Colin Marshall

The turkey sandwich lifestyle

For Thanksgiving, Tyler Cowen twote:

The plain truth: Turkey hardly ever tastes good.

That, I have long thought, is this holiday's elephant in the room. You think up recipe ideas for what could be months, prepare for perhaps weeks, spent at least a day actually cooking, and what's it all revolve around? Turkey, quite possibly the least appealing meat commonly eaten in the developed world. Its blandness is well-documented, but I haven't read much about what I consider to be its fundamental sadness.

I don't know about you, but I've never chosen to eat turkey unless all the other available options are truly repulsive. (Vegetables, for example.) Having come to regard the turkey sandwich as a symbol of wan resignation, I cannot fathom the mind that possesses enthusiasm for it. I find few images sadder than that of the sad-sack who, given all of the world's brilliant culinary variety, actively chooses to eat a turkey sandwich. Glumly he pulls the defeated meal from his rumpled brown lunch bag, biting softly in as the smothering clouds of pedestrianism engulf him.

Hence the expression "turkey sandwich lifestyle," which I mainly use in my internal monologue. A turkey sandwich lifestyle is, you might have guessed, the lifestyle equivalent of a turkey sandwich: limp, featureless, willfully bland. I have what might be called a lengthy list of goals, near the top of which sits "don't live a turkey sandwich lifestyle." If you find yourself resigned to turkey, Mistakes Have Been Made.

But turkey's problems, I suppose, constitute the relishable challenge of Thanksgiving. You have the fixed component of your meal: the turkey. Now make it good, if you dare.

A monstrous pairing

Madelaine asked me what I planned to cook this week. The flop sweat began as I desperately thought through the possibilities. As much as I enjoy cooking in the event, I suffer from severe cooker's block: rarely does the idea of what to make come easily. As for intuitively knowing which "side dishes" best combine with which "main dishes" to form "meals," forget about it; I throw myself on the tender mercy of combinatorial randomness and hope for the best.

"Salmon," I blurted. "Wasabi salmon."

"With what?"

Uh oh. "Um... potato cakes."

"What about sweet potato cakes?"

"Sold."

I thus found myself making wasabi salmon and sweet potato cakes last night, the recipes for which follow. The salmon I adapted from an Epicurious page:

3/4 cup wasabi peas
4 8-oz salmon fillets
Two or three limes

Preheat oven to 400°F. Blend wasabi peas in processor. Arrange salmon fillets skin side down on lightly oiled baking sheet. Sprinkle fish with sea salt. Press ground wasabi peas onto tops of salmon fillets to adhere, covering tops completely. Grate lime peel and sprinkle over salmon; drizzle with one tablespoon oil. Roast salmon just until opaque in center, about 10 minutes.

Transfer each salmon fillet to a plates. Serve with lime wedges for self-drizzling of fish.

The sweet potato cakes I made by following pretty much the first Google hit:

1 1/2 cups sifted all-purpose flour
3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 1/4 cups mashed cooked sweet potatoes
2 eggs, beaten
1 1/2 cups milk
1/4 cup butter, melted

Sift dry ingredients into a mixing bowl. Combine remaining ingredients; add to flour mixture, stirring just until dry ingredients are moistened. Drop by tablespoons onto hot greased griddle or skillet and fry, turning once, until browned on both sides. Makes one hell of a lot of pancakes, so watch out.

But how palatable, I sense you dying to ask, was the combination of wasabi salmon and sweet potato? That's not for me to say, though I will admit that I ate so much of the stuff that I rendered myself nearly immobile for the rest of the evening. Res ipsa loquitur. Then again, you're talking to a guy who ate peanut-butter-and-tuna sandwiches for lunch at least once a week throughout middle school.

But deliciousness aside, it seems to me that the product of cooking matters far, far less than does the act of cooking. Permit me to gesture toward the musty old trunk of clichés about journey over destination. While putting this monstrous pairing together, it occurred to me that it probably feels good to cook because cooking is something: it's a sequence of real actions that actually involve stuff in the world and produce tangible results. This recommendation may sound weak — don't a lot of pursuits... "involve stuff?" — but it signifies the physicality, immediacy and clarity lacked by much of what we might spend our time on. I suspect it's no accident that so many people who shuffle figures around Excel sheets all day long turn to the kitchen for their only solace.

Awe-inspiring black bean burgers

On Saturday I synthesized several black bean burger recipes to create what I have reason to believe is the ultimate black bean burger. Behold:

Awe-inspiring black bean burgers for 4n

14n oz black beans, drained
n/2 medium onions, chopped
n/2 cups rolled oats
n tbs chili powder
n eggs
n/4 cups miso
1.5n to 2n heads garlic, roasted
A thing of panko crumbs
4n toasted rolls, preferably onion, but at least not the kind that come in 16-packs

Combine the beans, miso, onion, oats, chili powder and egg in a blender. Pulse into a sorta-coarse (not puréed) mixture. Pour it in a bowl and stir in panko until the mixture reaches a shape-able thickness. Refrigerate.

In the meantime, roast the garlic with a bit of olive oil under 350d heat for 35m. When the garlic is about done, pull the mixture from the refrigerator. Let the garlic cool a bit (unless you have unusually heat-insensitive hands) and peel the individual cloves, then mash them into the mixture with a fork.

Shape the mixture into n burgerlike patties. Cook them in a nonstick skillet preheated to medium. Browning should take a little over 5m per side.

As a garlic fiend, I adhere hard to the 2n-heads side, but your mileage may vary. Some may wish to omit the garlic entirely, which is a sin against god.