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The turnip, fennel bulb and apple was a great match for the turducken. There wasn't much room in the roasting pan around the five pounds of birds and stuffing, but it all fit. I made the mashed potatoes by cooking them in the microwave and mashing them skin-on in a pan* on the stovetop over low heat; ended up using a cup of milk and a tablespoon of water, plus butter, and they were great.
The gravy? I started with five strips of bacon, enough to get a quarter-cup of melted fat. Set the bacon on a paper towel covered plate to drain, and added a quarter-cup of flour to the hot fat to make a roux, cooking over low-medium heat until it darkened. Then a whole two-cup box of Kettle & Fire Mushroom Chicken Bone Broth, all at once, and I kept stirring and cooking as it thickened, with occasional breaks to snip bacon bits into it. The end result was as smooth as velvet, rich with umami, and went wonderfully with the mashed potatoes and turducken.
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* I mash potatoes in an old-fashioned way, starting by stirring them with a sharp knife, and switching to a large dinner-type fork once they're in small pieces. It's not the fastest and it takes a little work, but I like the end result.
Never heard of making mashed potatoes without boiling them, when I googled this what came up was basically doing baked potatoes, then mashing the insides as in making twice baked potatoes. Is this the method you used, or something else?
ReplyDeleteAs described in the post and footnote: microwaved until soft (4 minutes and turned. It took four rounds of four minutes each), then cut up and mashed in a a paan, adding milk and butter as it proceeded.
ReplyDeleteBobbi, a small suggestion: steam the taters. When my girlfriend & I first got together, I steamed some potatoes, which she turned into mashed taters; she swore immediately that she'd never boil a potato again (and she hasn't). She had no idea the humble potato could have that rich a taste.
ReplyDelete--Tennessee Budd
When feeding one or two people, microwaving potatoes is the way to go in getting to mashed potatoes. I nuke a medium-to-large potato, cut it in half, scooping out the meat of one half, then mash that scooped out half on my husband's plate (with a fork). The other half, plus the skin from husband's half, get mashed (or, at least, chopped up) on my plate. I find it "sinful" to waste the skin and do not peel potatoes even when I am boiling up a large pot of them.
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