The difference between a good Thanksgiving dinner and a great one is homemade broth. But it's Thanksgiving morning and you're on the internet. If you don't already have the stock pot simmering, it's still possible to have homemade broth, but you need to get cracking.
It would help if you'd bought extra turkey parts for making said broth, but you probably didn't. Don't worry, if you've got a whole bird, you're in business. Read More
26 November 2024: Thanksgiving Cranberries
In the best-laid plans department, this essay was intended for posting on Monday, but we had some last minute changes to our plans for the week and I had to shift gears with the intention of posting it early this morning. But then the electrical company shut off the power to work on our area's grid for several hours, so I'm awfully sorry to be several hours late with it.
The reason it ought to have posted yesterday was because the recipe that follows needs to be made at least 24 hour ahead, and is all the better if it's made 36-48 hours ahead.
Cranberry relish has been a standard in our family for almost as long as I can remember. But the traditional recipe makes more than half a gallon of the stuff Read More
Over the more than three decades that I've been teaching and writing about cooking, the biggest challenge has been coming up with fresh ways to talk about coping with our big cook's holiday, Thanksgiving. In all that time, the focus, both in my work and most everyone else's, has been on tackling a feast for a crowd without killing ourselves.
It never occurred to me—or apparently anyone else—that, as challenging as cooking for that crowd might be, it's nothing to the challenge of The Dwindling Thanksgiving Table. That, I had to learn the hard way.
When we moved to Virginia, I happily imagined our dining room table at Thanksgiving, Read More
Tomorrow is my birthday, and ushers in the last year of my sixties.
It's a milestone I suspect none of us is ever ready to face, and is coming at an especially difficult time for my family and for our country. Consequently, that need for comforting soup in my household hasn't lessened; if anything, it's only gotten more pronounced.
Whenever that need becomes acute, the soup that provides it best isn't, oddly enough, one I grew up on, but a classic Italian minestrone. True, it's a kissing cousin of my grandmother's vegetable soup, but its comfort isn't rooted in childhood memories as are most other "comfort foods." When I was traveling to teach a lot, Read More
Usually Autumn is a season that fills me with hope, a time of golden light, of doors opening on new beginnings, and of joyful anticipation as we look forward to the winter holidays. But this one has been dark, a season of endings, sadness, and anxiety, of doors not just closed but slammed in our faces. We've needed comfort in large, hefty doses, and while it's been tempting, not all those doses could take the form of ice cream and bourbon.
Yesterday's comfort came in the form of a velvety butternut squash and leek puree. Of all the winter squash, butternuts produce Read More
My mother's cornbread, while I was growing up, was like so many other Southerners' bread back then, a round cake baked in a preheated iron skillet, just as her mother's and grandmother's and probably her great- and great-great-grandmother's had been before her. Cut into wedges and passed around while it was almost blistering hot, we eagerly risked a burn to split our steaming wedge and stuff it with as much butter as we could get away with.
It was the quintessential accompaniment for Mama's pots of greens, beans, field peas, and vegetable soup.
And yet, oddly enough, when I'm missing her and craving her cornbread, it's not a round skillet cake that I make, Read More