Stuffing and Rolls and Rice

As a young child, I was deprived of stuffing...I don't believe my grandmother ever made it, and my family has a lot (A LOT) of food allergies, including a wheat allergy running rampant. While I escaped that, it meant that stuffing was not really around. I may have had it first in high school. This makes me sad, in retrospect, but at least I can eat it now. But, as a consequence, I have no childhood image or taste in my mind of what stuffing is supposed to be. I'm fairly happy with StoveTop, but I had some Target-brand stuffing a few weeks ago that was really really bad and turned me off of boxed stuffing. I ended up combining two recipes, one from the Minimalist, and one from Simply Recipes. I think I made enough changes to call it my own. As will become clear, I am sort of adamant about very traditional stuffing, with no excess things in it.

Out of Deprivation, Stuffing (or, "Sorry, Sister! Wild Rice is very good also! Stuffing")
1 gigantic loaf of french bread
1 smaller loaf of semolina bread, both bought a few days before cooking
giblets and neck from turkey, or chicken broth, probably
2 onions
butter
tarragon
rubbing sage

Simmer giblets and neck for an hour in water. Pour out liquid and reserve. Throw giblets away on grounds of being icky. Simmer neck in a new pot of water indefinitely/until tender/until gone since you've picked at it so much. Turkey neck is excellent. From liquid, decant most of the fat.
While innards simmer, cut the bread into cubes. It should be slightly stale. Spread out in pan and put in oven at 350C or so until more crunchy. Melt butter in pan and throw in bread cubes. This took me two go-rounds. Let bread cubes get toasted on a few sides. Meanwhile, melt butter in a large pot and saute chopped onions. Add bread cubes and some of the stock, tarragon and sage. Stir. Cover and periodically add more stock (and bread cubes, if they didn't fit in the pot the first time). Take off heat after an hour. When ready to serve, spread out in pan again and cook at about 350C until warm and slightly crisp. Stuff self.

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The rolls were super-easy and could be made up to 2 hours in advance and kept in the fridge. My, and your, favorite part is grating frozen butter. The recipe is from Baking Illustrated, of course. As my roommate ate three of them, they evidently turned out well.

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As I mentioned earlier, my family usually has wild rice instead of stuffing, so we made some from a box too. I only bought one box, which I sort of thought would be okay since we wouldn't be eating the recommended serving size, what with all the other food, but then I reconsidered and wanted to buy more, but then forgot. Short story, I should have bought more. Also, due to flat surface limitations by the end of the evening, the rice cooker went on the floor, all lonely.

So, I'm not too busy to bake, but I am too busy to write about it.
Continuing the freezer purge, there were two pie crusts left, and my roommate requested I make apple pie from them. I can never remember what recipe I used the last time I made apple pie, and I knew I needed to make a smaller recipe than 6 cups of apple, so I looked at Baker's Illustrated, as usual, and a recipe from Baking Bites. I actually wrote the recipe down as I was making it, just in case it turned out to be the best apple pie ever. It wasn't, but it wasn't bad. The apples cooked down a lot, and also sort of lumpy, so I think I could have arranged them more compactly in the pie and fit more in, but my roommate had no complaints.
Apple pie is so much easier when you don't have to make the crust pie


Thaw frozen crusts for about 15 minutes. While thawing, slice 1 granny smith apple and 1 and a half golden deliciouses. Mix with 1/4 cup white sugar, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, a scant tablespoon flour, 2 dashes of salt, 2 dashes of nutmeg and a 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon. Let sit for 15 minutes or so. Place in pie crust and dot with a tablesppon of butter. Press down the other pie crust gently and place on top, using fork tines to seal the edges. Cut slits in a super cute and decorative way, and place in 425 degree oven for about 15 minutes, then 45 minutes to an hour at 375 degrees, until filling is bubbling. My crust got pretty brown quickly and had to be covered with foil, so watch it.

Then, realize you actually have an extra apple, some strawberries, and leftover crisp topping from a previous berry pie. Throw them together in a pie tin and also bake for about 45 minutes in a 375 degree oven.
Decide there wasn't enough butter or juice so it's not very browned or all that good. Offer to roommates anyway, and realize that three pies divides up into three people very easily. Really, I had one small slice each of apple pie and the apple-strawberry thing, and almost all of the berry pie, and each of my roommates staked out their own pies.

Lomi Lomi Salmon

1 tomato. Mine was nearly a pound. I bought it at a farmer's market and assumed 1 tomato equals, I dunno, a third of a pound. This is not true, but the tomato is forgiven for being so expensive by being so delicious. I was really hoping to avoid that correlation.
Smoked salmon. I went to three grocery stores before finding a 4 oz piece of smoked salmon. NOT lox or anything like that. A whole chunk of salty goodness is needed.
Onion. My mother uses green onions, which add a nice bit of color but not all that much taste. Apparently, she only makes it this way because my dad is allergic to normal onions. So I used half of a white onion I had on hand.

Slice slice, dice dice, and sort of crumble/shred the salmon into a bowl. Shake on some salt, and add a few ice cubes. Stir together. (Hold up, wikipedia says the whole point is to massage the ingredients together, as this is what "lomi lomi" means. Alright, kinky. Me, I think just stirring, maybe some slight mashing, is enough. But figure out your own level of comfort.) Cover and place in fridge to let ice melt and everything to soften together. Eat with rice.