[Sca-cooks] Report on Thanksgiving experiments...OP

[Sue Clemenger]

Gravy-making boogie? *snerk*
--maire, trying desperately to get her mind out of the comfortable, familiar
gutter....

----- Original Message -----
From: "Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius" <adamantius.magister at verizon.net>
To: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>
Sent: Saturday, November 26, 2005 5:05 PM
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Report on Thanksgiving experiments...OP


>
> On Nov 26, 2005, at 6:36 PM, Helen Schultz wrote:
>
> > I may be asking the obvious, but I have no idea what "mirepoix"
> > is... can
> > someone please explain it to me??  Is it the stuffing?
> >
> > ~~ obviously, my cooking knowledge must be lacking <sigh>
>
> Named after some deceased Frenchman or other, it's an aromatic
> chopped vegetable mixture frequently used in making stocks and
> sauces. A standard formula is 2 parts onion, 1 part carrot and 1 part
> celery. There are variations such as "white" mirepoix, which
> substitutes the white of leek for the carrot, and "dark" mirepoix,
> which uses carrot and/or the green part of the leek (I like both when
> making that, myself, but had none on Thursday). Typically this
> mixture would comprise about 15% of the total contents of your stock
> or saucepot. You strain it out when you're done, as a general rule,
> unless you take special care to cut it into little perfect 1/8th-inch
> cubes or some such (this is sometimes used as a garnish for
> consomme). Mine was rough-shopped.
>
> It's also good the way I used it, which was as a pan liner. Like some
> of the others who did a turkey and mentioned it on this list, I did
> the "breast side down" thing, but had been concerned about the breast
> skin sticking to the pan and tearing (I didn't have a roasting rack
> large enough), so I put about four cups of mirepoix down in the
> bottom of the pan, then laid my bird down on top of it.
>
> And, as others have also mentioned, there came a point where I wanted
> to turn the bird over, and the mirepoix did a fine job of keeping the
> bird from sticking to the pan, and also flavored the pan drippings
> quite dramatically. The only [minor] problem was that the cooked bird
> showed little dents in its breast surface shaped like the bits of
> carrot, onion and celery.
>
> Under certain circumstances, when you have a roast that isn't killer
> juicy (say, an eye round of beef), you can take the cooked roast out
> of the pan, put the pan with the vegetables back in a hot oven to
> brown a little more, then remove the vegetables from the pan to a
> serving plate, and do the gravy-making boogie in the pan, and the
> vegetables will have flavored the meat, flavored the gravy, and still
> serve as a secondary side dish of pan-roasted veg...
>
> In my case my lady wife stole some of them to add to dressing.
>
> HTH,
>
> Adamantius
>
>
>
>
> "S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la
> brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them
> eat cake!"
>      -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
> "Confessions", 1782
>
> "Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
>      -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry
> Holt, 07/29/04
>
>
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