I’m posting a lot about cooking lately, but considering I’ve taken to procrastinating my actual work by preparing meals that I don’t need, I figure it’s at least worth mentioning. Anyway, here’s the somewhat disastrous tale of my meat sauce:
After going to the big supermarket nearest Oxford (Sainsbury’s) on Sunday and finally finding ground turkey, something I thought didn’t exist in the UK, I decided to spend Monday afternoon cooking meat sauce. So, I chopped an onion, peeled and chopped some garlic, put on some cooking music, started sauteeing… and then realized that the turkey was still in the freezer.
Once I opened the package, I encountered my first problem: the frozen turkey had a piece of paper stuck to the bottom of it that, no matter how hard I tried, wasn’t coming off. So, being a fairly intuitive individual, I ran the turkey under some scaldingly hot water, which caused the paper to come loose. Crisis averted! But, the turkey was still completely frozen, and by this point, my onions and garlic were beginning to burn.
I now realize that I should have put the turkey in the microwave for a few minutes to defrost it, and then cut it up and put it in the pot with the onions and garlic as normal. My brain, however, wasn’t operating on that level of culinary prowess, so I put a huge frozen brick of turkey in the pot and let it sizzle. After a few seconds, I saw that the outer layer of the turkey could be scraped off. So, over about 20 minutes, I alternated sides of the turkey, scraping off tiny layers of meat each time and trying to break up this huge clod of ground meat.
Which was all well and good until the wooden spoon I was using to finesse the turkey snapped. I broke a spoon with my ineptitude.
Fortunately, we had a replacement so the cooking went on, and ultimately, the sauce came out really well (I had one of my flatmates taste it to confirm). But it was a traumatic process, as well as one that further reduced the stock of available cookware in my kitchen.