Birthday Brunch and Mummified Turkey

          Glorious, sunny day on Lummi Island.  Our dearest friends, Dan and Sue, along with their son, Jordan, came over on the ferry for brunch at the Beach Store Cafe.  We're making plans for when Jordan comes to Tunis with Gabe and Anton in December and we all go to Europe for a couple of weeks.  I think we decided on a pretty good trip concept today.  Danny is turning 50 this week and what a great treat to be here to give him a huge hug in person.

          Gabe really wanted to make an early Thanksgiving meal together.  He and Anton are technically dual Canadian/American citizens so we can say we're splitting the difference between the Canadian/American Thanksgivings.  Actually, we don't even need an excuse.
         We tried a process from the November Martha Stewart.  It was a totally new way to cook a turkey for me, but I think it was an excellent method and kind of fun and creepy wrapping the turkey in a shroud.  Here's how it went:
1.  Melt two sticks of butter in a bowl and mix with 2 cups dry white wine.
2.  Wash turkey inside and out.  Remove giblets and pat dry.
3.  Rub bird with 4 tablespoons softened butter and generously salt and pepper inside and out.
4.  Soak a sheet of cheesecloth in the butter/wine mixture.  Remove, squeezing gently into bowl; reserve butter mixture.

5.  Wrap soaked cheesecloth around the turkey, breast side up.

6.  Roast for 30 minutes at 425 degrees.

7.  Reduce heat to 350 degrees and baste every 30 minutes with more butter/wine mixture.
8.  When butter/wine mixture is finished, remove cheesecloth and discard.  Continue roasting until juices run clear and internal temperature reaches 180 degrees F.

9.  Remove from oven and tent with foil to allow juices to settle in the bird before serving.

Pumpkins Are a Girl Thing?

           Whatcom County could not have put on a more welcoming face for me to return to last week.  Bright, crisp, autumn days, brilliantly colored tree leaves, townspeople living intentional, artful days, and everywhere, everywhere piles of pumpkins.  No longer are there just the huge orange carving pumpkins, but now there are choices of artisanal whites and crimson oranges. 

            My plane landed one week ago at midnight and on the way home, my sons and I stopped in at our local Haggen store, open 24 hours, to pick up some kind of snack.  Turned out to be the remnants of that day’s sushi operation, which was just fine.  A cursory sweep through the store brought me to the check-out stand, arms loaded with the sushi, a six-pack of pumpkin microbrew beer, a pumpkin scented candle, and a Martha Stewart magazine that was screaming pumpkin everything.  I felt incredibly happy. 

            The week has been nonstop familiarity bliss.  I do love this city and I haven’t been here in the fall for over 15 years.  That must explain why all of my sensory memories are around me and my two darling preschoolers enjoying walks and other rambling outings, seasonal cooking projects, and fall gardening.  I am magnetically attracted to the garden shops this week, longing to spend a Saturday cleaning the beds for winter and planting a few new edibles: fruit or nut trees or perhaps some grapes, and definitely some bulbs.  I resisted, but it was difficult.

            Gabe and I were at Starbucks yesterday morning, early, and heard the woman behind us blurt out this order, “I’ll have a nonfat, decaf, pumpkin latte (I think there were several more directives, but I can’t even think what they would be) and a pumpkin scone.”  As we walked out of the store I commented that her order was just basically pumpkin vehicles.  She didn’t even want the caffeine in the coffee.  Gabe then unloaded the observation he had previously kept to himself which was that women are crazy about pumpkins.  He claims that from the first day that October hits, every woman he sees oozes with pumpkin loving mania, stringing up little jack-o-lantern lights in her work space, keeping a constant pumpkin drink at hand, making cute orange cookies and cupcakes.  He felt almost suffocated by it and later in the day his brother agreed.

            Now I know that there are men who also love pumpkins, particularly if they grow them or especially if the carving of them involves the use of power tools.  But to take a little goo out of this autumnal blog there will be no gratuitous pictures of pumpkins, just the beginnings of some blustery weather on a Lummi Island afternoon.  But I'm wondering, is it possible to die of pumpkin candle asphyxiation in a poorly ventilated room?

      

The Hottest Table in Town

            It’s not even a town; it’s an island, but suddenly we’ve got one of the hottest destination restaurants in the country just a mile up the road. The New York Times gave this incredible quote, "...one of 10 restaurants worth a plane ride" (Jan. 7, 2011) about our own Willows Inn.  The Willows has been a wonderful, conscience driven inn and restaurant for decades, nabbing an article in Gourmet magazine just a few years ago.  This new launch to Top 10ness, however, is due to their brilliant new chef, Blaine Wetzel.  A native of Olympia, WA, Blaine trained and worked in several restaurants in the West before working at the famous Noma in Copenhagen.  Hype and credentials aside, this is a young man with a crystal clear vision of the style of food he wants to create and then the skills to execute a succession of dishes that make you stop and truly ponder/savor what you are tasting.  His dishes are heavily based on local produce and seafood to which some magical molecular gastronomy is applied.  From cedar box smoked salmon bites to goeduck clams in a tiny avalanche of horseradish snow, the meal is a series of amazements.  Don't even think you will be able to tell your friends later what you had for dinner.  You will remember the meal through a series of sensory impressions that, like art,  make a satisfying whole.   

It Ain’t Over ‘Till the Pie Bird Sings

            We’re packing out to go and live the second half of our summer in Tunis.  Going together to Tunis, all four of us,  is the carrot, but counting down all of the “lasts” of our Lummi summer is sad.  We’ve got the last times to see family and friends we love.

The last pull of the crab pots.

The last time to watch the Alaska ferry cruise past our house into the sunset with its load of adventurous passengers destined to witness the Inside Passage.   

We gasped this week realizing that we hadn’t yet had our fill of blueberries, one berry we won’t get in Tunis this year. 

This pie is in honor of all the beautiful things we will be saying goodbye to this week. 

All-butter Pie Pastry

From Rustic Fruit Desserts (Schreiber, Richardson)

Makes four 9-inch pie shells

5 cups all-purpose flour

3 tablespoons granulated sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons fine sea salt

2 cups ( 1 pound) cold unsalted butter

1 cup ice water

2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice

     Put the flour, sugar, and salt in a bowl, stir to combine, then put the bowl in the freezer for about 10 minutes, until super cold.

     Cut the butter into 1-inch cubes, then add it to the flour mixture and toss to evenly coat.  Cut the butter into the flour mixture using a pastry blender, food processor, electric mixer, or your hands, just until the mixture becomes course and crumbly ad the butter is about the size of peas.

     Stir the water and lemon juice together, then drizzle over the dry ingredients, 1/3 cup at a time, tossing with a fork to distribute the liquid.  The pastry will be shaggy, but should hold together when squeezed in the palm of your hand; if not, add an additional teaspoon or two of ice water.  

     Dump the pastry onto a lightly floured work surface and press down on the dough, folding it over on itself a few times until it holds together.  Thy not to handle it too much or it will warm up and may become overdeveloped.  Divide the pastry int 4 equal parts and shape each piece into a disk, 1 inch thick.  Wrap each disk in plastic wrap and chill for 1 hour.

    

Blueberry Pie

adapted from Kingston Hotel Cafe Cookbook (Weinstock)

1/2 recipe all-butter pie pastry

6 cups blueberries

2 tablespoons cornstarch

2 tablespoons flour

3/4 cup brown sugar

6 tablespoons white sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ground ginger

2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

     Prepare all-butter pie pastry and line a 9 inch pie pan, reserving some dough for the top crust.  Chill reserved dough.

     In a large mixing bowl, combine all of the filling ingredients except the butter.  Pour into the pastry-lined pie pa.  Dot the top of the fruit with the butter.

     Roll out the top crust.  Wet the rim of the bottom crust with ice water and place the top crust over the berries.  Turn the edges under and crimp.  Make little slits in the top of the crust or cut a small circle to insert over the top of a pie bird to allow steam to escape while baking.

     Place the pie in the center of a parchment covered baking sheet. 

     Bake at 425 degrees F for 10 minutes.  Turn the oven down to 350 degrees F and bake for about 45 minutes.  Cover edges with aluminum foil if browning too quickly.  Uncover, then bake for another 30 minutes or until the top crust is golden brown and the juices are thick and bubbling out the top. 

Lummi Island Spot Prawns

            Oh my, we had a homemade summer seafood feast tonight.  Our neighbor, Leo Travenshek, has a specialty seafood business raising enormous spot prawns.  The Willows Inn, here on the island, has a special each Sunday serving spot prawns on their deck, but we were hungry for them on Monday so we bought and cooked them ourselves.  Allan has perfected the garlic, butter, olive oil sauté and he made the prawns.

          Fortunately, I had already been working for hours on another recipe from the July Bon Apettit, the Cilantro Scallion Bread.

          That’s all we had, prawns and the bread, and it was perfect.  The bread is a buttery soft dough absolutely stuffed with the vegetables and herbs and then there are the sesame seeds that get a toasty flavor as they bake.  Alongside the rich prawns, they were light, bright, and nutty. 

Fantastic combination.