Hi, Tom Papoutsis and we’re back making chestnut filling for your holiday bird or whatever you, anytime you want. It doesn’t have to be the holidays but typically this is what our family use as for a Thanksgiving turkey. We’ve been simmering here for about twenty minutes, I’m going to go ahead and add some cinnamon, typically if you’re doing a whole bird we would add about a tablespoon. We’re going to put in about one and a half teaspoons of cinnamon, that’s about a half, there we go, okay. So we’re going to put that in, we’re going to stir that around. Now as this simmers, of course, it’s going to reduce, in other words, the liquid is going to come out of this. So what you need to do is you need to add water to it, if you have to add water to it. Keep it a nice sauce-like consistency. You see how this is just thick enough that it’s not real soupy and thin, it’s got a sauce, it’s like a sauce, that’s what we want, okay.
So try to keep it a little bit thinner but you know, don’t let this thing burn, you know, if you let it go because the tomato, it’s going to burn. So keep adding water as you need, I had added water couple of times to keep this the way we want. These chestnuts are starting to soften up real nice fours and things are starting to look pretty good. So at this point I have a sautéed vegetables, chestnuts and turkey meat is all ready to go, we have our rice, it’s made; so what I’m going to do right now is I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to add the rice, and remember we turned the heat off on this, we’re going to go ahead and add this rice into our mixture, okay? Now remember I had this pre-cooked, the rice is ready to go and like I said you could actually use this; you could be making your rice while you’re actually doing the sautéing here. So what I’m going to do is going to go ahead and mix this around and you know what, sometimes it’s easier to mix like this. And we’re just going to mix that, you could see how it starts to come around, yeah and make a little bit of a mess but it actually works better; won’t you know what you’re doing; and a couple more, there we go.
Okay, it’s mixed up, it’s ready to go. Now, typically we would take this and we would go ahead and in the cavity of the bird, open the cavity, spoon this into the bird and then just take, and you can buy a commercial sewing kit for a turkey, a lacing kit where it actually has metal-like pins to go through and then you just use your string and lace it up; or you could just do it with a knife and lace it. Then close the bird up and then you’re going to bake the bird. As you normally would for a stuffed bird, okay so it’s going to take more time than you have an unstuffed bird.
Today, for art purposes, what we’re going to do is we’re going to put this in a baking dish, this is my beloved stone ware dish that I love so much because I just, if I could have all stone ware for my baking, I just think that’ll be fantastic, it works so great, once you it seasoned, it’s incredible. But we’re going to go ahead and put that in there, and what I’m going to do is just kind of push it around in here. Now what I did was I went ahead and sprayed the dish here for non-stick purposes; now we’re just, you got cure these things so oil is not going to hurt, oil is actually good for it, and it’s going to keep things from sticking. So what I’m going to do, I’m going to take real quick, grab some foil and I’m going to cover this and we’re going to bake this covered, there we go. We’re going to put it in the oven and we’re going to bake this covered up just like that for probably a good 30 to 45 minutes and we’re going to go in about 350. So it will be like the same as the bird but not as much time but because we’re doing this in a roasting pan, excuse me, in a baking dish and not in the bird we’re going to, of course, we’re going to cut down the time but it will, keeping it covered keeps the moisture in and it’s going to help it to stay moist and stay nice. So we’re ready to go, I’m going to go ahead, slide this into our pre-heated oven and when we come back we’re going to pull that out and we’re going to have some nice chestnut filling.