He said he didn’t mind having turkey again, so I decided to try to be creative about it.

I had bought a single jar of cherry fig savory jam from Cherry Republic in Michigan to try out–kind of a token purchase for the year towards keeping the Michigan farmers in business, as one does in 2020 if one can. I opened it: it was lumpy but really not jam-sweet. Spices. Hmm.

I diced up a bunch of turkey, cut some seedless green grapes into quarters so they would cook faster, scooped out less than half that jar of jam into a separate bowl and whisked it with maybe a quarter cup of leftover plain cream, there you go.

I used one of Mel and Kris’s ceramic cake pans, which always take just a little longer to bake with but always seem to improve the texture of whatever I put in them over anything else. In with the turkey/grapes, mix in the lumpy attempt at a sauce, then I grated some fresh Gouda cheese from Milk Pail on top.

It looked pretty but it didn’t feel done.

So I took a heaping spoonful of their fresh grated parmesan and sprinkled that around on top of the whole shebang and called it good.

Now, it must be said that theirs is nothing like the room-temperature supermarket stuff in the tall green cans: fresh authentic parmesan totally rocks.

Oven, 350, shooting for 20 minutes since all I really needed to do was melt the cheese, checked it a few minutes late…

I’d had no idea. This was glorious. This is like, like, my MOM’s cooking, which is the highest compliment you could ask for. It was good, and it came out with a deep red rich sauce pooling at the bottom that you’d want to serve to company, and the turkey (thank you ceramic pan) had not come out overbaked nor tough from its second go-round of cooking.

Richard wanted a generous helping of seconds. So did I.

So I’m writing it down here, because it’s the one place I know I’ll be able to find it next year when I’m trying to figure out what on earth I did.

Suddenly realizing that–thinking of yesterday’s post–yes, yes, it would be good over pinto beans, too.