My grandmother, Dorothy Jane Wiley, known as Mimi, took tremendous price in her gravy and cornbread stuffing. She hovered over a small saucepan in the hours before the turkey was ready. When my cousin Melanie was married, she documented all her recipes in a hand written cookbook called, In the Kitchen with Mimi (which inspired the name for this blog). My Aunt had the book photocopied duplicated and it is my source for those two favorite Thanksgiving recipes of hers.
Giblets is a culinary term for the edible offal of a fowl, typically including the heart, gizzard, liver, and other organs. A whole bird from a butcher is often packaged with the giblets, sometimes sealed in a bag within the body cavity, which you remove before cooking.
Yield: 3 cups
INGRIDIENTS
Turkey giblets and neck, washed
1 celery stalk, cut up
1 medium onion, peeled and cut into quarters
1 medium carrot, peeled or pared with paring knife and cut cup coarsely
1 tsp salt
4 whole black peppercorns
2 cups of turkey or chicken broth (original recipe called for 1 can condensed chicken broth)
1/3 cup of flour
PREP
Put liver in refrigerator until ready to use. Place remaining giblets and neck in a 2 quart sauce pan. Add 3 cups of water, the celery, onion, carrot, salt and pepper.
Bring to a boil; reduce heat and simmer covered 2-1/2 hours or until giblets are tender. Add liver and simmer 15 mintues. Discard neck. Remove giblets from broth and coarsely chop or leave out if you don’t want to use.
Strain broth, pressing vegetables through a mesh strainer with broth. Measure. Add enough undiluted can broth to make 2 1/2 cups.
When Turkey is removed from roasting pan, add drippings into a 1 cup measure. Remove fat from surface and discard.
Make a roux with 1/3 cup drippings and flour in a saucepan. Stir over very low fire to brown flour slightly. Remove from heat. Gradually stir in broth. Bring to boil, stirring; reduce heat, simmer stirring until gravy thickens and is smooth. Add giblets, simmer 5 minutes.
NOTES
- This is Mimi's recipe, intended from start to finish to happen on Thanksgiving morning. I have begun to make Turkey stock ahead of time and start on Thanksgiving with broth instead of water and reducing cooking time to 1 hour with giblets, then 15 additional minutes for the liver.
- You may want to use your liver for your bread stuffing, in which case leave it out of the gravy.
- For a gluten free gravy, use cassava flour, but watch carefully as it browns much faster than regular flour.
- Mimi’s original recipe says you can add sliced, hard boiled eggs, but I left that step out.
