#brickhousemenu

BAKLAVA! We have a few beehives, and I decided to make a few snacks for our annual honey harvest. But of course, I wanted them to feature the star food of the day: our own honey!!!

I figured I'd embrace honey's sweetness in at least one dish, but it's a long day (that's already very sweet) so I wanted something savory, too, and thought this would also be a great opportunity to figure out honey lemonade (which I forgot to take a photo of!). The harvest is a lot of work, so everything had to be SUPREMELY simple to throw together or easily made in advance.

For savory, I just grabbed the best looking frozen chicken tenders I could find and served them with a honey drizzle/dipping cup, which 100% fit the bill: supremely easy, and chowed down quickly for some sustenance!

The baklava was a HUGE hit--I had multiple people comment it was the best they'd ever had (which I attribute mostly to the honey ;) My nut of choice was pistachio (definitely great!), and I used my mini food processor to get them really finely chopped. I followed the instructions closely for the honey-syrup pour over until it was just shy of super-saturated...then paused for a bit to let it soak and continued until, again, it was just shy. SO GOOD.

My only note is that it's really tricky to cut...it takes a lot of patience because you really HAVE to go slowly or the phyllo dough will stick to the knife more than its underlayer of nuts. It gets especially tricky on the edges (but the smaller pieces are definitely worth it, because this is rich--and it's a lot crumblier to cut after it's been baked than before).

I recently saw a version where the baklava sheets had been rolled up then cut, so you ended with little tubes instead of diamonds. At first glance, that seems so much simpler than cutting in the traditional pattern! But...I'm not so sure that rolling phyllo dough filled with nuts wouldn't be *more* difficult. This might require a side-by-side trial--cause I'd also hate if I tried a different strategy and it wasn't as good as the original. Because that was just SO good!!

Winter fruit salad! I'm very late posting this, but it was easy to forget once the weather warmed up...now that we're back to the cold and fewer fruit options, it is so relevant again!

We were invited to a friend's Seder dinner, and I was honored to be trusted with bringing a dessert. And excited about the challenge of a dessert with no risen flour (among other ingredients)! I was told a fruit salad is a go-to, so that's where I focused my efforts: making a fruit salad in late winter/early spring, before any of the traditional fruits are ripe, ha.

Enter, the Winter Fruit Salad! This was so good, and such a well received addition to the dessert table: it offered a healthy, refreshing, yet tasty counterbalance to all the other sweets. I think anytime in the winter, this is a really great addition to the table!

This recipe did a great job of encouraging you to lean into what's ripe and/or looks good and/or available in your area. My fruit list included:

Apples

Asian pears (<-I added this of my own inspiration, and I LOVED it!)

Kiwi

Mandarin oranges

Bartlett pears

The vinaigrette was just the coating needed to tie everything together, and it was easy to put together. I also think keeping everything to a small chop/large dice was KEY, so you got a variety of fruit in each bite rather than just a big chunk of one ingredient stabbed with a fork. (Kiwis and mandarins were the exception to that chop--just so they wouldn't disintegrate--but they were still small enough to get some other bites in your spoonful!) 10/10 would make this again. Because who doesn't crave delicious fresh fruit in the middle of winter??

Chicken Parmesan...and oh my goodness, this is, without a doubt, the BEST chicken parm I've ever had, let alone ever made. It's simple yet I'm absolutely consumed while consuming it!!

First, you pound the chicken flat. It's crazy how much better doing this is than just buying thin-cut chicken! The chicken is SO much more tender, and you get way more out of it! ...so much more, that you better be prepared: you're going to need twice as much wax/parchment paper than you expect to pound it out as thin as it needs to be!

After a quick dredge (different than my normal) and pan-fry, you top the chicken with fresh mozzarella and briefly pop it in the oven until it's good and melty. Then straight to plating, where a generous amount of sauce is plated first, with the chicken+mozz only sitting on top of it. The sauce is part of the key to this dish: bright and garlicky and delicious.

This is straight out of the Carmine's recipe book. I can't even think about chicken parm without instantly craving this dish.

https://carminesnyc.com/recipes/chicken-parmigiana

Moroccan pheasant with amba and cucumber salad! What a great twist on our normal preparation. The recipe actually calls for cooking the whole, trussed bird over an open fire—which we were going to do!! except it was too windy, so we settled for the oven alternate they offered. But next time: FIRE! :D

This was a REALLY flavorful dish. I love everything I’ve made with Ras al Hanout (Moroccan/North African spice blend), and this was no exception. It involved a 12-24 hr brine with lemons and garlic before roasting under a harissa-and-orange-based paste, and the result just exploded with flavor. Combined with the amba—which I’ll loosely describe being like a homemade mango chutney—and a little naan to soak it all up, and this was so great! (Recipe called for homemade flatbread, but I took the east way out on that part, ha.) The cucumber salad was also a really good counterbalance to all the warming spices on the rest of the plate…though I think I would have preferred it chilled instead of room temperature, actually.

One thing I did struggle with was even cooking across all three birds we had. Two of them came out definitely undercooked per the directions—I’m guessing I needed to be rotating them in the oven (which I didn't do), plus a longer cooking time (increase from 40 to...50? 60 minutes?). But the meat was moist and very flavorful, so I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water. This is definitely worth another recipe trial! I also wonder if you can be just as successful with chest*-meat only, so that might also be worth testing.

One other note is this calls for 3 tbsp of Ras al Hanout per bird! That's quite a lot, so good to check you've got enough on hand. Though in fact, I would actually start with just one bird's serving for the sauce (which is just applied before roasting) regardless of how many birds you're cooking, as I had a lot of excess that just got thrown away.

Recipe link!

This is such a good dish. It's hearty (but healthy!) and the smoky eggplant sauce adds an incredible layer of complexity. Ottolenghi does it again: I NEVER would have thought to combine basically any of these ingredients, and I equally never would have expected them to taste so good together, but it's a fantastic dish.

Chili verde turkey tacos! Amazingly, this is the FINAL recipe in my 22 pound extra Thanksgiving turkey series…because it was the perfect proportions to use the rest of the cooked turkey up! Huzzah! (We also had EXACTLY the perfect number of flour tortillas left, too, which is such a good feeling!)

Across two supermarkets, I couldn't find canned (or jarred) crushed (or otherwise) tomatillos, but I did manage to find a jar of tomatillo salsa, so I went with that. It was great! We had a good avocado on hand, too (because why not), but it really didn't need it. These were flavorful, moist, and had enough varying texture that they're really darn good on their own. I charred the tortillas on our gas stove for 5-10 seconds (each side) to give a nice warmth and char, too. We used fajita size tortillas, but I think street taco size would have worked well, too.

What a great, unexpected recipe series. These last four recipes have made me almost want to cook a turkey OUTSIDE of Thanksgiving! Or at least be excited for extra turkey in future years!

Tex-Mex turkey soup. The turkey trials continue, and they continue to deliver! This was a delicious, hearty soup. I’m pretty confident you could substitute chicken for the turkey with no issue on this—but I liked the turkey, and I appreciate that that’s how the recipe was intended. It was similar but not identical to the chicken tortilla soup in our occasional rotation, and definitely a solid way to use up a LOT of turkey.

Much like the previous turkey soup recipe, I doubled this. Unlike the previous turkey soup recipe, this one ACTUALLY MADE all the servings it claimed…which, when doubled, came to *16.*

Halfway through the recipe, I realized I was going to need a bigger pot. Which meant pouring a third of the soup into a *second* pot, because I was already using my typical big pot.

Next up in our 22-pounds of turkey leftover adventures: Thanksgiving chimichangas! I'm pretty proud of this dish, as its concept was initially inspired by some turkey (maybe even Thanksgiving?) egg rolls I had locally...which were good, but fell short for me. Not these, though!!

Corn tortillas

Pulled, dark meat turkey

A little bit of Oaxaca ("waa-haa-kuh" - I note that here with the hope that SOMEDAY I'll remember how to pronounce it) Mexican cheese

Cranberry sauce

Whatever little bites of stuffing, etc., you have leftover

Topped with half a bottle of turkey gravy!

I used corn tortillas because they fry beautifully (much better than flour), and that crunch was really important. I loved the turkey, tiny bit of Oaxaca (just to help with binding), and cranberry contrast inside, with the occasional surprise bite of something else (like stuffing!). The moist gravy topping also perfectly balanced the crunch of the tortilla!

I could only find the little 8" corn tortillas--I would definitely prefer larger, next time. (I tend to overstuff and almost converted these to quesadillas, as a result--but it was definitely the right instinct to keep them wrapped, chimichanga-style.) With larger tortillas, though, it might be a good idea to put the gravy on the plate, chimichanga on top, then just run a LITTLE gravy on top of it...so you still get the effect that queso traditionally has without running the risk of saturation halfway through your meal.

It was easier than expect to fry these up in just half of cup of vegetable oil (which was all I had in my pantry)--they did not need to be fully submerged in oil. A toothpick in the center did the trick to keep them (generally) together during cooking!