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Fri, 16 Mar 2007

Nebraska roundup, part 1

Since eating the Chanukah brisket with my dad last December, I think I've spent nearly as much time in Nebraska as I have here in California. While some Nebraskans flee the cold, I enjoy it since it reminds me of visits to my grandparents in Winnipeg when I was a kid.

When I arrived the week before Christmas, there had been no snow for the entire season. (Even the most dedicated snow-haters still hope for a white Christmas, for the sake of tradition, but nothing was on the horizon.) From the airport, Maggie and I headed right for The Oven, and had great dinner -- I had the Thimphu Chicken, one of the Bhutanese specialties that you can't get anywhere else I know in the U.S., except at the two other Bhutanese-Indian places in Lincoln and Omaha).

A couple of days later we brought home take-out from Paul's BBQ, from their new-ish location on Pioneers Blvd. near 48th St. The food is better since the move, and it's possible to eat there now, in a clean, modern, though somewhat spartan dining room. The pork ribs were delicious; the pulled pork had lots of flavor but was somewhat dry. On the weekend we were lucky enough to get some pizza from La Casa Pizzaria in Omaha, still my favorite of the southern Italian style, with a flaky, almost pastry-like thin crust and plenty of Romano cheese and fresh tomatoes. We usually have it with La Carraia sangiovese, a rustic-style wine from Umbria, which stands up well to pizza or any hearty red-sauce Italian food.

I'm very picky about Mexican food, and have never cared much for the usual run of enchiladas, flautas, and tostadas (or anything made up by Taco Bell) but a new place opened recently with the same ownership as El Toro. This is Las Margaritas, near 27th St., and Yankee Hill Rd. The most intriguing item on the menu was something called La Parrillada del Mar, and it turned out to be a huge plate of seafood -- shrimp, crab, mussels, clams, octopus, squid, and fish, all sauteed with broccoli and cauliflower, garnished with avocados, lettuce, limes, and oranges, and served up with tortillas and a bowl of melted butter. Wow. Not something I'd want to eat every day, but worth the trip over there.

After the family Christmas dinners, we headed out to Omaha for dinner at M's Pub. After escargot with garlic, shallots, butter, and melted cheese (and a glass of a California sparkling wine, the 2003 brut from Louis Roederer Estate in Anderson Valley), I had a grilled rack of lamb marinated in spearmint and orange, with blue cheese scalloped potatoes and grilled asparagus and zucchini. With the main courses we drank R.H. Phillips "Toasted Head" 2004 pinot noir.

It turned somewhat grey and rainy the week between Christmas and New Year's, which was a good time to stay home and cook. Maggie made Japanese Golden Curry, with beef, carrots, potatoes, and onions, which was wonderfully hearty over rice.

Later in the week we returned to The Parthenon, which I've mentioned before and where we've had many very tasty meals. The last couple of dinners, though, have been somewhat less than perfect, but I had a deep jones for some Greek food, and we headed back. We shared a roasted garlic spread as an appetizer, and I had a Greek salad and the gyros plate, with the special vegetable side dish of cauliflower cooked with onions, feta, and cinnamon. It's hard to tell what's up at the Parthenon -- if anything it seems like maybe it was a victim of its own success: big crowds and interesting food led to higher expectations, and at one point it seemed like the old one-liner, "it's so crowded nobody goes there anymore". There's certainly no problem with the food -- the chef's specials are winners, and his skill and technique with vegetables (like my cauliflower, and an earlier mushroom dish seasoned with herbs and cloves) and soups (like a wonderful lobster bisque) is exceptional. But the whole dining experience is sometimes just a little off, mostly related to service that is sometimes overbearing and sometimes just oddly paced or sloppy, and some odd experiments (like the Cinco de Mayo Mexican-themed dinner) which didn't seem to work. It's a lovely place with a great chef and I hope it finds its way back to excellence.

On the day before New Year's Eve, I finally got a chance to cook a turducken. My obsession with them had only increased since my dad and I had some for Thanksgiving dinner, and I was waiting until I had an audience -- hopefully one with hearty appetites -- to roast a whole one, which weighs in at 15 lbs. I ordered the one with creole sausage and cornbread stuffing from CajunGrocer.com, and it arrived early in the week, frozen, via, FedEx. (The dry ice it was packed in occasioned a brief but festive video.) It took several days to thaw out completely, and I followed the instructions on the label: 4.5 hours at 325F, with the last hour uncovered. One thing that I'd been warned about, and was an important point, was that even though a raw turducken looks like a turkey, it has been fully boned (except for the wings and drumsticks), and therefore has essentually no structural integrity -- you can't lift or move it like a bird that has a skeleton; it's pretty much a giant floppy sausage with a bunch of stuff in it that does not really want to stick together.

But once we got it into the pan, it roasted up nicely, and after 4.5 hours, the meat thermometer variously read 160, 162, 165, or 168, depending on where it happened to land. I figured it would come up a bit while it rested, so it was definitely done. We gave it about 15 minutes in the pan, and a little more on the carving board.

Carving was by no means trivial. Most sources recomended halving the turducken longitudinally and then cutting individual slices crosswise. Since, with 6 adults and 2 children, unlikely to finish even half, that looked like the way to go. Nevertheless, it still put up a good fight, like a game fish, mostly related to the different way each component (turkey, duck, chicken, cajun sausage, and cornbread stuffing) reacted to the knife. One thing I hadn't realized is that the Cajun sausage was not slices or chunks of cooked sausage mixed in the stuffing, but was a liberal amount of coarsely-ground raw sausage filling in the gaps between the birds. When cooked, it firmed up to the consistency of meat loaf. Interesting, and tasty (and spicy!) but it was hard to cut an even slice along with the bird meats. And the stuffing was soft and of a very fine consistency -- imagine light orange mashed potatoes, and was spicy as well.

Truthfully, the turducken got mixed reviews. It was hard to see what I was doing while carving and what I was doling out from the serving platter, and thus some people got mostly turkey and some got almost entirely the meat loaf-like sausage and stuffing. And the Cajun spicing might have overwhelmed the roast somewhat. I liked it, but when i went for seconds I carefully picked among the slices for a "good" one.

Another school of thought holds that the thing to do is to roast the turducken the day before you plan to serve it, refrigerate it overnight, slice while cold, and then heat the slices in the oven in gravy. This permits you to pick and choose among the slices, and equalize portions of the components, and otherwise keep tighter control over the whole affair. I suspect that's what CreoLa did at Thanksgiving, and it's what I'll do next time. As it was, I sliced the other half cold and reheated it for a dinner the next week, and it was much more manageable.

Just as we had almost given up hope for any snow in December, it started coming down with great gusto in the early morning of December 31st, with about 8" total, and throwing plans for our New Year's Eve dinner into question -- the streets and driveways in the neighborhood had not been cleared by mid-afternoon, so Maggie and I shoveled the driveway by hand, and we headed back to The Oven for a festive dinner. We started with the papadum shrimp and a keema paratha, and for the main course I returned to my old favorite, the lamb shank vindaloo. We got home in plenty of time to toast the New Year with Taittinger champagne to the sound of snowplows and Bobcats digging out the rest of the neighborhood.

And two days later I was back in sunny California.

Posted at 13:14 | permanent link

(Articles which are no longer in the main column are available in the archives. Click on the year in the left-hand column under "Previous articles" for all entries from that year.)