Turkey – The Noble Bird

I couldn’t the 4th Thursday of November AKA Turkey Day slide by without a nod to our fine winged friend. I grew up on a turkey farm, surrounded by my family who were all in the family business. Lets just say we weren’t having pot roast on Christmas or Thanksgiving.

So to show my love for Gobble, I thought I would throw up this little walk down memory lane…

National Parfait Day

So I don't own any parfait glasses. So sue me.

Parfait. Parfait. That’s francais for Perfect.

Tonight I had a perfect parfait.  I used some amazing blueberries from Dan’s Farm Market on Oldfield Road. Sadly, ’tis not the season, so they were berries I had frozen earlier this year, not fresh.  But I’ll take that any day over the flavorless and pricy imported versions available in the produce section of the grocery store.  Besides, frozen fruit kinda goes with the whole Parfait theme anyhow.  I tossed in a few slices of banana and some giant red globe grapes.  I topped it with just enough french vanilla almond granola for texture.  And amidst all of this I layered the WORLD’S MOST AMAZINGLY DELICIOUS YOGOURT: Méditerranée Lemon from liberté.  If you have not been introduced to this unbelievably divine creamy fabulousness, you really must run, not walk, immediately to the nearest grocery store and purchase this, the Holy Grail of Dairy Products (I didn’t come up with that on my own – as much as I wish I had.  Go here and you will see I am not alone in my worship for this product).  When P had his first bite tonight he said, in a hushed and reverential tone, “Mmmmmm … I have never had yogurt like this before.”  Seriously.  When you eat this stuff, angels come out singing and stuff.

The Fixin's

I apologise.  Besides waxing poetic about the brilliance of fantastic yogurt from Quebec, there’s not really a whole lot exciting that I can write about a parfait.  It’s a dessert.  It’s a breakfast.  It involves sweet dairy products and fruit.  There’s lots of different versions of it.  About as many different versions as there are different kinds of fruit and sweet dairy products. If you google “parfait”, you will come across 5,660,000 hits.  Search “parfait recipes” and you at least narrow your search to 770,000.  It would take a long time to try them all out to find the parfait Parfait.

After consuming my own delicious parfait dessert tonight, I did some more research and discovered that there are also savoury parfaits – kind of like paté.  I found this recipe for a chicken liver parfait with apple and saffron from Gordon Ramsay that sounds like it might actually be pretty darn tasty … so far as chicken livers go.  So I imagine there’s a lot more to parfait than just some berries and yogourt (or ice cream or custard or creme fraiche).  But, in the end, it’s really just another version of a Sundae.

Speaking of which, remember how I said the Brandied Fruit was too nasty and I wasn’t even going to try it? Well, when I went to throw it out, I felt that I would be delinquent in my duty and besides, all that fruit and brandy had been pretty expensive so I figured I should at least taste it.  I mean, it looked atrocious (see picture – I know – I said I wouldn’t, but I had to suffer and therefore I felt the need to share), but it smelled okay … kinda.  In any event, as I had thought, epic failure.  I actually gagged.  Clearly I have something to learn about that stuff.  Considering myself suitably humbled by the experience, xoxo – B.

Yuck. Brown nastiness.