Steve Irby

Lunch was 5-spice SV turkey breast served on pita bread. I'll have to say the breast and bread co-starred for this lunch. I've been buying this brand of pita for about 30 years and it never disappoints. I'll nuke the frozen bread for ~20 seconds and finish on a cast iron hoe that's been passed down for a number of generations.

Fried turkey tenderloins served with mashed potatoes, purple hull peas, kale, giblet gravy and cornbread.

The turkey fest is coming to an end. I'd like to thank the two 12-pounders from Publix ($0.49/#) and the 15-pound Butterball from BJ's ($0.99/#) for making it possible. The Butterball is featured today. Leg quarters cooked for 20 hours @ 150 and breast cooked for 4 hours @138. The breast halves were seasoned with five spice, pork fat, satsuma slices and lemon slices. The leg quarters were seasoned with Tony Chacere's More Spice blend. The meats were vacuum bagged and allowed to marinate for 24 hours prior to cooking. The dark meat was finished on the smoker for about two hours. The breast and drumette were flash fried for color. The breast with five spice is really tasty and the texture is better than the generic Publix birds.

Yes - The loaf is Ken Forkish overnight white. I must have been a little slack in the folding stage😏

It was a somewhat busy day so the lunch menu morphed to dinner. Tonight's sandwich was homemade longaniza sausage with gruyere and lunch was SV turkey breast with cheddar.

I started a couple of turkey leg quarters and wing flats with tips at noon. This will be the first time I have used my Anova for an extended period using an ice chest. I made a bridge for the Anova out of a 1-inch scrap of PT SYP. I also used a small piece of shoe mould to clip the bag ends too. The way the interior of the ice chest is moulded allows the top of bridge to sit flush allowing a nice seal with foil backed insulation lid. I'll cook for 20 hours then reduce the heat to 140 and cook the breast.

The last of the turkey and andouille gumbo. Served with a sous vided & smoked turkey wing. Next time I'll separate the drumette and cook it with the breast meat. The flat was cooked perfectly. Yesterday's lunch was chicken boudin and made a very nice light lunch. I have a "next time" for this lunch also. I'll make shorter links and not pack the casing as tight.

From an Android phone tap on the menu icon top right then tap on browse. The cure calculator should be in the drop down menu.

@&roid the universal cure calculator that DiggingDogFarm created is an excellent tool to determine the quantity of curing salt. It is located in the tool bar(?) above. I believe for wet equilibrium brining you input the weight of the meat plus the weight of the water required to cover the meat. Unlike most web based calculators it allows you to specify the % nitrite of the curing salt that you are using, the target salt % ( also sugar %) and also can calculate based on desired ppm.

I'll call this one Gilded Lily Gumbo. The turkey and sausage gumbo was made with homemade andouille sausage and SV/smoked turkey leg quarters in a rich chicken stock. The gumbo was finished with lump crab and shrimp sautéed in butter and turkey meat from the wing.

SV'd turkey breast and bacon wrapped tenderloin sandwich. Served with turkey gravy and gingered cranberry sauce on Hawaiian rolls. Yum Yum! The sandwich The turkey

@kayb I've successfully smoked meat after SV. I use a Smokai smoke generator attached to my gas grill. I use the left burner on low and place the items to smoke to the right. I think @Duvel SV'd some goose quarters which he finished in the oven. I decided to SV turkey leg quarters and wings for ~18 hrs @ 150 then finished on the grill for about two hours. Here's the collection of turkey cuts from two birds prepped for the circulator. Two breast halves were seasoned and bagged, two breast halves where stuffed with garlic sausage, wrapped in bacon and formed into a roulade, the tenderloins from each bird where bacon wrapped and formed into roulades and the quarters and wings described above. I decreased the temp of the bath to 140 for the last three hours when I added the white meat. Two leg quarters and carcasses were used for stock. I use my homemade circulator in a 48 gt. ice chest. I think I made this around 2012. I have an Anova for small batch cooking. The tenderloin and breast halves after a quick hot oil bath for color. Bagged up and ready for the freezer. One tenderloin and the stuffed breast were cooked then iced. I re-thermalized and brown at some future time. The JVR Vac100 has been a work horse over the past year.

A light meal tonight-boiled shrimp and avocado salad. The main course last night of a not so light dinner. The main was a sautéed seafood platter with meuniere sauce from Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen Cookbook. I was going to serve stuffed flounder but the flounder looked a little tired so I bought three puppy drum and filleted at home. The frames were used for stock. I was a little sloppy on the last platting due to too much hovering from my help🙄 and I was two oysters short.

Thanksgiving dinner may be a little anti-climatic after tonight's feast. I went to our local co-op yesterday to buy celeriac root and a few other ingredients which they were all out of. They did have a nice package of Meyer Duroc porterhouse chops at 25% off that I jumped on. The chops were about 12 oz. each and I cooked then sous vided tonight for 1.5 hours @ 150 then seared and served with potato's and spinach. I hope the SV turkey turns out half as well!

@Tropicalsenior, @Shelby, thanks for the boudin love! I worked out of Cameron LA for many years and ate a lot of boudin on my commute from Mobile AL. Boudin is pretty ubiquitous at gas stations/convenience stores south of I-10 in LA and is usually served from a crock pot with a steamed casing. Grilling really transforms the links to entrée status. Tonight's dinner was shrimp and sausage grits. The sausage is homemade using A.C. Leggs #10 seasoning blend with the addition of garlic and pink salt. I smoked it using my Weber gas grill and Smokai smoke generator with a blend of apple and hickory pellets.

About nine PM last night I was wondering what possessed me to make such a large batch of chicken boudin. My fifteen pound sausage stuffer was filled to the rim and I still had six pounds of pork sausage to stuff. I hung in there and cranked away and a little past ten the job was done. A shout out to Sweetwater 420 for the assistance! The boudin was a improvised mixture of roasted chicken thighs (seasoned with fresh rosemary and garlic) combined with onion, celery, parsley and medium grain rice. The rice was from Crowley LA and really tasty after being cooked in the roasted chicken pan juices. Dinner tonight was grilled boudin with a garlic forward vinaigrette. Boudin pre-link Pork sausage post smoke. I'll provide details in another post.

A few lunches from the past week or two. Today was a cheese omelet on toast with tomato gravy and crumbled bacon. The pan drippin's were the base for the gravy and the bread is overnight white. Grilled cheeseburger and house longaniza sausage. Store bought smoked jalapeno sausage with Zapp's potato chips

Whoops! I'd better get my iced tea ready. Lipton's finest with the second meyer lemon off the tree this season.

I'll give this thread a bump. I usually roast my own coffee but I decided to try a local roaster's espresso blend while I'm waiting for my order from Sweet Maria. I pulled a flat white this morning and the coffee was quite delicious. A little pricey at $16 for 12 oz but the quality of the coffee is very good and not over-roasted.

I had a small piece of grilled salmon left over from earlier in the week so I prepared it in the style of Maryland crabcakes. I used a recipe from Craig Claiborne's Favorites from the NYT, Series I. Lot's of great recipes in those two series of recipes and recollections. The salmon cake was served over Potatoes Anna with remoulade sauce. The salad was watermelon radish and mixed greens in a light vinaigrette. White chocolate amaretto cheesecake in the process of being inhaled!

Oysters today. Check out the size variation. They were pretty good but far from prime. We refer to the big oysters as tongues and they are great fried. VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED AS THE FOLLOWING PHOTO COULD CAUSE "DEEPLY UNPLEASNT" FEELINGS. Last night we had oysters from the same box prepped a few different way's. Cheese was a common denominator in several preparations😮. This batch was grilled with hatch green chilies, green onion, bacon crumbles and Monterey jack cheese. Pavlova for dessert. Eggplant Parmesan a few nights ago.

My sister and BIL have been in town this week so I cooked a few favorites the past couple of nights. I bought 25# of oysters which yielded about 6 dozen. The count is inexact as the ones I consumed during shucking aren't included in the total😛 The first night we had them raw, grilled and fried as a topping on the main course. The second night we had the remaining oysters grilled. The grilled toppings were butter, garlic and pecorino romano cheese or minced Conecuh sausage and pepperjack cheese. Salmon Rockefeller-Gruyere cheese grits, wilted spinach, grilled salmon, fried oysters and hollandaise Creme Brulee both nights. Last night's braised beef shanks

First greens of the season from Stewart Farms in Bay Minette AL. Salad turnips & tops, rutabaga greens & tender root, and watermelon radish with the tops cooking down with the rutabaga greens.

I've been knocking it out of the ballpark with the lettuce-tomato heart healthy type stuff and tonight's dinner was more of the same. Panzanella'ish salad with fried shrimp and a tarragon forward remoulade sauce. The shrimp seasoning was a Louisiana Brand shrimp blend. The bread was Forkish overnight white that was toasted then rubbed with garlic and Finlandia butter.

New Orleans style roast beef faux-boy's. I had some delicious leftover roast beef and gravy but no Leidenheimer bread so hot dogs buns were pressed into service. Dressed with lettuce, tomatoes, onion and a swipe of mayo with horseradish. Nice and sloppy just like in the Big Easy. And since your stomach doesn't know it's full till you have dessert I had a little bread pudding to finish. The pudding was made with TJ's Pumpkin Brioche.