I must have written a zillion past NaBloPoMo posts about Thanksgiving dinner. For a long time I cooked One True Thanksgiving Dinner, and I did not veer from the path. But even the most diehard lover of tradition begins to chafe against the bonds of the past at some point, am I right?
There was the year that I made a molded cranberry sauce with actual sugar instead of the One True Penitential Cranberry Sauce, and my children regarded it with suspicion. I made a version of this sweet potato dish the year after Joe rejected the idea, but I think I forgot that I had seen the recipe online and improvised. I added lime juice, which was an excellent call, and I pureed everything together instead of going for a coarse mash. People loved it. One guest requested a doggie bag of those sweet potatoes so he could take them home to his mom and ask her to make them for him. Success, right? Except...now people want both the old sweet potatoes and the new sweet potatoes on the menu. Because tradition!
One year when we wondered if we had enough dessert, we whipped up a cranberry cake because it is fast and easy and delicious (these days I do add a sprinkle of salt to that recipe), and now we have to have cranberry cake too.
I am feeling a bit like the Ghost of Thanksgiving Past is in my kitchen. His clanking comes not from chains like Jacob Marley's, but from the array of empty baking dishes trailing behind him. "How could you even think about serving one kind of sweet potatoes?" he asks reproachfully.
The kids are great about cooking and washing up, and Joe and I are both off next week. So we'll figure it all out. But I might lobby for one kind of sweet potato, ghost or no ghost.
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