Condiments

Turkey meat-loaf bites & Cranberry dipping sauce

/ Dave S. Koster / Leave a comment

I’m going to be perfectly honest. This is NOT what I was aiming for. A few weeks ago, I was goofing with the kids telling them what I was going to cook for dinner. The random words that fell from my lips involved turkey nuggets and cranberry dipping sauce. Naturally, I thought this was going to be a brilliant idea. So. I was wrong, but it’s okay, because the dipping sauce was pretty good and I think it’d make a damn fine spread for a turkey sandwich. I’m giving the full recipe for both here because you could probably cook the meatloaf bites as meatloaf and top it with the spread. It’s in the realm of comfort food. Someday, hopefully, I’ll give the turkey bites another go and actually get them right. In the mean-time, here is what I came up with.

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Turkey meat-loaf bites:

What you need:

  • 2 lb lean ground turkey
  • 1 tsp Garlic powder
  • 1 tsp Rosemary (crush if you can)
  • 1 tsp Sage
  • 1 tsp Thyme
  • 3 cups Panko crumbs
  • ½ C. flour
  • salt/pepper to taste
  • olive oil
  • 2 eggs

Directions:

Mix 1 ½ C. Panko crumbs with ½ C. flour with salt, pepper, a dash of garlic, and a dash of sage. This is going to be your breading. Mix the rest of the ingredients together, it should be a bit dry as if you’re going to make meatballs. Make little chicken-nugget shapes and roll in the breading, place on a well-oiled cookie sheet. Bake for 20min at 375, flip and bake for another 10 minutes.

Dipping sauce/turkey spread:

What you need:

  • 1 16 can jellied cranberry juice
  • 3 oz orange juice
  • ½ tsp Ground ginger
  • Pinch salt
  • Pinch pepper
  • pinch sage
  • Pinch orange zest

Directions:

Whisk all of the ingredients together until you have a smooth sauce, serve at room temperature.

Cranberry Relish

/ Dave S. Koster / 1 Comment

** This article will be published in the 11/16 Edition of the Seward Journal Newspaper **


As I write this, Thanksgiving is two weeks away.  I am, or was, super excited about having my family all in the same place for the festivities. After Tuesday, however, I think festivities is a rather generous expectation for the day. The best analogy I can come up for the proceedings is the past week on social media, specifically Facebook. If you think about it, Facebook is just a giant Thanksgiving dinner table. Think about it, all of your friends and family are going to be there along with at least a few people only one other person knows. Everyone is listening to all the conversations and, for better or worse, looking to jump in on one. Undoubtedly, someone will lead with a prayer meme before everybody goes around throwing up memes about what they’re thankful for. After that comes the food pictures and recipie discussions. Maybe you’ll get pleseant conversation about the kids, which leads to one person gushing about their job and everyone else complaning heartily about theirs. Eventually though, the politics memes start. It’s going to start subtly by someone tossing out a funny meme about the candidate they didn’t support, which they also imagine, incorrectly, everyone else will find funny too. Then there’s a response, and the whole dinner table starts to roll down hill until, eventually, at least two people are shouting and the rest of us are chasing the wine to the bottom of the bottle, and reaching for the liquor cabinet. At the end of it someone will throw their hands up and storm out, with the standard, ‘I’m taking a break from Facebook for a while’, and a few others will walk away from the proceedings and go back to posting about the Seahawks again.

This year, that’s where we’re at, pretty much all of us, I think. I’m super optimistic that after already reaching the point of angry red-faced shouting on Facebook, everyone knows to not bring up politics for even a second, it’s a slippery slope. In any case, if it does get there, because it will, I’ve got the perfect recipie that you can knock up by just throwing ingredients into a blender. 

What you need:

– 1 Navel orange (unpeeled)
– 1 bag of store-bought cranberries
– 1 Cup of white sugar

Directions:

Put all of that into a blender, and it’ll be fine if your huffing and puffing and shouting or totally distracted and thinking about this argument or that. If you like, you can throw in a few tablespoons of Grand Marnier.