Do Instant-Read Thermometers Ever Work?

Thanksgiving.
I think the very word engenders fear and depression in most cooks.
See, Thanksgiving is a holiday that, whatever its roots, has become centered around food. But not just any food, no! A very specific menu is laid out in front of football-watching half drunk family members on the fourth Thursday of every November by home cooks in various states of exhaustion, stress and panic. And if, like me, your husband's mother is "the world's best and most amazing cook" (sorry about the air quotes, Suzanne. You really are a great cook, but I'm trying to build a rapport with my readers) your Thanksgiving must at least be similar to hers, and may not include the cornbread dressing you grew up on and love upon pain of death. (This is what happens when a Texan marries a Californian. It's like a culture clash.)
So this year I decided to ease away from my mother-in-law's traditional meal with a little help from Bon Appetit and Cooking Light. I made the Sage Butter Roasted Turkey with Cider Gravy and stuffed it with Sourdough Stuffing with Sausage, Apples and Golden Raisins, accompanied by Green Beans with Bacon, cranberry sauce with a dash of allspice and cinnamon, my mother's fantastic mashed potatoes and her also fantastic pumpkin pie cake.
So here's my question: Do instant-read thermometers ever work for anyone? This year, after two overcooked turkeys that registered cooked from two cheap thermometers in previous years, I put my foot down and insisted on a more expensive one, which I dutifully calibrated in boiling water. After about an hour and a half of cooking, my 16 pound, beautifully basted and burnished turkey registered 165 degrees! This is way too short, I thought to myself. But I inserted the thermometer repeatedly into every part of each thigh that could be considered "thickest", taking care not to hit bone, and still it kept telling me that this bird was done. So I took it out, removed the stuffing and heated it to a safe temperature, and made the gravy. By the way, if anyone ever has doubts about the flavor homemade turkey stock adds, you should stop those doubts right now. I made the homemade stock from the website, and oh man. This was the most flavorful, richest-tasting and most beautiful gravy I've ever had. I could have eaten it by the spoonful. (I know, that's gross. But it was that good.)
Okay, back to the turkey. As the carnivorous husband is carving it at the table, we noticed a somewhat alarming amount of pink-ish juices pouring from the turkey. Our guests got white meat (thank goodness), but I like the dark meat so I requested a bit of both. The white meat was wonderful; incredibly juicy and perfectly cooked. The dark meat, however, was like a turkey version of carpaccio. It was simply raw.
Everything else was great; the sourdough bread made the stuffing much more interesting than normal bread cube stuffing, and the sausage added a textural element that was a nice counterpoint to the chewy raisins and crisp-ish celery. The potatoes and gravy were the highlight; there was actually no gravy left over! I think I was the only one who really liked the cranberry sauce. The cinnamon and allspice made it taste like Christmas, but as my husband said, "Then why are we having it on Thanksgiving?" The green beans were all right, but next year I think I'll venture into the mysterious world of creamed brussel sprouts.
All in all, it was not a failed meal, but in the interest of not serving potential salmonella to my family next year, can someone please explain to me how to get a meat thermometer to work?

Steak and Potatoes, Deified

Yeah, you read that title right. The writers of the amazing cookbook The Best Recipe have managed to do to steak what some cultures do to rocks or Megan Fox: turn them into something you would happily worship.
On Saturday I made beef bourguignonne. I'm purposely not writing "boeuf" because this recipe wasn't the classic French recipe, or Julia Child's recipe. It was a riff on those that, as far as I can tell, reduces the stew to those ingredients which are essential for it to be called "bourguignonne." These ingredients are bacon, steak, onions, mushrooms and red wine. And, well, wow.
The reason this became a famous combination of flavors is because it makes you weak in the knees when you taste it. Seriously. It is a truly, truly fantastic dish. Be warned: it is very labor intensive, and requires at least two loads of dishes plus lots of hand washed pots and pans, but it is so, so worth it.
The recipe starts pretty much like any other stew recipe, with the exception of crisping the sliced bacon before the beef and aromatics. You then pour off and save most of the bacon grease to saute everything else in...I know.
So when the bacon is done, you have to brown the meat, and I will say this: Julia Child is absolutely right about drying the meat. I still don't have a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but that particular gem was tossed into the movie Julie and Julia, and it is really true. Every time I have cooked a stew, I have always assumed that "brown" meant "to cook it so it's gray on the outside and not pink." WRONG. The gray color comes from the liquid being exuded by the meat, and also from the pieces of meat being crammed right next to each other. You really do have to dry each piece of meat thoroughly and brown them in very small batches. This time, about one third of my stew meat was lovely and browned before I lost my patience and threw the rest of the undried meat into the pan at once. At least it was a lesson learned, right?
Then you remove the meat and saute the onions, then the garlic, and toss in a few tablespoons of flour until it is all a light tan color. At this point, you add the liquid. This recipe calls for a combination of red wine and chicken broth, and they explain that the beef broth sold commercially is both foul and will completely ruin a good stew. I picked a fairly decent full-bodied Argentina blend to use. I really wanted the earthy, chocolate flavors that come through in Argentina wine, but I didn't want a wine with lots of jam, so I got a blend instead of a straight Malbec.
You then add the meat, bring it all back to a boil and stick it in the oven for a few hours, and while that's simmering you brown the mushrooms and pearl onions in the rest of the bacon grease to be put in during the last half-hour of cooking.
So at this point I turned my attention to the potatoes. The potatoes were deified not by a cookbook, but by my mother.
For my mother, there is no middle ground in the kitchen. What she does well, she does really, really, wickedly well, and mashed potatoes top this list (well, right next to her incredible brownies.) It's actually pretty simple, and it's all in the butter and the sour cream. Seriously. I boiled eight medium-sized potatoes until they were falling apart, drained them and threw them on top of a stick and a half of butter, then scooped in about ten ounces of sour cream (the full-fat kind, folks. There's no room for compromise here.) I whipped the whole thing with an electric mixer, added a bit of half and half and a whole lot of salt and pepper, and had the most incredible mashed potatoes ever made (except the ones my mother makes.)
The best thing about these potatoes was how perfectly they went with the stew. The stew was seriously moan-worthy, with the most incredibly deep, rich sauce, meltingly tender meat, slightly chewy and flavorful mushrooms, and those all-important pearl onions that provide a crisp bite to foil all the richness. The potatoes, on the other hand, were light, airy, rich and smooth, giving the stew a creaminess and picking up on all the flavors of the stew without losing the textural contrast. But you have to serve the stew over the potatoes, otherwise you just don't get the incredibly matched textures.
At some point, I will try Julia Child's boeuf bourguignonne, but I'm pretty happy with this one for now.

Simplicity is Beautiful

And the dinner I made tonight was just that; both simple and beautiful.
Due to the dreadful recession and the general lack of money in the lives of Ph.D candidates and their spouses, we've been eating lots and lots of flash-frozen chicken and frozen vegetables lately, something that in the past I would have snottily eschewed. However, I'm discovering that these two things can be just as good as the real thing, and a thousand times more convenient because you don't have that pressure of the "Best By" date hanging over your head. With that in mind, tonight I pulled out my several years-old copies of Cooking Light to bring some new ideas to a stale routine of fajitas, stir-fries, and various chilies and stews. I came across a recipe that I had intended to make years ago and instantly went to work.
The recipe is Rotini with Chicken, Asparagus and Tomatoes, and of course the main attraction was the picture. Anything that combines pasta with tomatoes is bound to grab my attention, and it should grab yours as well. I was also interested in what seemed like a too-simple vinaigrette that gets tossed over the whole thing...I had my doubts about that.
I was so wrong. This recipe was not only the soul of simplicity, but it was also a remarkably well thought-out harmony of flavors. The chicken and pasta (I used whole wheat rotini) provide a nice, chewy, hearty backdrop to a variety of fresh yet mild flavors.
In my experience, pasta recipes that showcase asparagus tend to call for way too much of it, which creates an overwhelmingly asparagus-y texture and flavor. Asparagus may be a thick, meaty vegetable, but I don't think it should be given center stage. This recipe, however, called for a perfect cup of 1-inch asparagus pieces. The one warning I would add here is this: if you use fresh asparagus, make sure you get pencil-thin stalks. The thick ones will simply be too big to complement the small pieces of chicken and the corkscrew pasta.
I used grape tomatoes instead of cherry, and while the flavor worked, next time I'll stick with the cherry. The grape were too small and we ended up with several tomato halves in every forkful. That being said, slicing and quickly sauteing the tomatoes is certainly the best way to handle them in this recipe. They need to be just warmed enough to burst when you put your fork to them, but not so cooked that the skin shrivels and they become mushy and lackluster. The tomatoes are one of the joys of this recipe. They provide a nice, crisp juiciness to offset the chewy pasta, meaty chicken, and delicate asparagus.
The balsamic vinaigrette was absolutely perfect. With a light and flavorful pasta like this one, the last thing you want to do is drown it in a sauce, heavy or not. But there was just enough oil to coat the pasta, basil punched up the flavor with a little more freshness, and the balsamic really came through to provide a bit of sweetness and tang with every bite. The only thing I might do next time is whisk the basil into the oil and vinegar mix before adding it to the completed dish, just to ensure that it's all evenly distributed.
Finally, I must take a second and gush about the goat cheese. I think you all know about my devotion to goat cheese, and if you didn't know, now you do. Goat cheese is the star player in this recipe. Even my husband mentioned what a wonderful pairing it is. It is such a flavorful, creamy cheese that it truly is wonderful in almost everything, but the mild flavor it has especially complemented this pasta. The crumbles melted into a lovely cream over the hot pasta, which helped to both bind and enrich every single ingredient. And I was really shocked at how well it worked with the balsamic vinegar. The two of them played off each other wonderfully; the tang of the balsamic was matched by the tang of the cheese, and also toned down by its creaminess.
Altogether, this pasta was phenomenal and took a little less than thirty minutes to make. Can you beat that?

A note about wines: We drank 2007 Nero d'Avola, a Sicilian wine with big jam, light tannins and a little acidity. While this is a really good, drinkable wine, it did nothing for the pasta. A pasta this light and harmonious needs a wine that is equally so; the last thing you want to do is drown a good meal with a mis-matched wine. That being said, I would probably urge you to pick a nice pinot noir. I think that California's Russian River Valley does fantastic pinot noirs, and you can usually get one for a decent price, at least for a pinot noir. But because pinot noirs to tend to be pricey and are truly not worth compromising on, you might want to go for a dry riesling or a chardonnay that's neither too oaky nor too buttery. Pacific Rim does a nice dry reisling that might work with this dish. La Crema's Chardonnay would probably be much better. The carnivorous husband thinks a merlot would be best, but through no bias against merlot (even though I totally have one) I disagree. I think a heavy or thick red would kill the harmony of this dish. Perhaps even a syrah would work all right, as long as it's not too acidic. Hmmm. I think this is a question for my sommalier brother-in-law. So stay tuned, and hopefully I'll have an answer for you before you make this pasta.