final food pics before the meal

Tonight was about making the final bit of food, which I'll be hauling to the office later this morning (it's almost 5:30 a.m. as I write this). First up: I checked my raspberry jelly to see whether it could survive the "tip sideways" test. It did—barely. You can see the bottom of the jelly bulging: it's still too soft, but it's solid enough to stay sideways for a few seconds. Will it taste any good? No idea.

Below is the new, improved gravy. I've kept the first batch of gravy, but this one is inarguably better. No funny smells, light brown in color, and tasting chickeny, the way chicken gravy ought to taste. I checked online to see whether this sort of gravy can survive reheating in a microwave without separating the way an Alfredo sauce might. Answer: microwaving in short bursts is A-OK. Short burst, stir. Short burst, stir.

How to make this gravy: buy or make your own chicken stock. I made mine, but I helped it along with the addition of some powdered bouillon and a small dash of Worcestershire sauce. Build your gravy by making a standard roux—flour and regular butter. Add the chicken broth bit by bit, just as you'd add milk when making a Béchamel or country gravy. Add salt and pepper to taste. Some people might add flecks of dried parsley or something; I decided to be fairly minimalist with mine: very little salt, but a bit more pepper. 

Looks and smells pretty good:

The peas are a colossal disappointment this year. Despite a longish boil, they're a bit too hard, and they don't taste quite right. I got them from the same store in Itaewon as last year, but this year, the peas are different. Did someone have a bad harvest?

Next up—my pride and joy, the chicken roulade. This time around, the probe thermometer was the star of the show. But before the roulade got baked, it had to be assembled. I'm not a germophobe, but I did have visions of billions of little bacteria crawling all over the chicken as time ticked on. The ground chicken had been in the fridge all night, so I was pretty sure that whatever bacteria were in the meat were more or less dormant. But when it came time to pull the meat out and make the roulade, I kept thinking about how, as the meat warmed up, those same bacteria would be waking back up and becoming active. I pressed on, anyway.

The "stuffing" inside the roulade had two main components: (1) a spinach-cheese-herb-mushroom layer and (2) a smoked-duck layer. If I couldn't give my boss and coworkers a proper turkey, I was going to give them two-thirds of a turducken—with pig on top. So they're getting the duck and the ken, but not the turd. With the bacon wrap, maybe this is a porkucken. Sounds like a mythical sea monster. Aside: the spinach part of the filling tasted awesome when I sampled it. It has three cheeses: cream cheese, Grana Padano (a mild cousin of Parmigiano), and mozzarella. The mozzarella, which has some tensile strength, helped to slow the ooze of the filling out of the roulade as the roulade was baking.

I almost added dried cranberries and macadamias to the stuffing, but after tasting the Italian-ish flavor profile of the spinach-cheese filling, I decided that cranberries would be an off note. As for the macadamias... I was all ready to toast them up when a voice in my head said that I'd already put toasted macadamias into the sweet-potato casserole, and that was enough. Not adding these two ingredients was, I think, a good decision. Sometimes, less is more.

Below, the ground chicken is layered out; the duck has been laid down, and the spinach-cheese-shroom filling has been spread on top. I've got a ton of that filling left over. I'll figure out what to do with it later. Note the sheet of cling film to aid with the rolling of the roulade (culinary French for "roll"; a toilet-paper roll is a rouleau). Oh, yeah: the shrooms got pan-fried before being integrated with the rest of the spinach-cheese filing.

The roulade ended up being too huge, so I cut a third of it off. The two-thirds portion got baked first while the one-third portion was placed in the fridge to wait its turn. The safe temp for chicken is supposed to be 165ºF (74ºC). My probe thermometer has Japanese written all over it, but the numbers are in Celsius, and the probe is easy enough to read. I ended up checking temps twice on the big roulade, and twice again on the little roulade. After the first measurement, when the interior temp was around 56ºC, I guesstimated how much more time I'd need to bring the roulade's interior up to 74º. Seems as though I guessed right both times, despite the fact that the two unevenly sized roulades had different cooking times.

I should also note that transferring the roulades from the big tray into their own, littler trays was a nightmarish experience I'd rather not repeat. The ground chicken was constantly threatening to break apart, so I had to be as careful as a bomb-squad member while handling both roulades. The big roulade, when it flopped into its baking tray, tumbled in upside down because I'd miscalculated the thing's circumference. Not to worry: I layered my bacon strips across the "bottom" of each roulade, knowing that no one in the office would care or even notice. These are the little moments the chefs never tell you about—the last-minute compromises they make on the road to preparing your dish.

Below—the big roulade, finished after a quick broil to make sure the bacon got tanned:

I think I forgot to take a pic of the finished small roulade before I covered it in tin foil, but here's a pic of it right before baking:

Let's end this with a pic of the ham. This is that awesome John Cook Deli Meats "jambon" (yes, the package uses the French word for ham). The meat is ready to eat as is, but I bathed it in a mixture of maple syrup, honey, mustard, brown sugar, and apple juice. Very tasty. I wish there were more ham, but the stuff is ass-expensive. Hamminess:

That'll about do it. I have to cart this food over so we can eat hearty. Expect pics from the meal itself. If this goes as usual, my American coworker will chow down heartily and give me a thumbs-up; my boss will rumble that "It's good," and my Korean coworker will quietly throw away the small portion of food that he'll take for himself. Sigh.