Ginger and Black Pepper Roasted Turkey Breast with Red Wine Sauce & Celery Root Puree

This dish was inspired by this Wolfgang Puck roast salmon recipe. I altered the recipe a bit and made it tonight for dinner.

The meal is elegant and interesting but still accessible. I am a pretty average home cook and I managed to make it relatively easily on a weeknight after work. Timing was important--as long as you trim and boil the root vegetables first, prepare the meat, preheat the oven, start the sauce and let it reduce, and then cook the meat. Everything can be done simultaneously and finishes at about the same time. I must admit that I did not take the recipe’s suggestion to make my own chicken stock, which saved me a lot of time but may have sacrificed flavor.

I used turkey breast steaks rather than salmon here--and I think any meat would work rather well with it, even beef. Maybe especially beef. The turkey was good though. I did have to cook it 10-15 minutes longer than I would have for salmon since I had pretty thick turkey steaks. I also cooked them at a lower temperature because I'm pretty sure at 500 degrees, they would have gotten burned before they were done inside. I settled for 450 degrees and the turkey took about 20-25 minutes to reach a level of doneness I was comfortable with. Like I said, a variety of meats could be used here; it’s just important to adjust the cooking time and temperature to suit the particular meat.

There were a lot of interesting flavors going on with the celery root, ginger, and red wine. I never would have thought to put these ingredients together, but it worked. It's a really beautiful dish, especially when you drizzle the ruby sauce over the pale turkey and celery root puree. It made our average weeknight feel pretty special.