Bobby Flay's Thanksgiving Turkey Recipes; Happy Holidays!

Turkey by Bobby Flay


When the bird takes center stage, you want it just right. Renowned chef, restaurant owner, and TV star Bobby Flay has a foolproof technique that requires no fancy tools. You can get the best flavor with traditional seasonings: salt, pepper, and fresh herbs.

1 whole fresh turkey (17 lbs.), rinsed and patted dry
1 1/4 sticks unsalted butter, slightly softened
2 Tbsp each finely chopped fresh sage, fresh rosemary, fresh thyme leaves, and fresh flat-leaf parsley
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
3 large carrots, cut into 1-inch pieces
3 large celery stalks, cut into 1-inch pieces
2 large onions, quartered
8 cups warm homemade chicken stock

1. Remove turkey from the refrigerator 1 hour before roasting.
2. Mix butter, sage, rosemary, thyme, and parsley in a food processor until smooth; season with salt and pepper.
3. Preheat oven to 450ºF. Season the cavity of the turkey with salt and pepper and fill with half the carrots, celery, and onions. Rub entire turkey with herb butter and season liberally with salt and pepper.
4. Put 4 cups of the chicken stock in a medium-size saucepan and keep warm over low heat.
5. Place remaining vegetables and stock on the bottom of a large roasting pan. Place turkey on top of the vegetables, put in the oven, and roast for 45 minutes or until lightly golden brown. Reduce heat to 350ºF and continue to roast, basting with warm chicken stock every 15 minutes, about 1 1/4 hours longer. (An instant-read thermometer inserted in the thigh should register 160ºF.) Remove turkey from the oven, transfer to a baking sheet, and tent loosely with foil. Let rest 20 minutes before slicing.

Per 4-oz. serving: 240 calories, no carbs, 32g protein, 95mg cholesterol, and 11g fat.

Bobby’s Turkey Tips

Fresh vs. Frozen
Both are good, but frozen turkeys have to be defrosted, which can take several days and occupy valuable room in your refrigerator.

Fresh Herbs vs. Dried
Dried herbs can be substituted for fresh herbs at a ratio of 1 to 3. But fresh herbs have purer flavors that stand out on Thanksgiving Day.

Resting
It’s imperative to let the turkey rest before slicing so the juices recirculate. Wait at least 20 minutes for a small bird, 40 minutes for a larger one.






Black Pepper-Pomegranate Molasses Glazed Turkey


Ingredients
Turkey Glaze:

* 1 1/2 cups pomegranate molasses
* 3/4 cup prepared horseradish, drained
* 3 tablespoons Dijon mustard
* 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
* 1 1/2 teaspoons coarsely ground black pepper

Turkey:

* 1 (about 15 pounds) fresh turkey
* 1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, softened
* Salt and freshly ground black pepper
* 4 cups homemade chicken stock or low-sodium canned broth

Directions

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.

Whisk together pomegranate molasses, horseradish, mustard, salt, and coarsely ground black pepper. Set aside and let sit at room temperature for at least 30 minutes before using to allow the flavors to meld.

Remove the neck, heart and gizzard from inside of the turkey. Rinse the bird inside and out with cold water and pat dry. Rub the entire surface of the bird with the butter and season well (including the cavity) with salt and pepper. Truss the turkey and place breast-up on a rack in a large roasting pan. Roast for about 45 minutes, until slightly golden brown. Reduce the heat to 350 degrees F and continue roasting, basting with some of the chicken stock every 15 minutes, for about 1 hour, 15 minutes longer. (An instant-read thermometer inserted in the thigh should register 160 degrees F.)

During the last 15 minutes of roasting, stop basting with the chicken stock and brush the entire turkey with 1 cup of the pomegranate glaze. Remove the turkey from the oven, brush with the remaining glaze, loosely tent and let rest 15 minutes before slicing.


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Sources: Food Network, Parade.com, Youtube, Google Maps

"Apple" & "Cider" Receive Turkey Pardons From Pres. Obama

Obama Pardons Two Turkeys At White House ceremony


At 21 weeks of age and 45 pounds each, Apple and Cider would normally be prime candidates for Thanksgiving dinner this year.

Instead, the two California-born turkeys got a new lease on life Wednesday when President Obama pardoned them in a Rose Garden ceremony at the White House.

"Now for the record, let me say that I feel pretty good to stop at least one shellacking this November," said Obama, referring to the staggering defeat his party suffered in congressional elections this month.

Obama celebrated the 63rd anniversary of the national Thanksgiving turkey presentation by sparing the two birds. Their names were chosen from more than 200 suggestions by California schoolchildren, a White House statement said.

Apple was designated the official national Thanksgiving turkey, and Cider was the alternate.

Obama said the turkeys were among 20,000 born at a Modesto farm last summer chosen to "strut their stuff" in a competition for the presidential pardon.

"It's like a turkey version of 'Dancing with the Stars,' " the president said. "Except the stakes for the contestants were much higher. Only one pair win the prize: life, and an all-expenses trip to Washington."

Two turkeys that "didn't quite make the cut" were delivered to Martha's Table, a local nonprofit organization that serves homeless children and their families, the president said.

Having escaped execution, the two birds will head to George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens for a Christmas display and then live out their days in a specially built enclosure, the White House statement said.

While the tradition of the president receiving a national Thanksgiving turkey began with Harry Truman in 1947, the first official presidential turkey pardon was given in 1989 by George H.W. Bush.


Sources: CNN

Angela Merkel Slams Muslim Extremists & Multi-Culturalism

David Frum's Commentary: Germany's Merkel Is Right -- Multi-Culturalism Has Failed


The Germans, for obvious reasons, prefer their politicians dull. The current German chancellor, Angela Merkel, more than meets local expectations. So on the rare occasion when Merkel says something vivid, something important must be going on.

It is.

Speaking in Potsdam on Saturday, Chancellor Merkel told a gathering of young Christian Democrats that Multi-Culturalism has failed.

That might seem to be saying the obvious.

Item: December 20, 2007. Two young men are smoking on a Munich subway train, where smoking is prohibited. A fellow passenger, a 76-year-old pensioner, asks them to stop. What happened next was captured on surveillance cameras. The young men call the old man a "s--- German" and savagely beat and kick him, fracturing his skull. Other passengers on the train failed to intervene. One of the attackers was a Greek immigrant, 17. The other, 20, was born in Germany of Turkish parents.

The Munich train story captured the attention of the country, symbolizing an apparent deterioration of public order driven by multicultural immigration.

After the attack, Hesse governor Roland Koch asked:: "How much are we prepared to take from a small proportion of violent youths, who frequently have a foreign background?"

There are more than 15 million people living in Germany who were either born outside Germany or whose parents were born outside Germany. That amounts to almost 20 percent of the population.

This immigrant population is disproportionately connected to almost all of the social problems of modern Germany. Yet the problem that has transfixed the country is, very understandably, the problem of crime.

In Berlin, young men of immigrant stock are three times as likely to commit a crime as young men of German background, reports Germany's state broadcaster, Deutsche Welle. In a September interview, Chancellor Merkel endorsed claims that religious young men of Muslim origin were more likely to commit acts of violence than other young Germans.

These crimes seem increasingly the work of criminal gangs of immigrant origin that organize resistance to police authority in what the German media -- with tabloid exaggeration -- increasingly call "No Go areas." Violent assaults upon police officers jumped 60 percent between 2005 and 2009, according to the German newspaper Bild.

Less spectacular -- but as important to ordinary people's feelings of security -- is the perceived deterioration of public order: declining schools, rising welfare rolls and foiled terrorist attacks.

Because of very low birth rates among old-stock Germans, the proportion of foreign-born is highest among those younger than 20s. In the poor Berlin neighborhood of Wedding, three out of four students and at least half the parents lived on unemployment benefits and welfare, even before the global economic crisis. In 2005, The New York Times interviewed a teacher in a Wedding high school:

"In Wedding, [Evelyn] Rühle says, immigrant children today speak poorer German and have less contact with German culture than when she started teaching 20 years ago. Many Muslim students ... go to Koran classes outside of school and speak only Turkish or Arabic at home. Meanwhile, the growth of digital television has made a host of Turkish- and Arabic-language channels available, intensifying language problems and nurturing identities that are informed more by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the war in Iraq than by the local German environment."

A high-tech economy offers few opportunities for the poorly educated, with the result that immigrants and their children increasingly find themselves dependent on public assistance.

In the United States, immigrants are less likely than the native-born to collect welfare or other social benefits. In Europe, immigrants are radically more likely than the native-born to collect welfare and social benefits, with Third World immigrants collecting the most of all. That's the findings of a 2005 study by researchers at Prague's Charles University.

European voters have absorbed these uncomfortable data into a suspicious view of newcomer intentions: According to a recent study by the Friedrich Ebert think tank, 34.3 percent of Germans believe that migrants come to Germany primarily to receive welfare benefits.

Merkel's Potsdam speech did not cite those social problems.

In Germany, the problems created by immigration literally go without saying, and those who do try to talk about them rapidly find themselves ejected from public life. Thilo Sarrazin, a governor of the Bundesbank (and it's worth mentioning, a member of the left-of-center Social Democratic party) was pressured to resign his post in September after publishing a book arguing the failure of Germany's absorption of immigrants.

Yet in the words of Sigmund Freud, the repressed always return.

Even if Germany and the other European Union countries can prevent the immigration population from growing -- and that is a very uncertain if -- they must find ways to deal with integrating the immigrant population already present, both first- and second- generation.

It's safe to say that no country in Europe is succeeding at that all-important job.

Two weeks ago, I visited the British city of Birmingham.

In 2005, the city had been torn by riots that erupted about 50 yards from the lawyer's office in which I met with four community activists. The riots were sparked when a rumor spread through the neighborhood's Afro-Caribbean population that some Asian youths had gang-raped a black girl. That rumor proved false, but only after blacks and Asians had fought two days of street battles that left two people dead.

I asked these local leaders how things had changed since 2005. The answer: not very much at all.

The authorities had responded to the riots by infusing more money into the community and by intensifying police patrols.

But the mutual suspicions between groups had not been allayed. Problems of integration remained. One of the four activists I met was obviously uncomfortable speaking English, even though born and raised in the United Kingdom. One said to me very poignantly: "The British don't know who they are, so they can't teach us how to adapt."

On the other hand, it's not so clear how much the newcomers want to adapt. The man who spoke poor English had spent his entire life inside an Islamic school system, memorizing the Quran in Arabic. Hard to see how that form of knowledge would equip anyone for life in a modern technological society.

Chancellor Merkel's Potsdam speech raised the question: Could more be done to accelerate immigrant adaptation? Unfortunately the speech offered few answers.

Quietly, some Europeans are wondering whether Europe -- by stumbling into an American-style immigration policy -- has willy-nilly forced itself to follow other American policies as well:

-- Tougher law enforcement and longer prison sentences to fight crime.

-- A less generous welfare state that compels migrants to work rather than collect benefits paid for by the native-born.

-- A stronger assertion of national identity -- and a more emphatic demand that newcomers adapt to the existing society.

These days, many American conservatives are warning that the United States is going the way of Europe. But maybe the real story is the reverse: Is it Europe that will soon be imitating the United States?

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of David Frum.


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Sources: CNN, Deutsche Welle, Youtube, Google Maps

A Turkey Named "Courage" Receives Presidential Pardon...Happy Thanksgiving!

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Sources: MSNBC, McClatchy Newspapers, Under The Dome