California Roast Turkey

By Andrew Hunter

The biggest Thanksgiving challenge for most people is getting over the psychological hurdle of cooking the big bird. Whenever a cooking project intimidates me I think to myself that it’s only food and then, how hard can it be? I also do a little extra homework before starting, like reading cookbooks, searching for instructional photos and making sure I have all the right ingredients in place.

I thought I would share my favorite turkey recipe with you this year. I like it because the results are delicious and it has very detailed instructions from opening the turkey to basting it while roasting and making the gravy. Don’t let the length of the recipe intimidate you. Instead print it out, read it two or three times, organize your ingredients and equipment, and enjoy yourself in the kitchen…just make sure you chill an extra bottle of Gewürztraminer for the “chef’s cooking wine.”

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Must-Have Kitchen Tools

By Andrew Hunter

My “must have kitchen gadgets” are centered on citrus, which is my favorite ingredient. I love lemons, limes and oranges, and all their variations like Meyer lemons, key limes and blood oranges. The nuances in both the zest and the juice are delicious. The flavor of the zest is floral, while the juice is acidic. As most of us are trying to watch or reduce our weight, citrus is an ideal way to enhance flavor without added calories, fat or sodium.

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Nicky’s Velvet Potatoes

By Andrew Hunter

Nicky was eating mashed potatoes before he cut his first tooth. He loved potatoes so much that we relied on them as a vehicle for his balanced nutrition.

We called him Picky Nicky in those days, which meant we needed to work really hard just to get him to open his mouth at the dinner table. Once we discovered potatoes, we began mixing in other goodies…mashed peas, carrots, broccoli, almost anything we ate got mixed into his. I’m sure he would have been mad if he knew, but what he didn’t know helped him.

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Pumpkin-Orange Smoothies

By Andrew Hunter

Halloween is the symbolic start of the holiday season in the Hunter household. For Marilyn and me, it’s a transitional time at the table too. Steaks and chops are on the grill less often with more roasts braised for hours on Sundays to eat the rest of the week; and our shopping trips yield fewer summer fruits and veggies and more squashes, roots and gourds.

Pumpkins this year will get carved, roasted, grilled and puréed. We like to buy small orange pumpkin, cut off the stem end, then cut in quarters, clean away the stringy and seedy insides, rub with oil, salt and pepper, and roast until soft and tender. With these chunks of soft pumpkin, we can do a bunch of things from dicing for pasta, to puréeing for soups and mashing into potatoes for an autumnal side.

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Chinese Noodles

By Andrew Hunter

There’s a Chinese noodle house east of L.A. called Din Tai Fung. Their specialty is dumplings and boy, are they special – glutinous rice shaomai, green melon and shrimp bundles, and tiny soup dumplings bobbing in clear chicken broth, to name a few of our favorites. Din Tai, as we call it, is a regular and possibly favorite stop on our weekend rotation of dim sum houses.

The place is sleek, clean and crowded with a large tinted kitchen window that gives a shady peek at cooks working shoulder to shoulder rolling noodles, stuffing discs of dough and crimping them into round, crescent and purse-shaped dumplings.

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