Thanksgiving Sides 🍠🥦 with Two Catskills Chefs

Transcribed by Jerome Kazlauskas

Brett Barry  0:03  
It's Thanksgiving week and that means Thanksgiving side dishes: stuffing, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, and maybe even that cranberry sauce that's shaped like the can that it arrived in. Delicious! We asked 2 Catskills chefs to share one of their Thanksgiving sides with us and joined them in the kitchen to experience the process of preparing and cooking in real time. Grab a pen and a recipe card so you can add these two dishes to your Thanksgiving file and if you'd rather not cook anything at all, both restaurants in this story warmly accept Thanksgiving reservations. Kaatscast is sponsored by the Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for local regions like the Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, and Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call 518-763-6854 or email: mountaineaglenews@gmail.com. This episode is brought to you by Ulster Savings Bank with locations throughout the Mid-Hudson Valley including right here in Phoenicia and Woodstock. Call 866-440-0391 or visit them at ulstersavings.com. Member FDIC. Equal Housing Lender. The Deer Mountain Inn sits on 168 wooded acres in Greene County's Tannersville, New York. Chef Corwin Kave uses local and seasonal ingredients in the dishes served in Deer Mountain Inn's arts-and-crafts style dining room. He invited us to his kitchen to showcase his ... Charred Broccoli di Ciccio with preserved lemon aioli and crispy garlic.

Corwin Kave  1:48  
My name is Corwin Kave and I am the chef at the Deer Mountain Inn in Tannersville, New York. I've been here a little over two years now. Deer Mountain Inn has a lot of history. I came up here kind of, you know, after the heat of the pandemic, basically when things started to die down a little bit and the restaurant is kind of moving towards this like kind of new American cuisine. We try to keep it casual but elegant and there's about 60 seats inside and during the summertime when it's nice outside, we get, you know, an additional six or seven tables out on the porch as well.

Brett Barry  2:24  
Is it open to the public in addition to the guests who stay here?

Corwin Kave  2:28  
Yes, we are open for dinner service Wednesday through Sunday. We do breakfast service for inn guests, but the dinner service is open to everybody. Our service hours right now are five to nine. We open up the bar a little bit earlier on weekends ... and in the wintertime, we do like an après-ski where people can come, you know, after skiing a little bit in the late afternoon and have some snacks and things by the fire.

Brett Barry  2:50  
Are you open for Thanksgiving?

Corwin Kave  2:52  
Oh, we are very open for Thanksgiving. Yes. Thanksgiving is actually one of the busiest days of the year for us. In fact, the whole week is fairly busy; a lot of people come up and they spend the whole week up here; we do kind of a traditional spread; it's all for the table. We feel like it's, you know, the best representation that we could do for Thanksgiving to make people feel almost like they're at home when they're not at home. All the food that we do again kind of leads in a traditional sense. This year, we've got a bit of a bread service, and then like an autumnal salad: it has a lot of like cheese and nuts and pear in it. We do a few different vegetable sides, and then we do turkeys from Snowdance Farms and we like braised all the thigh meat and everything we smoke the turkey breast and we make this big platter out of it. There's dressing and cranberry sauce and gravy, mashed potatoes ... kind of all that classic stuff. So, one of the sides that we're doing this year is ... I buy this product that's called Broccoli di Ciccio was like a very particular type of broccoli. I mean, I order it through a wholesale company, but broccolini, broccoli rabe, those are all very readily available and I think the closest representation is broccolini. It's probably just like a little bit longer, but you can do the same thing and cut the top portion of it off or split it in half or something, it'll be the same. We make a sauce here that I enjoy very much. It's very easy to replicate at home. It's essentially like a preserve lemon mayonnaise. It's really zippy and bright and it goes really well with just about everything. We used to serve it with fried potatoes or roasted chicken, so I wanted to take that sauce and just do like a simple broccoli dish. So we're gonna just roast the Broccoli di Ciccio in the oven, and then laid it on top of the preserved lemon sauce and it gets some fried garlic as a garnish. So there's not too many components. The broccoli itself ... we just start raw. If you're using whole broccoli, I'd recommend cutting it into like smaller florets just to make the roasting part easier; for things like Broccoli di Ciccio, you can keep it mostly whole. I'm just going to dress it with some olive oil and like a little pinch of salt and I'm going to rack it in the oven ... pretty high heat. If you're at home, something like 400-450 makes the most sense and it should take like ... depending on your oven, you know, anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes to get tender and roasted. So we roast it in the oven right now. In the meantime, I'm going to mix together the sauce ... what we do here and I think it's really nice for home cooks as well as, you know, don't shy away from just buying a mayonnaise. We buy kewpie, which is like a Japanese mayonnaise, which has like a lot of kind of like sweeter flavors and richer flavors to it. It's also really dense. Other mayonnaises like Duke's or other like really like heavy mayonnaises, I think, are really nice because we're going to add other ingredients to it. They're going to thin it out a little bit. So I'm going to take about ... that's about a cup and a half of our kewpie and just put it into a mixing bowl, and then so that I'm going to grate one clove of garlic and it's kind of like a medium-sized clove of garlic. Just take like a little microplane or do you want ... you can hand chop it or if you've got one of those garlic presses, you could push it through a garlic press, and then I've got some rice wine vinegar and you can really use any vinegar or any kind of white wine vinegar is also fine or a cider vinegar. This is about 120 grams that I'm going to pour in here. I'm going to add just a pinch of salt to season it, and then I've got preserved lemon puree. So, preserved lemon puree is going to be maybe a little bit harder to find, but it's really not that hard nowadays. Essentially what it is ... is you take whole lemons and they get buried in salts or a salt and sugar and spice solution for multiple months and what happens is the salt kind of eats into the outside of the lemon usually make some cuts in it, so it gets into the inside of the fruit and the whole thing gets preserved and it will really last forever at that point. The whole lemon itself ... you don't want to puree ... you're really just looking for the skin. We make some here in house, but for people that, you know, don't want to wait 3 to 4 months for the lemons to be done. You can also buy it. They basically come in jars and brine. You take the lemon out and you take the skin kind of off the inside. It falls apart basically in your hands, and then I just puree in the blender ... all the skins. So, this is 75 grams of the pureed lemon. I'm just going to add it to the mix here and it's a really cool trick. It like really livens up your mayonnaise. It's a really nice thing to have around in general. I think it's really good to have in your pantry, and then you could buy a jar of it and you could really last year a long time. They're also really nice if you just cut up the skin into pieces, you can add it to salads. It's really good on top of like raw fish dishes and things like that. So you really just want to mix everything together until it's smooth and that's it. It's as easy as that. The taste ... very good. Alright, so broccoli is just coming out of the oven right now. You can hear it's really sizzling and crispy. It's a nice moment to maybe add a little touch of salt to it. It's nice to season things while they're a little hot. So you kind of just put a little bit of salt on the top, and then the only other garnish I put on it is fried garlic and, you know, this is something that we make here. It's really as simple as just cooking chopped garlic and oil and so it's crispy. You can also buy it again very easily. There's things like fried shallots and fried garlic you can buy pretty readily nowadays. Also, I think it's just a great pantry staple. If you're cooking up some rice fried rice or, you know, some simple salads or something a little sprinkle of fried garlic, I think is really lovely. So here, we're just going to put it up. Some of the start just by putting some of the mayonnaise down on the plate and a little bit goes a long way. I'm just going to kind of spread it out a little bit. Then, I'm just going to add some broccoli on top. It's nice you get some crispy bits and some less cooked bits. You get really cool textures out of it and everybody loves chard broccoli in my opinion. It's nice to like add a touch of olive oil on top makes a little shiny and I'm going to finish it just with a sprinkle of this like fried garlic, which is really crunchy. It's not extra sharp garlicky. It gets kind of sweet from the frying and roasting process and that's it.

Brett Barry  2:52  
Beautiful.

Corwin Kave  8:42  
Broccoli di Ciccio, preserve lemon mayonnaise, and fried garlic.

Brett Barry  9:39  
You make it look really easy.

Corwin Kave  9:41  
Yeah, I mean, it is easy. That's also, you know, it's easy when you're in a commercial kitchen. It is also nice to do at home.

Brett Barry  9:47  
What's your favorite side when you have Thanksgiving at home?

Corwin Kave  9:50  
I feel like potatoes always steal the show. We're like fortunate to work with a lot of great local purveyors here and we get beautiful like ... it's fresh like golden organic potatoes that we get locally; and this year, we're going to do a mashed potato with just some scallion and buttermilk, which was exceptional and I feel like that's the type of thing I always like to do at home. That was really the inspiration for doing this food here was, you know, I don't know, you think like, well, what should I do for this holiday and so traditional, you know, I don't want to do all this out of the box thinking necessarily, you want people to feel comfortable. So I wanted to think about the things that I eat at home and really just bring that to the restaurant. So yeah, I think it's the potatoes, and then the other thing for me is always the stuffing. We don't stuff the birds here themselves. Just because it would just be a tremendous feat to cook all that turkey with stuffing, but we make a dressing on the side that is extremely delicious, so that's ... I think those two are really ... it's always the sides for me.

Brett Barry  10:49  
Do I get to try a little piece of this?

Corwin Kave  10:50  
Of course ... yeah, yeah, please get in it. I'll do so as well.

Brett Barry  10:53  
A lot of flavor, and it's really fresh.

Corwin Kave  10:55  
Yeah, really zippy, really easy. You know, you gotta eat your greens, too. So it's a good moment to do so.

Brett Barry  11:03  
Great. I love it.

Corwin Kave  11:04  
It's great, right?

Brett Barry  11:04  
Yeah, not bad. Crunchy garlic is really ...

Corwin Kave  11:07  
Yeah, the garlic really, really solves it, I think.

Brett Barry  11:09  
Probably ... it adds a nice touch for a lot of sides of that garlic.

Corwin Kave  11:13  
Yeah, that's already kind of like a secret seasoning for us.

Brett Barry  11:23  
After the break, join us at Big Indian's Peekamoose Restaurant & Tap Room for a sweet potato side with Chef Devin Mills. Kaatscast is sponsored by Briars & Brambles Books. The go to independent book and gift store in the Catskills, located in Windham, New York, right next to the pharmacy, just steps away from the Windham Path. Open daily. For more information, visit briarsandbramblesbooks.com or call 518-750-8599; and by the 52-mile Catskill Mountains Scenic Byway; following New York State Route 28 through the heart of the Central Catskills. For maps, itineraries, and links to area restaurants, shops, and accommodations, visit sceniccatskills.com. If you'd like to help support this podcast, please give us a rating on your podcast app. Tell your friends about us and sign up for our newsletter at kaatscast.com. At the western edge of Ulster County, Big Indian, New York is home to Peekamoose Restaurant & Tap Room, where proprietors Marybeth and Devin Mills have been serving up memorable meals for two decades. I've known Chef Devin Mills for many years and his sense of humor is as dry as a Cabernet Sauvignon. So keep that in mind as he whips up a sweet potato gratin ... excuse my French ... in his busy kitchen.

Devin Mills  12:52  
My name is Devin Mills. We're at the Peekamoose Restaurant.

Brett Barry  12:57  
Give me a little history of your work in this place.

Devin Mills  12:59  
Yeah, I'm terrible with dates and I just know we've been here a long time. I think we're in our 20th year.

Brett Barry  13:06  
What was your experience in kitchens before you started the Peekamoose?

Devin Mills  13:11  
Well, that goes back farther than 20 years—obviously. Yeah, I mean, if you do all the math, I must be 65 years old by now—started as a dishwasher, became a cook and went to culinary school, cook some more, open a restaurant and continue to cook, and you would think I'd be good at it by now, but it's ... it's weird. Maybe it's just not a passion of mine. Well, I can't wait for Marybeth to hear this interview. It's going to be amazing!

Brett Barry  13:37  
I'm just gonna let it run.

Devin Mills  13:38  
Yeah, you do.

Brett Barry  13:40  
I usually edit; this one's gonna be raw.

Devin Mills  13:41  
This is just ... yeah, this is going.

Brett Barry  13:43  
Did you wash that celery?

Devin Mills  13:44  
No, I never wash the vegetables. I don't like to get rid of the ... I want to ... it's all about the earth that they came from.

Brett Barry  13:50  
The terroir.

Devin Mills  13:51  
The terroir ... I want everyone to taste it.

Brett Barry  13:53  
He did wash the celery, and then we tried to get back on track. Are you able to get most of your ingredients locally?

Devin Mills  14:00  
Yeah, yeah, we work with a decent amount of farms and makes life easier. It's most restaurants in the city get their stuff from up here anyway and we're right here ... we're right in the middle of it. For our side, we are going to make a sweet potato gratin. We're going to cook our sweet potatoes and cream. We'll put in some secret spices that we will dispose for this special occasion, and in addition to our basic salt and pepper.

Brett Barry  14:31  
Are these sweet potatoes or yams?

Devin Mills  14:33  
These are sweet potatoes. I know they ... please don't ask.

Brett Barry  14:35  
You don't know.

Devin Mills  14:36  
I have not.

Brett Barry  14:37  
Read ...

Devin Mills  14:37  
I'm not a ... I'm not a "yamspert" ... sweet potato peeling in real time.

Brett Barry  14:42  
I much prefer watching them doing it. I hate peeling vegetables.

Devin Mills  14:46  
Yeah, okay, so we're just gonna do that. Then, I'm going to take a mandolin and I'm going to play a song for you. So I am slicing on the mandolin right into the pot.

We just covered with cream.

Brett Barry  15:07  
Heavy cream.

Devin Mills  15:08  
 Heavy cream, yes, heavy cream, I always ... the heaviest. We're going to put this in the cream until a potato was tender, and then we're going to scoop it up and put it onto a sheet tray lined with parchment paper. We're gonna put it in the oven to kind of brown it on top to gratinée. But I'm going to add some seasoning to this, salt. I would like to put some thyme in there.

Brett Barry  15:32  
But that's pepper.

Devin Mills  15:33  
That's pepper. We're going to put some thyme, coriander, ginger.

Brett Barry  15:39  
Now, for home cooks who like to measure things.

Devin Mills  15:41  
A half a teaspoon of each. When you become professional, they take away your spoons. You want to bring it up to a simmer, then turn it down. You don't want it to boil because your potatoes will stick to the bottom of the pan and your cream will burn. It'd be ugly ... it'd be a mess. You'll ruin Thanksgiving. Grandma's not coming back next year. We're going to make it right.

Brett Barry  16:02  
Even I know never to boil cream.

Devin Mills  16:03  
Never. Don't boil cream.

Brett Barry  16:05  
I don't know why, but I never do.

Devin Mills  16:07  
It escapes the pot. It's just right out. It's got to taste the seasoning and like grab a spoon ... little slurping action you can get here.

Brett Barry  16:20  
Oh, thank you. Hoping this part would happen.

Devin Mills  16:23  
Now, it's going to be salty at this point because it's just the cream. We're not using all that cream.

Brett Barry  16:28  
Holiday spiced.

Devin Mills  16:29  
Yeah, that's it. Yeah, it's gonna be like a pumpkin pie. So, at this point, you'd want a slotted spoon. You don't want all of this cream. You're not going to use all of it. I mean, this cream can be used in something else if you want. So we're just gonna ... we're gonna just take it out, you know, be as gentle as possible because the potatoes are fully cooked and they are tender. So it's just gonna break up. I mean, the goal is to have as many nice full pieces on top.

Brett Barry  17:03  
This looks fantastic and it looks doable.

Devin Mills  17:06  
Oh, it's easy. I mean, the alternative is to, you know, cook the potatoes whole and just kind of make this cream on the side with your flavor. Put in your oven like 400-425 and it's like 15 to 20 minutes in the oven and just to get brown on top ... there, and then you would just put that right onto your ... your table.

Brett Barry  17:31  
Why did I think cheese was gonna go on?

Devin Mills  17:33  
I don't know. Oh, for gratin, maybe, you were thinking cheese.

Brett Barry  17:36  
Is that au gratin?

Devin Mills  17:38  
Au gratin?

Brett Barry  17:39  
It's different from gratin.

Devin Mills  17:42  
It's the accent. It's just like ...

Brett Barry  17:43  
So what does that mean?

Devin Mills  17:45  
What?

Brett Barry  17:45  
Au gratin.

Devin Mills  17:48  
It's brown on top. Throw some herbs on there. There's this herb mix has tarragon, chives, chervil, parsley, and that's it. You know that ... that would be nice ... on your plate with the cranberry sauce mixed in and your brussels sprouts, your mashed potaters ...

Brett Barry  18:11  
It's delicious!

Devin Mills  18:12  
It's all good.

Brett Barry  18:14  
So what will you be serving for Thanksgiving here at the restaurant?

Devin Mills  18:17  
Definitely not these potatoes, they're too labor intensive. You know, turkey for sure, mashed potatoes, mashed turnips, brussel sprouts, cranberry sauce, gravy ...

Brett Barry  18:31  
For Thanksgiving because everybody gets this dish or you have the ...

Devin Mills  18:34  
Well, we also ... we offer for the people that don't want turkey ... we offer a fish ... we offer a veg plate, which is based ... a veg plate ... it'll be like roasted honey nut squash, a lot of the vegetables that are involved in the turkey dinner. We just do a vegan version of it and we'll do a porchetta ... pork loin wrapped in the belly ... roasted nice crispy hard skin for the black sheep of the family. What do you mean you're not having a turkey? Everybody has turkey.

Brett Barry  19:11  
Many thanks to Devin Mills at the Peekamoose Restaurant & Tap Room and to Corwin Kave at the Deer Mountain Inn. For an ingredients list plus a Thanksgiving recipe from my own family archive, click on the show notes. Special thanks to the Nicholas J. Juried Family Foundation for a generous grant to this show and a very happy birthday to Nick Juried, who just turned 94. Kaatscast is a biweekly production of Silver Hollow Audio. I'm Brett Barry. Happy Thanksgiving and we'll talk again in December!