SieWorld: Pepper Plate

For me, there are two culinary High Holy Days: Thanksgiving and Lunar New Year's Eve. These are the pedal-to-the-metal, grueling, marathon cooking holidays that truly test your skill and endurance in the kitchen. I love the challenge. This year we'll be hosting Doug's entire family, plus a couple of friends, and I've already begun preparing, with the help of some cool high tech gizmos, starting with the cook's best friend: Monsieur iPad.

Who knew this touch tablet would be so good in the kitchen? Imagine— no clunky cookbooks taking up space on your counter, with grease-spattered and flour-dusted pages held down by bowls to keep your place. The iPad is an elegant solution, as long as you have the right apps. The ones I'm using for Thanksgiving include Pepper Plate and Baking with Dorie.

Pepper Plate is a recipe holder and menu planner; you can import recipes from a lot of cooking websites like Epicurious and Gourmet, and then you don't have to be online to use them. It can compile shopping lists for you, set a timer, scale a recipe up or down, and, most importantly, plan menus and put them on a calendar schedule. Bingo! I know what I'm prepping ever day up to Thanksgiving. With my limited memory capacity, this is very helpful. Added bonus: once you start a recipe in Pepper Plate is has a function that stops your iPad from going to sleep. Handy, though now with real cookbooks I find myself jabbing them to wake them up.

Baking with Dorie is an incredible app by Dorie Greenspan, whose cookbooks I've already raved about. Here she presents only 20 recipes (three of which I had already planned to use for Thanksgiving: the pie crust, the twofor Thanksgiving pie & the apple cake), but the format is truly inspired. Each recipe can be viewed as a simple step-by-step written recipe, a video recipe (starting with preheating the oven) or, for the practiced chef, a simple visual flow chart. It's crazy. Her videos are informative, even if you know what you're doing. It's like attending a mini master class. The most basic videos have great nuggets of information, like how to tell when your dough is mixed enough, or why baking soda is used with buttermilk. Highly recommended.

(Martha Stewart has a similar app for baking cookies; I'm not using it this go round but it deserves a mention. Hey, Martha & Dorie, if you're ready to throw some promotional bucks my way, feel free.)

With my hands full of flour and butter, how am I not greasing up my iPad? Ah, this has been solved thanks to an early birthday present from some thoughtful in-laws. Belkin makes a Chef Stand for the iPad that includes a big stylus that looks like a pestle. You jab that at your iPad and it keeps the gunk off your screen.

Okay, enough about the doo-dads. On to the food!

Started the season with turkey potsticker dumplings for my son's Thanksgiving feast (his choice). A big hit with the kids. My sister Michelle was right: if you have the right non-stick pan, fried dumplings are dream. I got a Scanpan from Sur La Table. Worked perfectly; the dumplings slid right out. Don't forget the lid!

This year I found a great blog in the New York Times about what foods to prepare when in advance of Thanksgiving Day. I'm going to try making my gravy ahead of time and add the turkey drippings while reheating instead of doing it all last minute, a time when I'm usually rushing around with the turkey trying not to slip on grease.

The blog's author, Melissa Clark, also has a good video if you're having trouble getting your cranberry sauce to gel. Cranberry sauce is incredibly easy to make! Why aren't you doing it? Made two cranberry sauces already, one that's chunky and one that looks like it shlooped out of a can, both in maybe half an hour, tops.

Today I got up early to arrive at the Farmer's Market at 7:45. Had an order there for a local Heritage Turkey but was hoping to snag a slightly bigger one. I was in luck. My turkey is beautiful, all 19.75 lbs of it. Heritage turkeys are turkeys that look like ye olde turkeys from days of yore, before they got all Pamela Anderson-ed. More leg meat, smaller breasts. It may shock some of you, but I am not a breast man. Dark meat all the way. One Thanksgiving at my in-laws it was decided to forego the whole turkey and just heat up a breast "because that's all that anyone wants anyway, without all the fuss." This breast also had NO SKIN. My bitter, salty tears could have brined a whole turkey, had there been one. Which there was not. Did I mention I'm cooking Thanksgiving dinner now?

At the market I also got all my veggies, tons of fruit, cider, flavored pistachios and flowers.