want to eat. 

The butchers at the Aspens Market know their meat.  You may remember Josh and Joel who I introduced you to last May, who trained in Italy with Dario Cecchini, the famous "singing butcher" of Panzano.  Now Morgan Brownlow has joined the team, a chef/restauranteur/butcher with an interest in charcuterie. He demonstrated how to cure the pig's jowl to make guanciale, and how to massage the ham in preparation for making prosciutto, a process that takes up to two years.

Whole animal butchery is getting a lot of press in the national news as a fresh fleet of young butchers, male and female, are opening their own neighborhood butcher shops.  Earlier this month in the New York Times, "The Lost Art of Buying from a Butcher"  illustrates how the average consumer will have to learn how to order meat, after decades of having the meat presented precut and packaged at the supermarket.

If you want to eat locally-raised, humanely treated, pasture-grazing animals that have never seen a feedlot, there are lots of choices in our community.  Besides the whole animal butchery going on at the Aspens Market, local meats can be found at Jackson Whole Grocer and Pearl St. Meat and Fish here in Jackson. If you prefer to shop at the supermarkets, you can find all sorts of local meats.  Just ask the butcher on duty; they should know where the meat comes from and how it is processed.  

My foray into pig butchery inspired me to make a big batch of Momofuku Ramen Noodle Soup with Roasted and Shredded Pork Shoulder, like the soup you would definitely order if you were walking through Chinatown in San Francisco, Chicago or New York, and you saw a tiny noodle shop packed with happy diners slurping their noodles and tilting their bowls to catch every last drop of broth.  At least that was the soup I had in mind.  

After the butchery class, I brought home a fresh bundle of ground pork, which meant we had to make some Ginger Pork Potstickers.   I recruited some help in the kitchen for this project; dumplings should not be made alone.

High quality meats from an artisanal butcher can be expensive, but he or she can also offer you many economical choices.  The ground pork for my dumplings was not expensive at all.  For my Ramen project,  Morgan chose a handful of meaty pork bones that would be the base for the broth (cost: under $5).  Josh found me an end piece of Benton's bacon, an integral ingredient for giving the broth its smokey, salty depth (cost: $4.50).  Then Joel boned and skinned a generous piece of the picnic shoulder ($5.99/lb.), which I rubbed with equal parts Kosher salt and sugar, let marinate for half the day, then slow roasted for about six hours.  Shredding the meat gave me enough to feed my entire neighborhood Ramen Noodle Soup, with leftovers.  (I'll have that recipe ready for you soon, very soon, I promise, because I know you will need to make Ramen this month.)

If you want to save a bundle on local natural meats, buy directly from the farmer and have an independent butcher process it as you like.  Derek Ellis at Ellis Custom Meats in Driggs, Idaho processes wild game and locally harvested animals.  He sources organic grass fed lambs from Lava Lake Lamb, which you can buy by the half or the whole.  After consulting with Derek, he transformed my half lamb into 30 pounds of stew meat for curries, shanks, ribs, loins and chops, a butterflied and boned leg, and his own recipe of amazingly lemony and aromatic lamb sausage.  I also requested plain ground lamb, which I'll use in stir fries, empanadas, moussakas and burgers.  

Derek also processed the pig I went in on with friends last summer.  A 4-H pig raised by a kid I've known since preschool, "Christopher's Pig" as we call it around here, was lovingly cared for all summer, then auctioned off at the county fair.  With Derek's guidance, I ordered ground pork, breakfast sausage, hot Italian sausage, a smoked ham, smoked hocks, a picnic and a butt, the tenderloin, and lots of smokey thick-cut bacon.  He even smoked the ear for my dogs, and cured the cheek for my very own hunk of guanciale, which is my secret ingredient in soups, risottos and pasta.  We are loving every ounce of Christopher's Pig.  

It is essential to have a good source of freshly ground pork to make these potstickers.  Ask your butcher to grind the meat for you, but not too coarsely.  

This recipe comes from Rick and Lanie's Excellent Kitchen Adventures, a book that Rick Bayless wrote with his teenage daughter.

Makes about 40 dumplings.

To freeze dumplings for another day, place them in a single layer on a parchment-lined baking sheet, making sure they are not touching, and freeze.  Once solid, place them in plastic baggies.  To cook, drop them into boiling water, and remove when they float to the top.  Drain until very dry, and then sauté in hot oil as above. 

Aspens Market:  full service butcher market and charcuterie
Ellis Custom Meats:  Derek is an independent butcher, specializing in sourcing local animals, processing wild game, and creating artisanal meats and sausages
Lava Lake Lamb: natural, grass-fed lamb from Idaho; buy direct from their website, or through Ellis Custom Meats.  Visit their website for lamb recipes galore.
Teton Waters Ranch:  natural, pasture-raised beef from Idaho; can be purchased directly from the ranchers through their website, at their cafe in Driggs, or at Jackson Whole Grocer in Jackson, WY.

It was inevitable that I made a big pot of minestrone soup this week.  First, the cold November wind started to blow.  Then, I felt the overwhelming need to eat something besides pancakes and pumpkin chocolate chip cookies and my kids' Halloween candy (shhhh).

This was the day that I found a mysterious box of freshly-dug potatoes on my front porch.  No note, just beautiful russet potatoes that smelled of the dirt that was clinging to them. Not knowing anyone who grows potatoes, I was intrigued.  After a bit of investigation, I found that I was not alone.  Other anonymous boxes of fresh and dirty potatoes had mysteriously appeared at other houses.   Hmmmm.

Clearly I had to do something with this gift.  Rummaging through the fridge and pantry I found: one small hunk of guanciale, one Parmesan rind (I hoard the nubs leftover from grating Parmesan in the freezer for soups), a small zucchini,  carrots, cannelini beans, some orzo, and a can of San Marzano tomatoes.  

I have been making this soup for so long, and have gifted it so often to sick friends, new parents, and deserving teachers, that it has been dubbed Annie's Minestrone Soup.  Which is not to say you shouldn't adapt it to what you have lying around the larder, and make it your own. Hopefully, you have at least one really good russet potato, mysterious or not, to make this soup satisfyingly filling.

If you happen to be using dried cannellini beans for the minestrone, then you will want to soak them for a few hours or overnight in cold water.  While you're at it, soak a few more cups of beans and make Cannellini Beans with Garlic and Sage.  It's so easy, and when you run out of minestrone soup, you can puree the cannellini beans in their rich broth for another November-loving soup.

I should explain my habit of hoarding Parmesan rinds in the freezer.  If you go to the trouble to purchase authentic Parmigiano-Reggiano imported from Italy, please don't throw the rind away when the cheese is gone.  Save the rinds in the fridge or the freezer, and use them as a secret ingredient to soups, stews, and risottos.  As you'll find with this minestrone soup recipe, the rind will soften and melt into the broth, adding flavor and depth to the soup.  

This makes enough soup to serve 4 for lunch, then 4 for dinner, with some more to give to a friend, and another few cups to stash away in the freezer for another day.

Buy good quality dried cannellini beans for this bean stew.  If the beans are stale, they will take forever to cook, and won't have that tender bite.