roulade: sexed up

The turkey roulade that I'm making tonight is a radically improved version of the roulade I had made for Thanksgiving. The main difference is in the filling; the turkey and prosciutto are still the same (although I used a different brand of prosciutto), but the filling is now a heady mix of American breakfast sausage, ground pine nuts (I used whole nuts last time, per one of the recipes I'd been following), spinach, button and shiitake mushrooms, grated Gran Soresino Grana Padano cheese,* ground garlic, and black pepper. I didn't add salt to the filling because I knew the cheese and the sausage (and the bacon wrapping) would be plenty salty; I did, however, add a few pinches of salt to the kilogram of turkey meat that constitutes the roulade. I also blitzed half of the cooked sausage in my food processor to ensure an even distribution of meat throughout the filling. The other half of the sausage was left crumbled but slightly chunky.

The roulade split across the top. I tried to bandage the rip with some bacon, but as you'll see in the pics below, the bacon ended up shrinking and separating. All in all, though, the roulade smelled magnificent when it came out of the oven. I'm a bit worried about how salty it'll be, given the onslaught of sausage and bacon, but the roulade will be eaten alongside salads and other victuals that ought to blunt the impact of any saltiness.

I've got another hour to go before I head over to JW's place: enough time to pack up the roulade, bag up the food and the Christmas gifts, take a shower, then head out around 9:15PM to JW's posh apartment complex.

Here are two pics of the finished product. Later on, I'll take pics of the cross section.

Out of the oven (see how it split across the top?):

Here's the roulade again, now transferred to one of those pretentious rectangular plates after having been basted in its own lovely juices (notice the enticing sheen?):

*Grana Padano has almost the same consistency as Parmigiano Reggiano, but it has a decidedly subtler, milder taste that isn't nearly as salty as Parm. I like it a lot, and for the moment, my building's grocery is selling wedges for about $8.25 a pop. There's an inedible rind that occupies at least a half-centimeter of the package; that's an unfortunate waste, but I don't mind too much.