Al Dente

New Year’s Day Lillet Sugar Cube Cocktail, Plus S’Mores Chocolate Tartlets for the Kids

I love Lillet. Lillet is one of the great French apéritif wines from Bordeaux that comes in both red and white varieties. This cocktail calls for “blanc,” or the white one.

I always loved the idea of Champagne cocktails on New Year’s Eve, so if you have any leftover Champagne from midnight merriment, use it here. It’s a little bit of Lillet, a sugar cube, and whatever sparkling wine you want to use. Champagne is fine.  Cru Secco is also a great alternative. We started serving this at my restaurant Union Pacific on holidays for something different. We wanted to offer people an apéritif they hadn’t heard of, something slightly sweeter than normal. I think people don’t realize it but they prefer sweeter aperitifs and cocktails. Right now, for example, a litchi martini is one of the most popular drinks in New York City. People don’t notice how sweet it is because it has that wonderful tropical flavor of litchi. The Lillet does a similar thing; it aromatizes the cocktail, the bubbles--Champagne, Cru Secco, sparkling wine--in a very unusual way because Lillet has got over two dozen botanicals in it. It’s a very special flavor.

Rocco’s Lillet Sugar Cube Cocktail
From Rocco Gets Real

Ingredients:
3 sugar cubes
Dash Angostura bitters
1 2-by-3/4-inch strip orange peel
1 ounce Lillet Blanc
4-1/2 to 5 ounces chilled Champagne (or Cru Secco, sparkling wine)

Directions:
Drop sugar cubes into a champagne flute; add bitters. Squeeze the orange peel into the glass, then run it over the rim of the glass. Drop peel in glass. Add Lillet, then slowly fill it with Champagne.

Makes 1 serving

S’Mores Chocolate Tartlets for the Kids

This is for adults and kids, but the kids especially love it. When else do you get to use Fluff? Can’t resist it. It is so indulgent and it looks very sophisticated but it’s based straight from a kid’s brain.

Rocco’s S’Mores Chocolate Tartlets
From Rocco Gets Real

Ingredients:
8 Keebler Mini Graham Cracker Pie Crusts, or other tart shells of choice
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped
8 large strawberries, sliced
1-1/2 cups Marshmallow Fluff® marshmallow creme
Salt

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Place tart shells on a baking sheet. Bake until golden brown, about 1-1/2 minutes. Remove from oven and turn oven up to 500 degrees F.
3. Meanwhile, in a microwaveable bowl, melt chocolate in microwave at 50 percent power for about 3 minutes, or until melted, stirring halfway through cooking time. Spoon a little more than a tablespoon of melted chocolate into the bottom of each tart shell. Arrange strawberry slices from one strawberry on the chocolate in each shell. Spoon about 3 tablespoons Fluff inside each shell and spread to cover the entire surface of the shell. Sprinkle a tiny amount of salt on top of the Fluff.
4. Place filled tartlets in oven. Watching carefully, allow the Fluff to get toasty brown, about 3 minutes. Remove from oven. Place 2 tartlets on each plate. Drizzle with remaining melted chocolate and serve immediately.

Makes 4 servings

--Rocco DiSpirito

A Relaxed After-Christmas or After-New Year’s Breakfast Brunch Egg Cake with Bacon Yorkshire Pudding

For a relaxed late breakfast or brunch in the days after Christmas, you can whip up a wonderful egg cake (not a frittata) that makes great use of your holiday leftovers. I like to sauté lots of onion and garlic with bacon lardons, which are little slivers of bacon. First, you want to render the bacon, heating it in a pan; when the fat is melted, remove the bacon. Then add your sliced onions and garlic to the pan and really get those caramelized. Add the bacon back and then take all your Christmas leftovers--bits of turkey, ham, or roast, and potatoes--and mix them together with your bacon, onion, and garlic base in a large pan. (A 5-quart sauté pan, about 12 inches in diameter, will work well.) Fill the pot up with your mixture and then crack 12 eggs on top of it. Season it with salt and pepper, and bake it in the oven until the eggs are the consistency you prefer. I bake it until the eggs are just opaque on top, and still runny on the inside, like a sunny-side-up egg. Serve it with bread. I’ve made this often, and guests love it.

This cake works well for any holiday; it’s basically bacon and eggs with the flavor of the holiday. So if it’s after Christmas Eve, for me that means a lot of Christmas Eve fish, lobster, and shrimp leftovers. There’s crab, too, that is terrific in this mixture. If it’s New Year’s Eve, maybe it’s scraps of roast beef or Yorkshire pudding. It’s a great day-after-any-holiday meal.

Rocco’s Yorkshire Pudding
From Rocco Gets Real

Traditional Yorkshire pudding is cooked in the beef fat that drips off a roast. These are cooked, popover style, in a popover or muffin pan.

Ingredients:
4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons salt
4 cups milk
8 large eggs
Nonstick cooking spray
2-1/3 cups shredded cheddar cheese, about 10 ounces

Directions:
1. Place a 1/2-cup popover pan or standard-size muffin tin in the oven. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Place the flour and salt in a fine-mesh sieve and sift it onto a piece of wax paper.
3. In a small saucepan, heat the milk over medium heat until small bubbles appear around the edges.
4. In a large bowl, whisk the eggs until frothy. Slowly whisk hot milk into the eggs, being careful not to cook the eggs; set aside.
5. Gradually whisk the dry ingredients into the egg mixture, stirring until almost smooth (a few lumps are fine).
6. Remove the hot popover pan from the oven; spray the cups with nonstick cooking spray. While the pan is still slightly warm or at room temperature, fill each cup at least 3/4 full.* Top each pudding with some of the grated cheese. Place pan on a baking sheet to catch any drips.
7. Bake puddings for 15 minutes. Rotate the pan 180 degrees so that the puddings will rise evenly. Bake until puddings are golden brown, about another 35 minutes.
8. Invert the pan to remove the puddings and serve immediately. (Puddings can also be made up to 2 hours in advance. Prick them a few times with a fork to keep them from deflating, and then cool on a wire rack. Reheat in a 250 degrees F oven for 5 to 6 minutes just before serving.)

*Note: Depending on how many pans you have, you’ll have to repeat the filling/baking process the number of times it takes to use all the batter.

Makes 24 servings

--Rocco DiSpirito

Christmas Crackers, a Christmas Hamper, and Stuffed Artichokes

Growing up, my brother and sister and I were constantly struggling with the acculturation process and trying to figure out who we were. When you’re an Italian-American kid, you grab onto the traditions of other cultures you experience in this country. My family exists at the center of the Italian way of life, the American way of life, and all the rich traditions that come with both cultures.

On Thanksgiving, it was always very clear, because there isn’t an Italian Thanksgiving. It was an American holiday and we should be cooking turkey, there should be stuffing, there should be gravy and cranberry sauce, and a 12-hour turkey fest. For Christmas it was a little more difficult to sway my parents toward the American version of Christmas because there is such a strong, thousand-year-old tradition for Christmas in Italy, which was actually pretty great. The Christmas we had was la Vigilia di Natale, the Feast of the Seven Fishes, on Christmas Eve, when we opened our gifts. Our Christmas Eve dinner was off the charts. It was the meal we looked forward to all year, my first cousins, second cousins, third cousins--everyone. It was hosted family to family, year by year, because it was a really big splurge. There had to be shrimp and lobster, and fancy vegetables like artichokes--all the richest, most extravagant ingredients. There was so much fish to buy, and it was so expensive, that the men went shopping for the fish, because they had to go and do the negotiating.

Over the years, little by little, some American traditions crept in to our Feast. As my cousins got married and had their own kids, we started opening gifts Christmas morning to be like the other kids in the neighborhood, and there were fewer gifts exchanged on Christmas Eve. Then, I moved to France and lived there for almost two years, and became friends with a girl from England. I spent a couple holidays with her family, including a Christmas, and I learned about the traditions of Christmas crackers and a Christmas hamper.

A Christmas hamper was the big, giant container of food that you filled with everything you would need for the entire Christmas holiday, because all the stores literally closed for two weeks. Really closed, not just short hours; they were closed. This was in the 80s. I thought it was fantastic. I loved seeing English tradition played out at the Christmas table, and one of the things I loved the most was the Christmas crackers, because of the silly little hats that came with them. I remember her father putting on the hat and making jokes, telling stories, and thought how different this was from what I experienced growing up. My Christmases had more of a religious bent to them. We went to Mass and even the food was full of religious symbolism. There were seven fishes to commemorate the Stations of the Cross.

Then I found you could make your own Christmas crackers--or poppers, and that there are all different kinds. Some come with very expensive gifts, some with small inexpensive tokens, but they always have a hat, a toy or gift of some kind, a joke, a whistle…they basically are a way, at the start of a Christmas Eve or Christmas meal, to get the festivities going. You break down the barriers of everyday life and you establish that this is a special day. It’s the kind of day where we put on silly hats and celebrate the beginning of a meal, and I fell in love with it. And from then on, I brought the tradition of Christmas crackers to my family and everyone loves it. I even got my dad to put on a silly hat, and he’s a kind of serious guy. My brother does it now and so does my cousin. It’s a really sweet tradition, and I think a clever way to draw a distinction between that day and every other day of the year. In England, the silliness leads to pageants, and relatives and cousins getting together to put on little shows, and dancing by blindfolded people, or giving tours of the Christmas house and trying to fool guests into thinking they are touching Santa’s beard, or a reindeer’s nose by putting a cherry tomato on their hand…it’s a lot of lightheartedness, which is great.

So Christmas went from being a very solemn event to being solemn plus silly; I think we’ve struck a good balance. Plus now we do things like prime rib on Christmas Day. I’ve also brought in different kinds of fish experiences, like caviar and stone crab claws, things my parents were unfamiliar with; it’s really fun, and now they are very open to it and love it. Now it’s like, bring it on.

Thanksgiving Gratitude and a 24-Hour Turkey

Thanksgiving is so great. It’s about gratitude, not attitude. It’s about cooking, eating, and gathering with the friends and family I love.

I really enjoy helping home cooks make their holiday meal a stress-free event. When it comes to the turkey on Thanksgiving, there is a lot of lore, a lot of myth, debate, mysticism--a legend of the turkey and the myriad ways to cook it. Do you brine or not, do you cover it with bacon or do you cover it with cheesecloth, do you tent it, do you start low or do you start high? The answer is that all of these are correct, and fine, which just makes it even more confusing.

I remember when I did radio, I had a show called Food Talk on WOR, and I did two live Thanksgiving shows, from 5 AM until about 1 PM, just taking calls all morning to help home cooks with their dilemmas. It got me thinking: let me come up with the perfect version of a brined, marinated, roasted turkey with gravy and vegetables all in one.

So I set out to bring together the perfect combination of the brined and roasted turkey where the brine becomes the gravy, the vegetables are part of the marinade, the brine and marinade are one in same, and everything gets used, so there isn’t this separate brining process, roasting process, gravy process, and vegetable process. I combined them into one master recipe, and that became my 24-hour Turkey.

Rocco’s 24-Hour Turkey
From Rocco Gets Real

Ingredients:
8 cups low-sodium chicken broth
2 cups dry white wine
1 tablespoon salt, plus more for seasoning
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
3 tablespoons sugar
2 onions, cut into medium chunks
15 garlic cloves, peeled
1 parsnip, peeled and cut into medium chunks
3 carrots, peeled and cut into medium chunks
2 white turnips, peeled and cut into medium chunks
1 bunch fresh flat-leaf parsley, leaves roughly chopped
1 bunch fresh sage, leaves roughly chopped
1 bunch fresh rosemary, leaves roughly chopped
1 bunch fresh thyme, leaves roughly chopped
2 to 3 bay leaves
2/3 cup Bertolli® extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for brushing
1 13-pound turkey (thawed, if frozen), giblet bag and neck removed and reserved
Freshly ground pepper
6 tablespoons cornstarch

Directions:
1.   In an extra-large mixing bowl (about 8 quarts), combine broth, wine, the 1 tablespoon salt, peppercorns, sugar, onions, garlic, parsnip, carrots, turnips, fresh herbs, and bay leaves.
2.   Put turkey in a clean, unscented garbage bag; pour marinade over. Twist bag and seal with an extra-large twist tie or tie with twine. Place in a very large bowl and refrigerate for about 18 hours.
3.   Preheat oven to 200ºF. Remove turkey from marinade. Remove vegetables from marinade, reserving each separately. In a large saucepan combine marinade, giblets, and neck. Simmer, uncovered, for 1 hour. Strain, reserving broth. (You should have 4 to 5 cups of broth.)
4.   Toss vegetables with the 2/3 cup olive oil and spread in the bottom of a large, heavy, flameproof roasting pan. Place turkey on a roasting rack on top of vegetables. Season turkey with salt and freshly ground pepper. Roast for 3 1/2 hours, rotating pan every hour. Turn oven to 425ºF. Brush turkey with olive oil; roast for another 45 to 55 minutes, or until skin is golden brown and meat is just cooked through.
5.   Remove turkey from the pan and place on a carving board or serving platter. Cover lightly with foil and let rest for 30 minutes while you make the gravy. (If vegetables aren’t tender, return them to the oven and continue to roast until they are done.)
6.   Remove vegetables from roasting pan; cover lightly with foil to keep warm. Pour all but 1 cup of the strained broth into the roasting pan and bring to a simmer over medium heat. In a medium bowl, whisk remaining broth with cornstarch mixture into boiling broth. Cook, whisking, over medium heat until gravy consistency is achieved, about 2 minutes. Strain and season to taste. Return vegetables to gravy.
7.   Carve turkey and serve with vegetable gravy.

Makes 20 servings

--Rocco DiSpirito

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