Respect The Martha Stewart

Martha Stewart was a guest judge for the quickfire challenge on Top Chef last night. The first thing my husband said when Martha came on the screen was something about how she was a jailbird.

Hearing this my first thought was, "oh yeah, wow, I had completely forgotten about that," and my second thought was, "hey, leave Martha alone. Then I quickly jumped to Martha's defense. Why? Because I like Martha Stewart. And even if you don't like her, you should at least respect her.

Everything that Martha Stewart puts her name on is great. When I was planning my wedding the best of all the wedding magazines was the one with her name on the cover.

The Everyday Food cookbook that my husband and I use most often out of all our cookbooks (and which I actually am going to use today for an excellent meatball recipe) is another Martha Stewart product.


Sure, she's a little uptight and her crazy perfectionist ways make everyone else feel slightly inadequate. For example, a few months agoI was watching her TV show and it was an episode where she talked about how to make the perfect bed (using, of course, her Martha Stewart brand of bedding from Macys) and part of her technique included ironing the sheets.

Now, if it was Oprah talking about having her sheets ironed, I would be annoyed - as I was when Oprah once talked about how she likes fresh sheets on her bed every night. The reason for my annoyance is that Oprah has this "I'm just like you persona", when we all knows she's not the one making the bed and laundering those sheets. Martha, on the other hand, has more of a "sprinkling her knowledge on the little people" thing going, but I can imagine her actually ironing her own sheets just because she believes that no one else will do it as well as she can.

I guess what I love most about Martha Stewart is that she's kind of crazy. The way she interviews the various celebrities on her show- often awkwardly ordering them around, putting her foot in her mouth, or even accidentally stabbing them.

In honor of the awesome crazy that is Martha Stewart I have pasted below a recipe of hers that I used last Christmas to make the holiday ham for my family. It tasted delicious, but didn't end up looking quite as pretty as Martha's picture. And you know what? With a Martha Steward recipe - that's exactly the way it should be.

Honeyed Ham with Pears and Cranberries

• 1 fully cooked, smoked bone-in ham, (about 10 pounds), trimmed of excess fat and skin
• Whole cloves, for ham (about 45)
• 2 cups apple cider
• 1 1/2 cups honey
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 5 Bosc pears, quartered and cored
• 3 cups fresh or frozen cranberries
• 1/2 cup packed light-brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Score ham all over in a diamond pattern; insert cloves into diamonds. Place the ham in a large roasting pan. Pour cider and 1 cup honey over the ham. Bake 1 hour, basting with pan juices halfway through.
2. Add cinnamon and pears to pan. Bake 45 minutes, basting twice. Sprinkle cranberries over pears; bake until pears are tender and cranberries begin to burst, 30 to 40 minutes. Remove from oven. Using a slotted spoon, transfer fruit to a shallow bowl; cover with foil, and set aside.
3. Ladle juices from pan into a medium saucepan. Stir in remaining 1/2 cup honey, the sugar, and ginger. Bring to a gentle boil over medium heat. Cook until mixture is syrupy and has reduced by half, about 20 minutes. Pour glaze over ham; bake 15 minutes. Remove from oven; brush ham with glaze from pan. Let rest 15 minutes. Transfer to a cutting board, and carve. Pour pan juices over pears and cranberries in bowl; serve with ham.

Let's Talk Turkey

Last year my husband and I hosted our first Thanksgiving. Since Andy and I have been together as a couple Thanksgiving has been a time to go see family. We went to Park City, Utah for our first Thanksgiving to see Andy's mother. Then for the next few Thanksgivings we went to Palm Springs in California to spend it with Andy's father and stepmother. However, last year everything changed because we had a six month old baby. It was decided, without any need of discussion, that attempting the holiday travel gauntlet with a child who was still working on sitting up without assistance was not a good idea. So, Andy's mother flew in from Utah and we began to plan our first Thanksgiving dinner.

Now I like to cook, so I saw this as more of an exciting challenge rather than something to get stressed about. I started watching the Food Network Thanksgiving specials, searching the Internet for the best recipes, and even bought an Everyday Food Magazine with some recipes in it. When Andy's mom arrived she also brought some recipes with her.

We ended up cooking an insane amount of food. Bacon wrapped and goat cheese stuffed pears for an appetizer (insanely good btw), all the fixings for the main course including: stuffing (my MIL was in charge of this and it was amazing, made with Ciabatta bread), mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, rolls, turkey, gravy, and roasted squash. As if this wasn't enough we also had TWO desserts. I made an apple pie (my husband says it is the best apple pie he ever tasted, but I was a bit disappointed with how my crust turned out. Those lattice tops are harder to make then they look) and my MIL made pumpkin bread pudding. As you may imagine this was wwwaaaayyyy more food than three adults could consume in one sitting, it was however, the perfect amount for three adults to consume over the course of a long weekend.

This Thanksgiving we will once again be away from home. We're flying up to Minnesota to spend the holiday with Andy's grandmother and his mom is meeting us there as well. However, even though I am not cooking a turkey I thought I would share three simple tips that I learned while cooking my first one.

1. Brining.

We decided to use Alton Brown's turkey recipe that involves brining the turkey the night before. Our refrigerator is pretty small, so we decided to use a little cooler that we have, and this way we could leave the turkey out on our porch. The next day we brought the turkey in, dumped the leftover brine down the sink, and then put the cooler back on the porch to clean later. Much later. That is where the cooler sat for days, weeks, and then months. Finally when the warm spring weather came around it could be put off no longer. Andy took the cooler to the car washing area to see if a high power hose could remove the kind of mold that grows from whatever it is that raw poultry leaves behind. Unfortunately, in the end the cooler could not be saved, and it was trashed.

The lesson: be careful what you decide to brine in, and if it is something you wish to use again, clean it sooner, rather than later.

2. Turkeys are not chickens.

I've roasted many whole chickens, using this great garlic and citrus recipe I got from Giada on the Food Network. So, I figured a turkey is really nothing more than a really big chicken. In some ways this is true, but in one important way it is not. Whole chickens only have one plastic wrapped bag of innards that you need to pull out before cooking, but turkeys have two such bags. I didn't find bag number two until we were carving the turkey. It wasn't a huge disaster - the bad didn't explode or melt or do anything terrible. Still it was kind of gross and really takes several points away for presentation.

The lesson: don't be shy about frisking your turkey before putting him in the oven.

3. Timing.

Our turkey took a little longer to cook than we had expected... at least according to our meat thermometer, whose accuracy has always been in doubt since it always seems to give readings that are much lower what they should be. Since my mother instilled in me a lifelong fear of ingesting undercooked meat (especially poultry products), so we decided to let the turkey cook a little longer. In the meantime we cracked open another bottle of wine. When we finally took the turkey out it was delicious and juicy, but not in a way that might give us Salmonella poisoning.

Lesson: Have lots of wine on hand and no one will care how long it takes to get dinner on the table. Also, some things are worth waiting for!

Hope these tips help someone and most importantly I hope everyone has a Happy Thanksgiving!