Thanksgiving is less than 30 days away. In my world, that means planning the menu now, and sharing it with my sous chef (my brother).

Serious negotiations will commence about what we can and cannot accomplish given our busy schedules and travel plans.

Two things are a given: we will have pumpkin pie and we will have cranberry orange compote.

So I’m sharing links to two recipes that will be on our Thanksgiving table, in case you’re new to the blog. If you’ve been reading all along, maybe you’ll remember these.

Pumpkin Pie

The first is pumpkin pie, and I did a little experiment to determine if roasting a pumpkin was better than using canned pumpkin for our pie. You can see the results here:

Fresh v. Canned: Pumpkin Pie

Which is better? Read the post to find out, but here’s a hint: it depends…

A word about the sugared sage garnish: brush a sprig of fresh sage leaves with a beaten egg white and roll in granulated sugar. Set aside to dry. Really, it’s that easy.

Cranberry Orange Compote

For years (who am I kidding… still …) the canned jellied cranberry sauce landed on our table at Thanksgiving. As long as my dad sits at the head of the table, it always will.

But that doesn’t mean I have to eat it. Instead, I make a wonderfully tart and decidedly grown-up cranberry compote with a healthy dose of ruby port and Grand Marnier.

Now you can too:

Cranberry Orange Compote

Now that we have these two in the “yes” column, all we need to do is decide which sides will accompany our citrus & herb turkey.

For the past few years, we’ve been using a modified dry brine recipe from Rick Rodgers we found in Bon Appetit years ago.

Mom’s corn bread dressing is a given, but I’ve never written a recipe for it. Truth is, we’re still working on it. Every year we think we’re getting closer, but it never is as good as Mom’s was.

But we will try again this year, like we always do.

Happy Thanksgiving planning to you.

Tags: bon appetit, canned pumpkin, cranberries, cranberry orange compote, fresh pumpkin, pumpkin pie, Rick Rodgers, Thanksgiving
Posted in Desserts, Recipes, Sauces, Salsas & Dressings | 2 Comments »

Who does a postmortem after Thanksgiving? Apparently, we do. There we were with notepad in hand, surveying the Thanksgiving buffet line. “Next year, we need half as many sweet potatoes,” I said, looking at the less than half empty 9 X 13 dish of sweet potatoes, still covered with caramel brown marshmallows.

“And let’s not forget to put the cranberry relish out BEFORE the meal, instead of after the meal,” Steve snickered. Touche! We both looked at the mounds of food before us. We planned on 20 people, and cooked for 50. As people were gearing up to leave, my sister-in-law loaded up bags and bags of leftovers, and still had a mountain of food for her own refrigerator.

We gave thumbs up to the dry brining technique we read about in Bon Appetit Magazine, based on an article by Rick Rodgers, a phenomenal cooking teacher and author of dozens of cookbooks. This guy really knows his stuff. It’s so easy and less messy than submerging your bird in a bucket of liquid salt brine. I even think it makes for less salty drippings, key if you use the drippings as the basis for gravy.

But then there was Mom’s cornbread dressing. We’re still not there yet, and what we wouldn’t give to have her back to show us how to do it. We’re close (although it was a little green from two bottles of sage) but we’re just not there yet.

So we have written notes – a postmordem – from this year that will make next year even better. Now if we can just remember to review them.

Tags: Essay, Thanksgiving
Posted in News & Nibbles | 1 Comment »

Tom is taking up a fair amount of space in the fridge. He is the biggest turkey I’ve ever seen, and my brother informs me we are cooking him on Thursday. I wonder if we really should get started today. How long does it take to cook a 21-pound turkey?

I don’t have years of experience cooking turkeys. Mom cooked all our turkeys up until four years ago, and our first Thanksgiving without her was painful in more ways than one. We dried out the turkey, we made glue instead of cornbread dressing, and we generally made a mess of the dinner.

Since turkey duties now fall to my younger brother and me, we’ve been experimenting. We held a competition one year. We each had a 12 pound turkey. I brined mine, Steve did not. I won. But Steve really won because my gravy was too salty to eat. His was perfect.

Last year, we roasted a beautiful bird to bronze bliss and decorated the platter with oranges and sage bundles. We roasted two extra breasts to eat, using the whole turkey as our centerpiece. We never had to carve the golden boy because we had plenty of turkey breast, plus a ham, and an untold number of side dishes for our 35 guests. Steve tells me he put the bird in the extra fridge and promplty forgot about it, eventually tossing it a few weeks later. Not a very happy ending for that Tom.

So here we are, looking at this monstrous fowl, and wondering what’s to become of him. We’re thinking we’ll try the salting technique in the November issue of Bon Appetit. Mainly because we don’t have a bucket big enough to do a full brine. We realize we’re treading on thin ice because we don’t have extra turkey waiting in the wings if we screw this up. And that is part of the fun. That, and being together on Thanksgiving, cooking, laughing, sharing. Creating a story for next year. Happy Thanksgiving.

Tags: Essay, family, Thanksgiving, turkey
Posted in News & Nibbles | No Comments »

Did I catch your attention? An article in last weekend’s USA Weekend insert in my newspaper caught my attention with ” A Lighter Thanksgiving: only 682 total calories.”

This just after I sent a text message to my brother about a luscious sounding pasta, cauliflower and cheese gratin recipe I’d seen in Bon Appetit magazine, that I was certain should be on our “new dish” Thanksgiving list.

My text said something about replacing the pasta with more cauliflower and using less cream, cheese and butter for a “lighter” version. (I blogged about Steve earlier this year after he dropped 25 pounds just by eating turkey bacon … and running 4 miles every day for months, but I digress).

He immediately texted back, and I quote, “Girlfriend, Thanksgiving is NOT about the calories.” Now that’s a reason to be thankful. We’ll have a normal, traditional Thanksgiving — no obsessing about the amount of food and fat. After all, what other national holiday do we have that is all about food, nothing but food?

I don’t mean to sound snippy about Pam Anderson’s Thanksgiving-Lite meal — she’s lost 45 pounds (and wrote a successful cookbook about it).  Her article says that a typical Thanksgiving meal is more than 1,200 calories, so her lighter meal may be an inspiration to people who need to watch their intake on this and every other day (and don’t we all). Seriously, I had just offered to “lighten” an new dish in honor of my brother’s “lighter” self.

But for me (and clearly this trait runs in the family), Thanksgiving is the opposite of restraint and moderation. I can be moderate and mindful for 364 days. But on day 332 this year, I’m going to indulge. I might have seconds. I might have six desserts. I might regret it all on day 333 but on Thanksgiving, I’ll eat like it was the last Thanksgiving — or the first. I imagine that the first Thanksgiving was a cornucopia of foods and both sides did the polite thing, sampling a little bit of what everyone brought to the table.

At the end of the day, I may very well wish that I’d followed Anderson’s Thanksgiving plan. But until then, I’ll be planning, shopping, cooking and stuffing my way to satiated bliss.

Tags: Thanksgiving
Posted in News & Nibbles | No Comments »

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