12 Recipes of Christmas: Mock Turtle Soup

You can almost taste the mock turtle.

On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, two turtle doves… and Cook Local gives you Mock Turtle Soup.

Have you ever tried to source doves? No, wait, I don’t really want to know.

Looking back, I could see another option: some kind of upscale, local pig in a blanket type dish.

Why? Well, PIGeons are in the same family as doves, and pigeonholing is a common enough thing, so, pig getting put into it’s own hole. That’d be a stretch, but, I guess that would have given us a way to get pork involved in this fowl process.

But, in the end, we did manage to get something besides fowl in this dish.

We went for the first thing that came to mind. A turtle soup.

Well, Sea Turtles are on the AVOID part of the Seafood Watch List, so a real turtle soup was probably out.

But a mock turtle soup, that’s do-able and pretty easy to find a recipe for.

So, let’s begin, shall we?

Mock Turtle Soup adapted from About.com

• Olive oil, 1/2 cup
  

  You can almost taste the mock turtle.

• Beef, inexpensive cut, 1/2 pound chopped
• Pork, Boston butt or roast, 1/2 pound chopped
• Chicken, 1/2 pound chopped
• Flour, 3/4 cup
• Onion, 1 cup chopped
• Green onion, 1/2 cup finely chopped
• Parsley, 1/2 cup finely chopped
• Celery, 2 tablespoons finely chopped
• Meat stock (or water), 10 cups total
• Tomato sauce, 1/2 cup
• Salt, to taste
• Hot sauce, to taste

1. Heat oil in a dutch oven/large  heavy pot over medium heat.
2. Brown the meats on all sides in the oil. Remember, the trick to getting a good, crust on the meat is to make sure it’s very, very dry and the oil is hot before putting it in. A drop of water in the oil should sizzle, but no more than a drop.
3. Remove the meat and set it aside.
4. In the same pot, stir in the flour to make a dark roux. Stir frequently until a dark brown.
5. Add the onions and stir.
6. Add the green onions and stir.
7. Add the parsley and stir.
8. Add the celery and stir.
9. Cook until the onions are clear.
10. Add 1 cup of stock/water and stir, leaving a paste.
11. Add the tomato sauce and stir (are your arms tired yet?)
12. Add remaining stock and stir, followed by the meats, a pinch of salt and a splash of hot sauce.
13. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for 1 hour.
14. Serve with a teaspoon of sherry.

Notes: A half pound of roast can be hard to come by if you’re looking at the frozen roasts. You’ll either be defrosting a 2-4 pound roast and then having a pork roast the next day (might I recommend our pulled pork?) or, you could hit Sea Breeze Farm and ask them to trim off a half a pound of a roast, and they may be able to help you out.

The hot sauce you use, well, that’s up to you. The original recipe calls for a Louisiana hot sauce (ie, Tobasco), but we used Zane and Zack’s Caffeinator-X, of which a little goes a long way.

When we made this dish, we actually used some leftover turkey from Thanksgiving, making it easier, no chicken to cook, although I’m sure it wasn’t quite as good.

But make no mistake, it was a good dish. I’d say it was an incredible mocking of a turtle soup, but never having had one, I have no idea. I prefer my turtles to be of the Teenage Ninja Mutant variety.

Salt topped Mock Turtle Soup

An option instead of the teaspoon of sherry, you can try a sprinkling of a flavored salt, such as Secret Stash’s chorizo salt or Zane and Zack’s Habanero infused salt.