Damon Lee Fowler

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 

Of all the turkey leftovers that we enjoy in the days following Thanksgiving, the one I most look forward to is soup. All of them have their charms: sliced and piled into sandwiches; creamed and ladled over dressing; mixed with rice; molded into croquettes, and of course diced and folded into casseroles like tetrazzini. But none of those can quite equal the soothing, soul-nourishing comfort of a bowl of fragrant  Read More 

If you've not already planned your Thanksgiving menu and started shopping for it, it's time you got cracking. You don't want to wait too late to plan and shop or you could be faced with rethinking your menu when the store sells out of some of the essential ingredients.

Planning that menu will be simple if you are wise and stick to your family's traditions.

Every single autumn social media is riddled with cooks asking for "something new and different" for this meal, claiming to be tired of and/or bored with cooking and eating the same old things every Thanksgiving.  Read More 

Thanksgiving may be a little over a week away, but it's not too early to start planning. In fact, if you haven't already started doing that, you're a little late—but not dangerously so.

Big holiday dinners don't have to be complicated, but we're easing out of a pandemic and even seasoned cooks are a little out of practice. As for you who are unseasoned, if the closest you've ever come to turkey in your kitchen is the deli-sliced variety in a sandwich, you really do need a plan—and help, so don't be shy about asking for it.

To that end, over the next week leading up to Thanksgiving, I'm resurrecting Mastering Thanksgiving, the series Read More 

Y'all, I cannot seem to help myself.

For our first Virginia Thanksgiving, we're not hosting but are going to another family member's home. My part of the meal is my grandfather's macaroni pie, cranberry relish with apples and oranges, and a sweet potato souffle from a fondly remembered Savannah friend.

So I'm not cooking the turkey, gravy, or dressing. And yet: There's a big pot of turkey broth simmering away in my sunny yellow kitchen as I write this, and I'll roast a turkey breast later on for sandwiches, creamed turkey over dressing, and turkey soup.

The thing is, it's just not Thanksgiving if my house doesn't smell like roasted turkey and broth,  Read More