Oh Thanksgiving oh Thanksgiving. Why did you have to be over so soon. For the past 2-3 years I have spent my Thanksgiving vacation down in Virginia at my friend’s parent’s place. It felt like an actual vacation. But this year I stayed in NYC and went to a little Thanksgiving dinner my 2 friends were having. It was fun and all but it went by too quickly. Another thing I did different this year was that I made something for Thanksgiving dinner. Since I wasn’t at my friend’s parent’s place I emailed his mom to get her recipes for the apple pie and candied yams. To bring a little bit of what I was missing about Thanksgiving to this dinner.
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When I had the thyme whipped cream from The Dessert Truck I was amazed how good it was. I never thought of putting herbs into whipped cream. So when I was making the apple pie for Thanksgiving I wanted to do something similar. After googling around I decided to use sage and make sage whipped cream. But all the “sage whipped cream” I found on the internet was just adding pieces of sage into the cream. I wanted to incorporate it more so I decided to boil it.

I poured in a pint of heavy cream into a pot. Wasn’t sure how many sage leaves to put in but I put in 7. Turned on the heat to medium-low. Give it a good few stirs every so often. When it gets to a rolling boil, let it simmer for couple more minutes. Take it off the heat, pour it into a bowl/container and let it cool. Take out the sage leaves too. As it cools, the cream will form a top layer of skin. Just skim it off. If you’re using this later, put it in a container and into the fridge.

Before actually whipping the cream, put a metal bowl and the whisk into the freezer and let them freeze up really good. Pour the cream into the cold bowl, add about 1.5 to 2 tablespoons of sugar and whip till stiff peaks form. Don’t over whip, no one likes lumpy whipped cream.

I was surprised how good this was. The flavors of the sage really came through and at the same time wasn’t weird or too crazy. 7 sage leaves were definitely the right amount. Enjoy!

Donny: Yes! We finally made it! After….2 or so years of saying “lets go to Perilla” and “we have to go to Perilla” and “dang it’s almost 2010 we need to go to Perilla” we finally made reservations for a Thursday night to solidify it. I have heard great things about Perilla, he’s like the Kelly Clarkson of Top Chef. Though last year when Howard and I went to one of those fancy NYWFF Midnight Munchies event, we got a taste of the falafel he provided for the event. It was horrible! It was waaaaay too salty. Why oh why?! After the salty falafel incident I was very cautious about my expectations. I understand the difficulties of catering to a big event like that but…….still.
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After finding cardoons at the Union Square Greenmarket, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with them. Although I’ve eaten cardoons twice since moving to NYC (once at Craftbar, once at Babbo) they’d never really made much of an impression on me. But the first time I had ever heard of cardoons was many years before I moved up here, on “Molto Mario.” He made Baked Cardoons, Roman Style.

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In my effort to clean out the fridge, I had to get creative with what I got. Actually I didn’t have to get too crazy since I had leftover stuff from making the pasta dish for Jamie Oliver’s Huntington 1000 and 2 week old spinach from my hot pot dinner and a tin of spam my friend, Phae, brought over. It’s basically the same recipe as the recipe I did for Huntington 1000 but instead of peas I used spinach. Also this time I didn’t use any oil or butter and added spam to it. I didn’t really add any salt to this since the spam is salty enough. In the end this was quick, easy and pretty good.

Spam and eggs over rice, yep. That’s the dish my mom makes when she gets too lazy to cook. Fried the slices of spam till nice and brown. Then cook the eggs. When done put both on top of steamy white rice. Though my version, picture above, I had to use old rice so I heated it up in the pan till I get crunchy bits on the bottom. I like to add Maggi seasoning, which I grew up calling soy sauce, over everything on the plate then lots of ground black pepper. Yum!