This past week the store started carrying meat from Rainbow Meadow Farms, a family farm right at the 100 mile mark in Snow Hill, NC. The first delivery consisted of a dozen pastured turkeys. I brought home a fourteen pounder to cook for a holiday meal.

This would be the second turkey I have ever cooked, and the first truly local one. Last year at Thanksgiving I cooked an organic bird from who knows where. I missed an opportunity to get a local turkey this Thanksgiving, but was glad Tidal Creek finally got a delivery system in place for Rainbow Meadow.

I cooked both turkeys “upside down”, meaning the breast faces down in the pan instead of the traditional way of roasting the bird with the breast up. The effect of cooking the turkey breast down is that all the juices from the roasting flow down into the breast. This is a good thing.

1 - Let the turkey sit out (in its wrapper) for an hour or so. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees near the end of the hour.

2 - Wash the turkey, remove the neck and innards and pat the turkey dry. I don’t eat the innards (yet), but I saved the neck to make some soup stock later.

3 - Get the turkey into the roasting pan. Rub it with salt and either butter or olive oil.

4 - To the inside of the bird, add a couple chopped carrots, leeks, garlic, basil, thyme and rosemary.

The leeks and carrots are from Oakley Laurel CSA, the garlic from Black River Organic Farm and the basil from my garden. The other herbs were from the dumpster.

5 - Tie the legs tightly together so that the veggies don’t fall out.

6 - Flip the turkey breast side down, rub with salt and butter/oil and sprinkle with herbs.

7 - Here is how my turkey baking time came out - 400 degrees for a half hour, 350 degrees for two hours and 225 for one hour and fifteen minutes. I also turned the turkey over for fifteen minutes at 350 to slightly brown the breast. The two important cooking times are the 400 and 350 degree times. The 225 degree time will vary by the size of the turkey. Use an instant read thermometer to be sure. The temperature in the deepest part of the thigh should be over 165 degrees when fully cooked.

8 - After removing from the oven, let the turkey rest for at least fifteen minutes before carving.

9 - My method of carving is to just randomly cut pieces off. I really can’t give anyone advice on how to do it since I really don’t know what I’m doing. As long as good chunks of the meat come off, I’m happy. The rest can come off in soup.

There are still three of these local turkeys in the frozen meat section at Tidal Creek if anyone is interested…

After discussing my bread problems on a previous post, I received quite a few helpful tips from readers and friends. El at Fast Grow the Weeds sent me a link to a no-knead bread recipe from the New York Times. The beauty of this recipe is that you let water and time do the work that your hands and back would usually do. Instead of using physical energy to create and expand the strands of gluten in the dough, the water (given eighteen or so hours) does the job for you.

I was skeptical, and, since I do not have packaged yeast, not convinced that I could make a sourdough no-knead loaf. I figured I would need a pretty strong and pretty watery starter to make everything work. After searching for no-knead sourdough recipes, I decanted a couple to try. This recipe is what worked for me.

Wait. First, a short discussion on my collection of sourdough starters…

This stuff is great if you take care of it. I use it a lot, and try many different flours in their creation and maintenance. I had three starters going, each with its own type of flour, but now I am down to two. If you don’t have a jar of starter and you make bread or pie or pancakes on a weekly basis then you are really missing out.

So I am down to two starters now. I was using graham flour in the one that died. It was getting pretty funky towards the end, losing its sweet aroma and leaning towards some kind of rotten smell. I don’t have a theory as to why the graham flour starter didn’t last. Maybe someone else has the answer. Here is the graham flour starter before I composted it:

It was pretty lifeless even after I fed it.

I also have a questionable starter that I feed whatever free flour I bring home from the store. It has recently eaten garbanzo bean flour, soy flour and a variety of other strange varieties.

It is still alive and smells fine. It does not bubble as much as my most active starter, the one I feed Southern Biscuit Flour, the only local flour I have available at the moment.

This one loves being what it is and performs no matter how long I neglect it or knock it around. It is my wild yeast workhorse, and I can’t praise it enough. I used this starter in the following recipe.

1 - Mix a sticky dough with three cups of flour, one cup of sourdough starter, one cup of water and one teaspoon of salt. You can also add just a dribble to honey to get everything real activated.

2 - Mix everything well, cover with plastic wrap and let sit for twelve to eighteen hours on your counter or other warm place. Sixty-eight degrees works well for mine, but seventy would be better.

3 - When the dough is ready it will have doubled its size (at least). Scoop the dough out onto a floured board.

4 - Form the dough into a ball, adding about a quarter cup more flour in the process. Don’t do too much work with the dough, just get it into a ball shape.

5 - Put the ball into a baking dish that has a cover. I am using a casserole dish at the moment, but have a cast iron Dutch Oven waiting to be put into service.

6 - Let the dough rise in the baking container. The recipes I found say everything from one to six hours. Use your best judgment.

7 - Place the baking dish (with cover) in a cold oven, set the temperature to 450 degrees and bake for one hour and ten minutes.

8 - Scrape the bread out of the container and set on a plate to cool.

Kristin says this is the best bread ever. It is really damn good.

Next up is Duncan’s beer bread…

Cabbage is in season, and I am trying to figure out new ways to use the vegetable. Chinese cabbage is somewhat easier to use than head cabbage and often it is quicker to work with. This is a fast way to make a head of bok choy disappear. It isn’t a new way to use cabbage by any means, but most folks don’t usually use bok choy when making a coleslaw.

1 - Chop one large head of bok choy (about four or so unpacked cups worth) into pieces and strips. Add carrot, onion, radish, fruit or anything else that you like in coleslaw.

2 - Stir in one tablespoon of the vinegar of your choice. Add two or three tablespoons of mayonnaise or salad dressing. Add one teaspoon of salt and a bit of mustard.

3 - Mix and your done. The most time consuming part of the process is washing and chopping the bok choy.

Warning: this stuff is very addictive. Kristin and I ate almost the whole bowl in one sitting. Be warned…

I have made enough chunky apple sauce from bruised and scavenged apples to last until spring. This Thanksgiving I used the apple sauce as the filling for a quick pie.

Last week my friend Mike gave me the recipe for the crust, and so I present my first from-scratch apple pie.

1 - Start by making the apple sauce.

2 - The crust is pretty straight forward. Mix two cups of flour with one teaspoon of salt and two-thirds cup of butter. I used goat butter, which can give the pie kind of a goaty flavor but I like it.

3 - When the dough starts to have a flaky texture and about half the pieces are pea-sized, start adding ice water in tablespoon increments. Don’t add any more than five tablespoons of water.

4 - Form the dough into a ball.

5 - Roll the dough out on wax paper. No wax paper? Just sprinkle some flour on a cutting board or countertop to avoid sticking. I started with a roller but ended up just using my hands to flatten the dough.

6 - Use half of the dough to line a nine inch pie pan.

7 - Add a bit of flour, no more than a tablespoon, to your apple sauce to thicken it up.

8 - Pour enough sauce into the pie dish to get it almost to the top of the dish. Add some honey to the top of the filling.

9 - Use the other half of the dough to cover the pie. I did the lattice top. Sprinkle with cinnamon if you have it.

10 - Bake at 450 degrees for ten minutes then reduce heat to 350 and bake for another forty minutes or until browned.

Crust recipe is from Mike and is adapted from Cooking Southern Vegetarian Style.