Kitchen Tip: Make Chopping Garlic Easier

When you want to really chop the crap out of some garlic cloves so they form a paste or a fine mince, sprinkle the peeled cloves on the cutting board with some coarse salt. The grains will help break down the garlic and keep the bits from flying around the cutting board as you chop.

When I’m making a marinade with chipotle in adobo along with garlic, as I did tonight, I like to add the chipotle on top of the garlic/salt mix and mince it all together; again it makes the chopping easier to handle, and the flavors will become more mingled. It would be nice to be able to say that the salt serves as a buffer to keep your cutting board from getting stained by the chipotle, but alas, in my experience, any difference in the level of orange-tint saturation is of an almost imperceptible degree.

Thanksgiving 101: Grocery-Shopping Template & Tips

For the past few years, my cousin The Beez and I have more or less hijacked the planning and preparing of our extended family’s Thanksgiving dinner. And while hosting Turkey Day (or Tofurkey Day, if your relatives are hippies) for a crowd is many people’s worst nightmare, we get totally geeked out about it, to the point of making multiple spreadsheets for planning purposes. (Oh, you snicker now, but if you skip our advice and end up running out to 7-Eleven at 4pm on Thanksgiving Day for canned cranberry sauce, who will be laughing?)

This year, rather than schlepping on the Bolt bus on the most nightmarish travel day of the year, we are having T-Day right here in Brooklyn, chez The Beez. The prospect of not leaving the mother of boroughs is a massive relief to both of us. And I would like to pass that stress savings along to you, gentle reader; hence Thanksgiving 101, the BGC guide to Thanksgiving planning!

Herewith, the first installment of we-haven't-decided-how-many-yet in our Thanksgiving 101 series: how to gather all the groceries you need without running around town like a turkey with its head cut off. (See what I did there?)

How-to: Cutting Butternut Squash / Toasting Squash Seeds

Fall—a.k.a. squash season—is just about here! A recipe for curried butternut squash bisque is forthcoming on BGC…but for now, I thought I'd get everyone in the squash spirit with a quick how-to on cutting butternut squash, which can be daunting since it's so dense. As you may have learned from experience, randomly hacking away with a kitchen knife is likely to result in a frustrating "Sword in the Stone"-type moment.

(Plus, below is a bonus how-to on toasting seasoned squash seeds, which make a great healthy munchie or a sophisticated garnish—throwing the raw seeds out is such a waste!)

Brining and Dining

Above: Brined and roasted pork loin with fennel.

Brining is one of my most favoritest foodie techniques. It is super-easy, impresses people, and makes cheap supermarket meat taste like grass-fed-free-range-Niman-Ranch-whatever. It only takes a few minutes to put the brine together, cool it, and throw the brining meat into the fridge, but you can let the flavors develop anywhere from overnight to a week.

The fundamental of brine is not even a recipe, just a ratio: You want 8 cups of water to each half cup of salt. (For a Thanksgiving turkey, you'd want about 32 cups of water.) To this, add something sweet (honey, molasses, or maple syrup), probably about as much as the salt. Heat the water in a pot on the stove until the salt and sweetener dissolve. Then add a bunch of stuff. Here are some suggestions regarding said stuff; I tend to use some or all of the following, depending on what I have in the house:

• Garlic cloves
  
• Peppercorns
  
• Dried chili peppers (add while the water is hot so they will reconstitute, or un-dehydrate)
  
• Chili pepper flakes
  
• Thyme sprigs
  
• Bay leaves
  
• Cumin seeds
  
• Mustard seeds
  
• Cilantro sprigs