If you have been reading this blog for any length of time you will have gathered that I'm a little rigid about Thanksgiving. I've cooked an Indian feast for Easter and I love to see what new thing I can flambé for Christmas dinner, but there is One True Thanksgiving Meal, and I will not depart from the Path. My husband suggested that perhaps there might be a little white bread in the stuffing this year (cornbread stuffing FTW, baby), and I snorted, "That's how you'll know when the pod people have taken over, dear, when there's white bread in your stuffing."
I think the reason I got a late start this year was that one of my boys asked if I would please please pretty please use one of the decorative copper molds to make a molded cranberry sauce. I was willing to prepare an alternative to the One True Cranberry Sauce because I'm flexible and gracious like that, but I kept tripping over the decision. I needed to do something new, right at the beginning, even though I never do anything new for Thanksgiving. I always start with the cranberry sauce, see: I boil up the cranberries with apple cider and a pinch of cloves and another of salt, and then at the end I add the merest drop of maple syrup. Cranberry sauce is meant to be astringent, in my view. It should make you pucker. So I squinched up my face at the Joy of Cooking recipe, which called for 2 cups of sugar. "That," I told my 13yo, "is more sweetener than I have used in total across all of the batches of cranberry sauce I have made in your whole existence."
I went with it, because I thought the syrup might be important for stability. Joe liked the way it looked, but he and everybody else said they preferred the old cranberry sauce. Candor compels me to tell you that this might be Stockholm syndrome induced by all those years of wince-worthy cranberry sauce, cranberry sauce to put hair on your chest. It's kind of cool, though, that cranberries have so much pectin (or something?) that they can stand up tall like that -- no gelatin, just natural cranberry uprightness.
As you might imagine, I had a bunch of stuff to do today. I made myself a List. To my amusement, someone edited it.
Are you familiar with Schichttorte? It's that 20-layer German cake that everybody eats on the fourth Thursday in...oh, wait. No. It's exactly the sort of thing you'd want to whip up if you hadn't done any of your Thanksgiving prep in advance...and you were a raving lunatic in possession of a time machine and six hands.
We made do with pies instead.
It was a lovely day, filled with board games and good conversation and plenty of yummy food. I hope that you had a great day too, and that somebody else washed the dishes for you.
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