These days, there’s no shortage of stunt cocktails out there—drinks made with zany, unusual ingredients: Sweet peas! Bacon! Hen-of-the-woods mushroom garnish! Cotton candy! Rose foam! These exhibitionist drinks invariably scream, “Look at me!”

And, yes, while I’m often the first one at the bar to order a stunt cocktail, it’s not what I want to serve at a dinner party. For that, I want something elegant, understated, and most importantly, something that complements food. But not a complete introverted wallflower of a drink, either—I want something delicious and balanced, a drink that can hold its own.

Enter the Sparkling Ginger Daisy cocktail. This drink, with a hint of warm ginger and sprightly champagne, is what I want my guests sipping while the Macy*s Thanksgiving Day Parade is on, and the turkey is still roasting. And as everyone’s sampling my signature cornbread stuffing laced with rosemary, as well as my sweet potato casserole sprinkled with ginger and cinnamon, they’ll be washing it all down with these daisies.

The drink starts with equal parts crisp gin and zingy Domaine de Canton ginger liqueur. (I love this stuff. If you buy one new bottle of booze this holiday season, I say this is the one.) Add to this a splash of tart lemon juice for balance and grenadine for rosy, festive color, and top with the lightness of bubbles. Together, these flavors meld together into a sippable sparkler that becomes an easy guest at the dinner table.

It doesn’t scream, it doesn’t whisper. It’s a perfect conversationalist.

Sparkling Ginger Daisy
by Kara Newman
from Spice & Ice
(Chronicle Books, 2009)
Makes 1 cocktail

A daisy is a classic juice-based cocktail sweetened with grenadine or a red liqueur, and often topped with sparkling wine. Here, the bright spice of ginger plays against a backdrop of bubbles for a festive holiday sparkler. And if you feel like gilding the lily, try one or both of the optional special touches below.

convert Ingredients
1 ounce Plymouth gin
1 ounce Domaine de Canton ginger liqueur
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon grenadine
Brut champagne

Method
1. Combine the gin, ginger liqueur, lemon juice, and grenadine in an ice-filled mixing glass.

2. Stir until well chilled, and strain into a champagne flute.

3. Top with champagne.

Optional touches:
1. Rim the flute with sparkling sugar before pouring in the drink.

2. Garnish with a cherry at the bottom of the flute.

Recipe © 2009 Kara Newman. All rights reserved.
© 2009 Leite’s Culinaria, Inc. All rights reserved. Terms of use.

It looks like something from the prop room of Star Trek. It could easily double for a whorled alien brain, a hairless Tribble, or an E.T. with one hell of an ugly mug. As if its low score in the looks department weren’t enough, it goes by several aliases: celeriac, turnip-rooted celery, knob celery. I even saw it christened celery globes at my local supermarket. To confuse matters even more, it isn’t the root of the popular stalk celery we all buy to add to a crudité platter, but rather the root of the less common variety, rapaceum. So it’s no wonder that for nearly 200 years people have been reaching past celery root to choose other vegetables for dinner.

“It’s not a pretty sight,” says Suzanne Tracht, co-owner and executive chef of Jar, “but it has a lot of uses.” Tracht, practically the doyenne of celery root in LA, uses it in soups, salads, purées, roasted vegetable platters, and even in slaws to accompany her whole-belly fried clams. “It has an assertive, refreshing taste,” she adds. It has flavor notes of celery and parsley but with the crunch of a crisp, just-picked apple. Even baked, as in a celery root–potato gratin, it can hold its own; it refuses to take on the mellow, buttery flavor of the potato, but instead offers up a slight tang guaranteed to keep guests guessing.

Tracht gives some tips to help ease the approach-avoidance dance most shoppers experience when encountering celery root. First, she says, realize it will be dirty, dirtier than most vegetables because of all of the nooks created by the gnarl of rootlets. Don’t let that be a turn off. In fact, it’s a good sign. “It’s probably fresh if it still has a lot of good earth clinging to it.” She also counsels that it should be heavy feeling, not hollow.

When you get your alien vegetable home, scrub and dry it. If you’re not going to use it immediately, store it in a cool place. “A root cellar is perfect,” says Tracht, laughing. At last count, not too many LA apartments come with their own root cellars, so she capitulated and added the vegetable drawer of the fridge as a suitable substitution.

So there you are finally standing in front of your celery root, ready to cook. Now what? “Lop off the bottom quarter,” Tracht says, “then slice off the stem piece.” For the vegetably challenged among us, think of the root as the earth, and slice off a good portion of Antarctica and the North Pole. Then peel as you would a potato or turnip, using a vegetable peeler or a sharp paring knife.

But do yourself a favor before cooking with it, and slice off a sliver and pop it in your mouth. The fresh, clean taste will win your over, disproving the notion that beauty is only skin deep. With celery root, you must boldly go where no man has gone before.

Recipe
Celery Root Gratin

Photo © 2005 Emily Sandor. All rights reserved.
© 2009 Leite’s Culinaria, Inc. All rights reserved. Terms of use.

Ah, the poor, beleaguered turkey. Ever since a huddle of Pilgrims shot off a few musket rounds at Plymouth Plantation in 1621 to celebrate their first harvest in the New World, the hapless bird became an unwitting—and erroneous—symbol of the holiday legend: Historians say that the original Thanksgiving table was laden with far more ducks and geese than turkey. To add insult to injury, when the turkey assumed the mantle of the holiday’s culinary mascot—after Thanksgiving became an official celebration in 1867—it became terribly misunderstood, a product of persuasive advertising and clever marketing speak. The result? Today, countless Americans head to their local supermarkets, butchers, and farmers with enough conflicting information to make choosing a bird an affair that ranges from merely haphazard to downright hand-wringing.

The following are guidelines set out by the United States Department of Agriculture—along with point-counterpoint commentary from some of the nation’s top experts in all things turkey—that will help you pick the perfect Meleagris specimen this season.

Fresh vs. frozen
A frozen turkey is just that: frozen. Its internal temperature has been kept at 0°F or below since being processed. Simple enough. Where confusion reigns is in the fresh category.

“According to the government,” says Todd Wickstrom, co-founder of Heritage Foods USA, an organization dedicated to promoting small family farms and a fully traceable, genetically diverse food supply, “a turkey’s freshness has more to do with the temperature it’s kept at rather than how near it is to the kill date.” For a turkey to be called fresh, the USDA requires that it must never reach a temperature lower than 26°F—that’s six degree below freezing. According to Wickstrom, most Thanksgiving birds are processed in September and October but are still labeled “fresh” in November. You do the math.

If a fresh bird—in the true sense of the word—is what you’re after, Dave Zier, owner of Zier’s Prime Meat & Poultry, in Wilmette, Illinois, suggests buying one that has been happily living among its brethren only several days earlier. Grill your butcher as to where he gets his turkeys from and how often. Armed with that information, you’ll know if you’re getting the freshest fresh bird possible.

“Hard-chilled,” or not previously frozen
“Hard-chilled is the gray area between fresh and frozen,” says Wickstrom. The category developed because grocers couldn’t keep a turkey fresh in their stores’ open coolers for very long, so they increased shelf life by lowering the temperature to between 26°F and 0°F.

Kosher
A bird that’s been labeled kosher has been processed by hand, following kosher laws, all while under rabbinical supervision. Many people confuse koshered turkeys with brined ones, and understandably so, because both use plenty of salt. But because of the required heavy salting and rinsing involved in koshering, it can dry out a turkey, while brining creates a juicy bird with great flavor and a perfectly crisp skin. How? Without a pedantic lecture on the denaturing of animal proteins, suffice it to say that by soaking the turkey in a salty solution, the liquid is absorbed deep into the tissue, causing it to get trapped there. This excess liquid seasons the meat as well as allows the bird to roast at a higher temperature without drying out, resulting in a crackly skin. So all this begs the question: Does a kosher turkey need brining? Absolutely not. It would only result in a salty bird.

Organic
An organic turkey is a bird that has been certified by a USDA-accredited agency. The term organic assures that the bird wasn’t treated with any growth hormones or antibiotics. But when it comes to taste, says Wickstrom, the conditions under which a turkey is raised and processed can cancel out many benefits of its being organic. An overcrowded, stressful environment impacts the quality of the meat. And the USDA remains frustratingly noncommittal on the issue: It makes no claim that organic turkeys are healthier or safer than traditional birds. In the end, each organic turkey farmer stands by a personal philosophy. If you’re partial to a brand, visit its Web site or call its hotline to find out what else constitutes its organic certification.

Free-range
A much easier term to define. A free-range turkey is one that has access to the outside. But both Zier and Wickstrom again stress that it’s the conditions under which turkeys are raised that affect the quality of the birds. Plus, adds Wickstrom, having access to the outside doesn’t mean a bird will choose to take it. Turkeys tend to stay inside, if given a choice, so even an accurately labeled free-range turkey may have rarely ventured forth. A more descriptive and reliable term is pasture-raised, which means the turkeys were reared in their natural environment full-time.

Basted
Basted turkeys are those that have been injected — before processing — with up to three percent of its weight (eight percent if boneless) of a solution containing butter or other edible fats, broth, water, spices, flavor enhancers, and/or the vaguely described “other approved substances.” But these birds are the bane of most butchers. Says Zier, “I think it’s such a crime that customers are hooked into buying [basted] turkeys. They’re injected with sodium phosphate, and when they reach a certain temperature, about 140 to 150 degrees, the sodium phosphate releases out of the body. You’re paying extra for that turkey because a lot of its weight is nothing more than chemically treated water.”

Hen vs. tom
Setting aside size, even Zier admits he’d be hard pressed to detect a difference in the texture and taste of a turkey based upon its gender.

Sizing up a bird
Most cookbooks suggest about a pound of turkey per person. (Zier believes in a whopping two pounds, “if you want leftovers, that is.”) But that’s not an exact mathematical theorem. With hens, which run in size from about ten to sixteen pounds, the customary rule applies. But for toms, which start at seventeen pounds and can top the scale at almost twice that, calculate about three-quarters of a pound per person, since there’s a greater meat-to-bone ratio.

Storing and thawing
Think cold. To store a fresh turkey, keep it in the refrigerator in its plastic wrapper until ready to cook it. (If brining, follow your recipe’s instructions.) Tucking a lipped baking sheet underneath is helpful to catch any drips. To store a frozen turkey, place it in the freezer immediately upon arriving home. Thawing it takes a bit of planning, though. Working backwards from Thanksgiving, use the rule of one day of thaw time in the refrigerator for every four or five pounds of turkey. So a sixteen-pound turkey requires four days to thaw completely.

The USDA also suggests the water-bath method for thawing a frozen turkey. For this, make sure the bird is wrapped tightly before fully submerging it in cold tap water, then allow 30 minutes per pound. So a 16-pound turkey thawed this way would be ready for the oven in only eight hours. In either case, never refreeze a thawed turkey.

Surprisingly, the department even offers suggestions for defrosting in a microwave. But unless you have a one the size of a Mini Cooper, stick with the above methods.

WIN, PLACE, AND SHOW
Farmers, producers, and butchers are so insistent on buying a fresh bird, it led the way in our triumvirate of top turkey choices for this holiday.

First place — fresh heritage turkey
At up to $10 a pound, fresh heritage turkeys are the Rolls Royce of gobblers, and our pick for best bird. Once teetering on the edge of extinction, “these birds are descendants of the first domesticated turkeys in this country and have excellent genes,” says Wickstrom. Since 2001, he has worked with prominent poultry experts and farmers to help assure the survival and proliferation of these pedigreed birds. Besides being pastured-raised, heritage turkeys are never treated with antibiotics, growth hormones, or additives. But perhaps most important, they’re allowed 26 to 28 weeks to develop to full weight, which is twice as long as industrially raised birds are given to reach the same size.

What all this genetic preservation and careful raising assures is a deeper, more intense flavor and a pleasant firmer texture, which is why heritage turkeys trump the Broad-Breasted White variety, the bird most commonly found in grocers’ freezers. “Heritage turkeys are delicious,” says Zier. “They’re like wild turkey, but not gamey or dry. We have more and more people asking for them every year.”

During the past several years, small-farm producers and independent distributors and butchers have joined forces, making farm-fresh heritage birds available to anyone with a car, phone, or computer. All turkeys ordered from Heritage Foods USA’s alliances of farms ship the Monday before Thanksgiving and are butchered no more than seven days before you get them, guaranteeing a fresh bird just in time for stuffing and roasting.

Second place — fresh crossbreed turkey
Because heritage turkeys come from superior stock, are raised naturally, and take longer to grow, all of which contribute to better flavor and a firmer texture, our second choice for top bird is a crossbreed turkey, such as the modern Broad-Breasted Bronze. A cross between the heritage Standard Bronze, also known — oxymoronically — as the Unimproved Bronze, and the standard Broad-Breasted White, the Broad-Breasted Bronze has the heft and enormous breast we’ve grown accustomed to, but it also has a deeper taste. Because it doesn’t mate naturally, however, it can’t be classified as a heritage turkey. Nonetheless, it’s far superior to the birds we’ve been eating for years.

Third place — fresh pasture-raised turkey
Our third pick would be any turkey that was pasture-raised and freshly killed. “Even a Broad-Breasted White raised on a farm where it can eat grass and enjoy its time while out there is better than an industrially raised turkey,” says Wickstrom. “It may have a shorter life compared to a heritage turkey, but that’s okay. At least it’d be a good one.”

This considerably less expensive bird is the type of turkey Zier and his wife, Denise, affectionately know as “the butcher’s wife,” sell most often, especially during the holidays. One of the local farmers they’ve chosen to do business with, because of his exacting standards, is particularly careful in raising his Broad-Breasted Whites. He even goes so far as to walk them slowly a mile and a half to slaughter, a process that’s less stressful on the bird and can be seen and tasted at the dinner table. Explains Denise, “When the bird is stressed, blood vessels rupture, and there’ll be blood in the joints. You don’t see that in a well-cared-for turkey.”

Of course, all this talk about fresh turkeys brings up the question: What about frozen? Both Zier and Wickstrom agree that a frozen top-quality bird beats any fresh industrially raised turkey. But with easy access through mail order and over the Internet, Zier strongly recommends a freshly processed turkey. “You simply can’t beat it.”

All of the following resources provide freshly butchered and processed turkeys.

Fresh heritage turkey
Heritage Foods USA
P.O. Box 827
New York, NY 10150
Tele/fax: (212) 980-6603
info@heritagefoodsusa.com

Slow Food USA
(Information only)

Fresh crossbreed turkey
Diestel Family Turkey Ranch
22200 Lyons Bald Mountain Rd.
Sonora, CA 95370
Tele: (209) 532-4950
Toll-free: (888) 446-2253
info@diestelturkey.com

Mary’s Turkey’s
6567 N. Tamera Ave.
Fresno, CA 93711-0924
Tele: (888) 666-8244
mary@marysturkeys.com

Fresh pasture-raised turkey
Thundering Hooves
2021 Isaacs Ave.
Walla Walla, WA 99362
Tele: (509) 522-9400
Fax: (509) 522-9444
Toll-free: (866) 350-9400
info@thunderinghooves.net

Dan Barber’s Pastured Turkeys
Tele: (914) 366-6200

Article © 2007 David Leite. Illustration © 2007 Amanda Duffy. All rights reserved.
© 2009 Leite’s Culinaria, Inc. All rights reserved. Terms of use.

It’s not your normal type of dread, like the kind that takes up residence in your stomach every time you pay bills or when your boss unexpectedly arrives at your weekend place with Vuitton bags in hand. No, this dread is more primal. It occurs every November when I know I’ll once again be facing a fixture of the Thanksgiving table: pumpkin pie.

Now, I’m all for tradition. But come on, people! It’s been 382 years since the Pilgrims sat down and made history. Shouldn’t we have a little more to show for it in the dessert department? Refusing to be a gastronomic automaton and mindlessly bake yet another pumpkin pie, I instead went searching for a new American classic.

First I turned to Craig Underwood, owner of the Underwood Family Farm in Moorpark, CA. Each year he sells his pumpkins at the annual Fall Harvest Festival. With more than 70,000 people foraging for the perfect orange gourd, I figured he’d have some ideas.

“Oh, people make all kinds of things,” he said. “But pies are the most popular.”

When I asked what his favorite dessert was, his voice warmed: “Pumpkin bread.” (As it happens, the recipe was from an 1970 Los Angeles Times article.)

Of course, that’s like asking a father which of his children is his favorite. So he added pumpkin cookies and cheesecake to the list. That got me thinking that cake—minus the cheese—could possibly be this year’s pumpkin pie. Yet something was missing.

That night I was crunched down in bed nursing a wicked flu and flipping through the pages of The Vineyard Kitchen by Maria Helm Sinskey (HarperCollins, 2003). My eye landed on a recipe for a cake slathered with maple-flavored cream cheese frosting — the missing link. With that, I tumbled into the most restful sleep, perhaps owing as much to NyQuil as to the dessert I was certain would change the face of the American Thanksgiving menu.

The next morning as I was rummaging through the cupboard gathering ingredients, I remembered the words of Sara Jane Underwood, Craig’s wife: “There’s a dirty little secret in the pumpkin world,” she warned. “The canned stuff tasted nothing like the real thing.” If I wanted true pumpkin flavor, it was into the pumpkin patch for me.

According to Sara Jane, sugar babies, which are about eight inches in diameter, are the pumpkin of choice because they have thick flesh and little moisture. To use them in the below recipe, quarter one pumpkin, and remove the stems and seeds. Place the pieces skin-side up on a foil-lined baking dish. Bake for 45 to 60 minutes at 350 degrees. Let cool, scoop the flesh into a food processor, and whir.

A fever of 103 degrees prevented me from pumpkin picking, so I reached into the pantry for the canned version, which still created a cake that had neighbors pleading for the recipe.

So with apologies to Mayflower descendants everywhere—America, may I humbly introduce your new Thanksgiving dessert.

Recipe
Pumpkin Cake With Maple–Cream Cheese Frosting

Article © 2002 David Leite. Photograph © 2003 Pornchai Mittongtare. All rights reserved.
© 2009 Leite’s Culinaria, Inc. All rights reserved. Terms of use.

I am not ashamed to admit it publicly: I’m a Solanum tuberosum freak. Yep, so lock me up and throw away the key to the pantry. In other words, I’m a potato fanatic. I wave my freak flag high and proud. I worship all sizes and shapes of this seductive tuber. In fact, so deep goes my freakiness for the starchy little fellows that I have on many occasions eaten for dinner nothing but a big-ass bowl of mashed potatoes. (And, yes, I’m well aware of all the big-ass references you’re probably thinking of that can be inserted here, but I’d happily risk your sniggers than be less than my true, unadulterated self.)

Sometimes I do make a concession to dietary diversity and add other food stuffs for a well-rounded meal, such as sour cream (dairy) and chives (vegetables) to baked potatoes or eggs (dairy and protein) to sautéed potato slices for a potato frittata. I’ve even gone all leafy-green vegetarian on myself and stirred sautéed spinach or Swiss Chard into my bowl of sexy, tuberous goodness.

My latest obsession is potato pizza. The recette du moment that I’m hooked on contains no tomato sauce (one less nutritional source, I know) but makes up for that with bacon. And, as I’m sure you know, add bacon—a food group unto itself—to anything, and it suddenly catapults the dish up the slippery slope of the food pyramid, besting fruits, vegetables, and lean meats. Just ask Dr. Regina M. Benjamin, President Obama’s Surgeon General nominee. (One look at ole ‘Gina, and you know she worships at the altar of bacon, bless her heart.)

I’ve been serving this pizza since summer, when it made its debut at a casual dinner hosted by our friend artist Gary Komarin in Roxbury, CT. I brought along a few pies, and they were gone in no time. Everyone weighed in with their comments (apparently, when it comes to pizza everyone’s a critic), but I got the greatest idea from Gary’s neighbor Candace Busnell of Sex in the City, Lipstick Jungle, and One Fifth Avenue fame: “Top it with a fried egg and you have breakfast.”

Needless to say, with my number one desire always being to round out my diet and eat as healthfully as possible, I did just that the next morning. Of course, I added a drizzle of white truffle oil. You can never have enough vegetables.

Recipe
Potato-Bacon Pizza