Robin Chahal

For Thanksgiving I decided to try a little experiment with the potatoes and it worked out really well.  The end produce was excessively rich, but damn did it taste good.

Whipped potatoes with blue cheese, cream cheese, bacon and chives

The recipe is pretty simple:

1. Boil a dozen red potatoes for about 45 minutes
2. Drain the potatoes, put them in the mixer and blend until smooth
3. Add 1/4 cup of whipping cream and keep blending
4. Add 1 cup of cream cheese and keep blending
5. Add 2 tablespoons of crushed and minced garlic
6. Add 1/4 cup of blue cheese
7. Add 1/2 cup of cooked and chopped up bacon
8. Add 1/4 cup of minced chives
9. Blend at high speed until the whole thing is smooth
10. Done

For Thanksgiving this year, I heard that I could get a Turducken from the Loblaws up the street all pre-assembled.  For the uninitiated, a Turducken is a turkey, stuffed with a duck, stuffed with a chicken.  To me, this was a very exciting thing.  I don’t really know why it’s exciting – but it is.  I called the store and they said I didn’t even need to pre-order the Turducken, I could just show up and take one some time in the two weeks before Thanksgiving.  I showed up a week before hand and found what they were talking about.  The Turducken they carry comes in a pre-packaged box.  The Turducken is assembled in a processing plant somewhere, frozen solid, packaged up and shipped off.  For some reason I had it in my head that the butchers at the store would assemble it.  Since cooking meat that comes in a box is unacceptable for Thanksgiving, and a regular turkey just wasn’t going to do now that our hopes were up, the only solution was to try to put a Turducken together ourselves.

Pre-Packaged Turducken - Sacrelidge

The first step was to gather the ingredients:  turkey, duck, chicken and sausage.

Ingredients: Turkey, Duck, Chicken, and Sausage

I then brined the birds in a salt water solution for about 20 minutes, rinsed them off and then started deboning.

Brining the Birds

Knives: Chef's Knife, Meat Cleaver, Boning Knife

The trick to the Turducken is completely deboning the chicken and duck.  The turkey is also deboned except the legs and wings are kept in tact so the whole thing still looks like a turkey when you’re done.

Deboned Chicken

De-Boned Duck

Once all the birds are deboned, the sausage stuffing is used to add a little flavor to the meat.  To stitch the turkey back together you can use butchers cord and a needle but I prefer to just stitch it up with BBQ skewers.  I then cover the bird with herbs and a layer of bacon to baste the bird.  I cooked the bird for 9 hours at 275 *F.

Deboned Turkey

Assembled Turducken

Protective Bacon & Herb Layer

Behold the Turducken in all it's glory!

Because all the birds are already deboned, carving is nice and easy.

Turducken Cut In Half

Dry Ice Ice Cream

A couple months ago I tried making ice cream using dry ice.  It turned out really well.  The added benefit of making ice cream with dry ice is for the first 24 hours after it’s made, the ice cream is carbonated which gives it a really neat texture.

The basic procedure is:

1. Get at least a pound of dry ice.  If you’re in Ottawa, the best place I’ve found for it so far is Praxair on Star Top Rd.
   

   Dry Ice Package

2. Assemble the base for the ice cream – any recipe you can find for ice cream to put in an ice cream maker will work.  I found that the recipes where you make a custard for the base worked best.
   

   Ice Cream Base

3. Knock off a big chunk of dry ice with a hammer and a chisel, wrap it in a towel, and then use a hammer to pound the dry ice into a fine powder.
   

   Crushing the dry ice

4. Put the ice cream base into your mixer with the beater attachment, put it on a medium speed, and using a measuring cup slowly start sprinkling in the dry ice powder.  As the ice cream starts to thicken up, gradually slow down the mixer.  Do not add chunks of dry ice thinking that your mixer will break them apart.  They do break apart a fair bit but if you end up eating a chunk of dry ice, it can burn the inside of your mouth – just like frost bite.
   

   Ice Cream Carbonation

5. Keep adding the dry ice until you think you can add just a little bit more before the mixer will struggle and then stop.  I found I repeatedly added just a little too much dry ice and ended up with big chucks of rock hard ice cream at the bottom of the bowl.  Stop while it’s still soft.
   

   Ice cream after adding too much dry ice

6. If you want to stir in big chunks of things in your ice cream like pieces of chocolate bars or if you want to swirl in chocolate syrup or a berry mixture, now’s the time to do it.
7. You can eat it now as carbonated soft serve ice cream, put it in the freezer for an hour and eat it as carbonated hard ice cream, or leave it in the freezer for 24 hours to eat it as regular ice cream.

Naga Jolokia Pepper

My Naga Jolokia Pepper plants are finally producing peppers!  They are indeed hotter than hell.  Unlike a habanero which slowly builds with heat after you eat it, the Naga Jolokia just hits you with a wave of heat the second it goes in your mouth.

These peppers are ridiculously hot.  So hot, I don’t know what I’m going to do with them.  Thinking hot pepper vodka.

Naga Jolokia Flowers

In 2007 Naga Jolokia Peppers were confirmed to be the hottest peppers in the world.  Twice as hot as the previously known hottest peppers.  Immediately after finding out about these things I ordered seeds online from New Mexico State University and started growing them.

I now have two surviving plants that have gotten huge but still haven’t produced any peppers.  This year I put them outside and a couple weeks ago I started getting the first flowers.  Flowers mean peppers are on the way.  I’m very excited!

I used to grow the previously known hottest peppers and a number of other species of pepper as well but in the past year and a half that I’ve been trying to get peppers out of the Naga Jolokia, the other peppers seem less significant.

Naga Jolokia Pepper Plant #1

Naga Jolokia Pepper Plant #2