Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Ground turkey can be delicious. No, really!
After a day of taking pictures of dishes made with ground turkey, photographer Hillary Levin had an insight. In a moment of clarity and understanding usually attainable only by solitary meditation on a remote mountaintop, she said: “Ground turkey is the tofu of meat.”
Lightning split the heavens. A dense bank of clouds parted, allowing a blinding ray of sunlight to shine brightly through. Somewhere a distant church bell chimed.
Ground turkey is the tofu of meat.
It has no particular flavor of its own, and no one would want to eat it by itself. But it absorbs the flavors of the food around it, amplifies them and adds texture. It acts as a catalyst — you add it to other ingredients, and it makes them taste better.
It is also inexpensive. To my eye, that makes it an ideal base for lunch or dinner.
I started with threecheese turkey manicotti. It takes shortcuts I am loath to take; it uses ingredients I prefer not to use (Italian seasoning, onion powder, garlic powder); it uses a bizarre amount of sweet onion; and it puts sugar in tomato sauce.
But I already had bought the ingredients without sufficiently examining the recipe. So I made it, after cutting the sweet onion in half, eliminating the sugar, making my own tomato sauce instead of getting it from a jar, using chopped onion instead of onion powder and going to the store to buy Italian seasoning.
And here is the weird part: It tasted delicious. Seriously, it was amazing.
Maybe it was all the cheese (the manicotti are stuffed with cheese; the ground turkey and sauce go on top). Maybe it was the balance of flavors. Maybe it was my homemade tomato sauce. But this is definitely a dish to feed your family or dazzle your friends.
The same can be said of my next dish, tamale pie. This is a dish that takes all the best parts of a tamale, ditches the corn husks and makes it into a casserole. Martha Stewart, whose recipe I used, calls it “the official casserole of Texas.”
Think of it as a casserole sandwich. The top and bottom layers are made from cornmeal, with the top embellished with Monterey Jack cheese. In between is a heavenly melange of Southwestern flavors — ground turkey, plus tomatoes, onion, garlic, cumin, oregano, cayenne and more. If you have ribs, it will stick to them.