Turkey and Papas

On my journey to find local food, I found myself at the Burlingame farmers market. For those of you who don’t know where Burlingame is, it’s about 25 minutes(without traffic) south of San Francisco on freeway 101. I arrived without any idea about what I was going to get for my ESF dish. Luckily I found a table that was selling baby red potatoes and fresh garlic from San Juan Bautista, which is about 20 minutes south of Gilroy. I decided to buy 2 cloves of garlic, and about 1 ½ Ibs of the potatoes.

 

I decided that I would make a dish with some type of meat accompanied by baked garlic potatoes, so I headed to the Golden Gate Meat Company, located at the Ferry building in San Francisco.

I wanted to find something that would still taste good after making the hour long trip from my house in Burlingame to my ESF class at USF. I went with turkey.  The particular turkey that I bought was a little under 3 Ibs. It was from the Diestel Family Turkey Ranch, which is about 2.5 hours east of San Francisco in a small town called Sonora. They’re turkeys are all natural– free from hormones and growth stimulants. They are fed a 100% vegetarian natural diet of corn and soybeans that are milled on their ranch.

So the following day at 2:45 pm on Wednesday May 13th, I was ready to begin prepping my turkey and potato dish. I turned the oven to 350 degrees to preheat, and started with the potatoes. I rinsed them thoroughly and cut them into quarters.

I based my potato dish off a recipe at this site: recipezaar.com. I didn’t completely follow their directions, but for the most part I did what they told me. Unfortunately the salt, pepper, olive oil, basil and butter that I used were not local ingredients. I simply already had them in my kitchen while I was prepping, and I just sort of used them without even thinking about what I was doing, like I often do when I cook–Zoned out, or in the zone, either or.  I mixed everything together, and then started on the the turkey.

Prepping the turkey was extremely easy. All I did was cut the strings that were holding the turkey together, rinse the turkey and then rub the turkey with a special dry rub that Golden Gate Meat Company had suggested I use. It consisted of onion, garlic, sea salt, pepper and rosemary. Unfortunately I was unable to find out whether these ingredients were local. They told me that they buy them in bulk from several different wholesale suppliers.

At this moment I had forgotten to put aluminum foil over the turkey. Luckily I caught my mistake in time!

The oven was preheated and the time was right. I placed both the turkey and the potato dish in the oven and set the timer for ten minutes. After ten minutes I opened the oven, took out the potatoes, stirred them around a little bit, put aluminum over them and put them back in the oven. I reset the timer for 1 hour. The potato recipe said they would take about an hour to cook, but after taking them out for the third time to stir the potatoes I tasted one and it was done. I think that since my potatoes were smaller it took a shorter amount of time for them to cook—about 45 minutes in total. As for the turkey, it took a little longer. Originally I planned on cooking the turkey for about an hour because on several websites people say to cook the turkey 20 minutes for every Ib and since my turkey was a little under three Ibs I thought an hour would do the trick. Luckily I had my trusty meat thermometer placed in the turkey, and it didn’t reach the 170 degree mark until after about one hour and fifteen minutes.

Success! I covered my dish with aluminum foil and headed to USF for a wonderful last ESF feast!

 

~ by Joel Weston on May 15, 2009.