so long, in fact, that i can't even remember what year it was -- though i recall it was at my aunt and uncle's house in missouri. i think. this is before i went back to japan for work, so already pushing 8 years ago.
i won't lie -- i miss thanksgiving. it was one of those holidays that i really enjoyed. getting up semi-early to help my mom in the kitchen, making stuffing, sweet potatoes, and hoping that this year the turkey would come out perfect. i never got the chance to ask my mom her recipes for thanksgiving before she passed away, and when faced with the chance to make not a turkey, but a roast chicken, i really wish i had.
so i made a roast chicken today for the first time. i found i reliable site to help out with chicken prep, but i couldn't find just the right stuffing recipe.
scrolling through pages on my phone, i started to piece together fragments from that kitchen in columbia. raw turkey wrapped in white paper. boiling the neck to make broth. lots of cubes of bread. mushrooms. onions. sewing up the turkey. butter. taking snapshots of memories and turning them into a patchwork movie. and then i got to work.
since we always have baguettes in the store, i took the leftovers from that day and cut it up into cubes, then let them sit out overnight. heaven knows it's so dry in hiroshima you could probably make beef jerky overnight, i figured they should be good and dried out by the morning. my plan worked perfectly. by the time the lunch shift ended, i was ready to prepare the stuffing. chop up an onion and some mushrooms, sautee in butter, then add the bread cubes. since the chicken was coming in later in the afternoon, i had to make due with chicken broth, adding in a little at a time til the consistency was like i remembered. salt, pepper, and some herbes de provence for good measure. surprisingly, it tasted a lot like i remembered.
turkeys are massive -- that's about the only thing i could think when the chicken arrived that evening from our meat guy. turkeys take 4-6 hours, whereas chickens take 1. i'm fortunate to have a gas oven since y'know, own a restaurant, so i at least have an easier time baking chickens than your average japanese electric oven.
one of the other snapshots that sticks out in my mind is sewing up the turkey at the end. it's such a bizarre image -- i mean, it's a turkey, not a pillow, right? but it's also really fun. and so after cramming as much filling into the chicken as i could, it was time to finally bake the thing and see if my hard work had paid off.
oh yeah, it did. i also made way too much stuffing, so i baked the rest separately.
the whole time the chicken was in the oven, i couldn't just stand around watching, i had to like peek in every 10 minutes, brush some more olive oil over it, and then peek in again. it just made me so happy to have this pseudo-thanksgiving going on in the kitchen. it brought me right back that kitchen i loved so much, waiting for the turkey to finish.
and when i finally cut into the chicken and took a big bite of stuffing, it was like coming home. it tasted EXACTLY like the remembered it, even if it wasn't baked in a turkey.
it's things like this that i find i miss the most. stuffing used to be the november norm, something you could count on like clockwork. and then you move to another country and that clock stops. i just happen to be fortunate -- i'm in a situation where i can get whole chickens year round from a great distributor, and where i have a reasonably large oven to fit it too.
but i won't ever be able to have turkey and stuffing that my mom made again. or any of the meals that she used to make either, for that matter.
that's what i miss the most.
so for now, i'm just going to have to try and recreate them in my own way. and i'm pretty sure my mom would like that, too.
0 件のコメント:
コメントを投稿