Who am I kidding? (Actually, whom am I kidding?) If you’re the cook for tomorrow you’re not reading blog posts, and this won’t arrive in your inbox until 6:00 this evening, at which point it will be far too late for you to go to the grocery store and buy a butternut squash. I actually should have posted this additional material on Monday, or even Sunday afternoon, as a friend told me at church that morning that she hadn’t been able to access the New York Times articles/recipes by Melissa Clark. But there it is. Maybe you’ll decide to make her pie for Christmas dinner. And you can still roast your turkey the way Melissa says to do it even if you decide not to do the dry marinade. I think you should be able to access the video at least:
Debi Simons
The 2018 Thanksgiving Dinner Countdown!
Here it is, Saturday morning, and the Big Meal is, well, four days if you don’t count today or Thursday itself, or six days if you do . . . I never know how to do the inclusion/exclusion bit. Anyway, if you’re in charge of dinner you know when it is! So I thought I’d share my own timetable for the meal in case it helps you get
Thanksgiving Menu for 2018
Everyone reading this probably has TG dinner all planned out, but just in case you don’t, here’s what I’m planning to do right now. We’re up to 15 for the count, with possibly more to come. I’m so thrilled! Back in our old house I always wanted to have 20, but the most we ever had was 13. Which was WONDERFUL, of course. But to me this holiday should be completely and utterly over the top. It’s my favorite holiday of the year. So here goes:
A Great, Unusual, Not-too-Sweet Cranberry Cake
This is a great recipe Not terribly simple, but well worth the effort!
Martha Stewart's Cranberry Upside-Down Cake
This is so pretty and so good--it's not terribly sweet, and the cornmeal and almond paste/extracts make it different and special.
Servings 12 23 grams of sugar per serving
Ingredients
- 12 tablespoons butter, softened or 14 tablespoons if not using the almond paste--see below
- 2 3/4 cups cranberries or one 12-oz. bag, rinsed and shriveled ones removed
- 9 tablespoons maple syrup or 1/2 cup + 1 tablespoon
- 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
- 3/4 cup flour
- 1 tsp. baking powder
- 1/4 tsp. salt
- 6 tablespoons cornmeal or 1/4 cup + 2 tablespoons--The recipe recommends coarsely-ground; I usually buy Bob’s Red Mill or Arrowhead Mills brands, not the Quaker de-germed stuff.
- 3/4 cup + 2 tablespoons sugar
- 1/4 cup almond paste An expensive ingredient, I know, but this cake is really special. If you feel that you just can’t splurge on this, I’d suggest that you add 2 tablespoons extra butter. Or make your own almond paste—see Note below.
- 3 large eggs, separated
- 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
- 1/2 tsp. almond extract
- 1/2 cup milk
Instructions
-
1. Spray Pam on or butter a round cake pan, then flour it. (I used a 9-inch springform pan, which made unmolding the cake much easier than if I'd used a regular cake pan. The original recipe says to use an 8” pan, but at least one comment on this recipe said that that size pan was too small. So if you don’t use a springform pan you probably should use a 9” cake pan.) In a large skillet, heat 6 tablespoons butter until melted, add cranberries and cook 2-3 minutes, until beginning to soften.
2. Add the maple syrup and cinnamon. Cook, stirring frequently, for about 5 minutes more, until cranberries are completely softened but still hold their shape. (Don't worry if they cook a little long--they just won't look as pretty.) Remove the cranberries with a slotted spoon and spread them in the cake pan. Boil the syrup remaining in the skillet until it boils and thickens, 3-4 minutes. Don't let it cook too long. Pour the syrup over the cranberries and let cool while you make the cake batter.
3. Place rack in center of oven and preheat to 350. Mix together the flour, baking powder, salt, and cornmeal. Beat together the remaining butter (6 tablespoons if using the almond paste, 8 tablespoons or one stick if not) and the almond paste, crumbled, if using, and the 3/4 cup sugar until creamy looking. (You're supposed to use an electric mixer, but mine was packed, so I just had to use a spoon and beat it by hand.) Add the egg yolks, one at a time, and beat until well combined. Beat in the vanilla and almond extracts. Add the flour mixture alternately with the milk in two batches.
4. In another bowl beat the egg whites until foamy; slowly add the remaining 2 tablespoons sugar; beat until soft peaks form. Whisk a third of the whites into the batter, then fold in remaining whites.
5. Spread the batter over the cranberries in the cake pan and bake for 45 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let the cake cool in the pan (original recipe says 2 hours) before inverting it onto a serving plate. Cake is best eaten within 2 days.
Recipe Notes
Note: You can make your own almond paste, especially if you have some almond flour hanging around and need to use it up. Use 1 ½ cups almond flour, 1 ½ cups powdered sugar, one egg white, and 1 1/ tsp. almond extract. Process in a food processor until it’s smooth. If you just have almonds, process 1 ½ cups of those with the powdered sugar until finely ground—don’t process the almonds by themselves or you’ll end up with almond butter—and then add the other ingredients. You can divide up the paste into 1/2-cup or 1/4-cup portions and put them in ziploc bags, then freeze.
Featherlight, Ethereal, Non-Library-Paste Hummus
For years I’ve had a very basic hummus recipe–chickpeas from a can, lemon juice, tahini, garlic, olive oil and salt, all dumped into the food processor and whirled until pulverized. It was fine as an occasional lunch item, sometimes spread on a flour tortilla with some veggies and rolled up to make a wrap. I would also make it for occasions when I thought I absolutely had to serve some kind of appetizer, say if people were coming over to watch the Super Bowl. But it wasn’t something I ever got too excited about it. I liked it, but it wasn’t an obsession.
A Family Get-Together
Alexander and the Wonderful, Marvelous, Excellent, Terrific Ninety Days: An Almost Completely Honest Account of What Happened in Our Family When Our Youngest Son, His Wife, Their Baby, Their Toddler, and Their Five-Year-Old Came to Live with Us for Three Months by Judith Viorst, originally published by the Free Press, 2007, now available in a number of formats through Amazon and at the library. (The above is an Amazon affiliate link.)
To be honest, I haven’t been doing a lot of book reading these days. It seems as if every waking moment that I’m not spending on anything else I’m devouring articles about the election. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t still love books and have ones that I recommend, and I can’t believe that I’ve never posted about this one. I bought it in hardback when it first came out and vividly remember reading it aloud in the car to my husband and son. The title is a takeoff of Viorst’s earlier children’s book, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good Very Bad Day. Same guy, but now he’s married with three children, needing a place to stay while his family’s house is being remodeled. So his parents invite the tribe to stay with them rather than renting a place. It turns out to be quite an adventure.
I love books that have a strong authorial voice, and especially those that echo my own personality. Oh my! Do I ever relate to Judith, whether she’s slipping an article underneath her son’s bedroom door about the dangers of too much bike riding, or trying to nonchalantly remind him about the instability of the big oak dresser upstairs, or restraining herself from shrieking about chocolate coming anywhere near her beloved velvet furniture. (I’m that way about my beloved dining room table and anything that could possibly scratch it.) She’s very self-aware, though, as I hope I am. Here’s a representative passage:
It’s inevitable, I suppose, that living, as Milton and I are now living, in close quarters with our resident grown-up children, there are bound to be opportunities–lots of opportunities–for intergenerational irritations. Some of them, however, some of us parents might be able to avoid by repeating the following mantra twice a day:
Don’t judge, advise, or criticize.
Respect their boundaries and choices.
Accept who they are.
Well, sometimes we need to repeat it ten times a day. And then we must try to abide by what we say. I’m doing my best.That doesn’t mean that I always succeed in keeping my mouth shut when I should keep my mouth shut. But I don’t understand those parents who won’t even try.
For me, the greatest delight of this book is that it reminds me of my own wonderful family, both immediate and extended, and how much I enjoy spending time with them. The long trips taken with my in-laws. The family reunions at the beach. The Thanksgivings and Christmases. This afternoon we’re heading over to said in-laws for dinner, so I’m trying to get this post done and my newsletter out before we leave. We haven’t had our usual Sunday-afternoon lunch for a couple of weeks, so it’ll be nice to see them.
Great takeaway: “And then we must try to abide by what we say.” A great reminder to me, as a champion maker of resolutions that I don’t keep,
Eventually the 90 days end and everyone goes back home. It’ been a great time, and now it’s over. One more quotation, only one, I promise: “I am full of smiles and tears at the same time, full of the difficult knowledge that I can’t, as the poet once put it, ‘cage the minute within its nets of gold.'”
Well, you need to read the whole thing. Only 113 pages of big type, and every one of them full of wisdom. Well, well worth the time.
A Set of Sweet Mini Tart Variations
Over the years I’ve developed several recipes for mini tarts that use the same easy dough for the crust. They’re kind of labor-intensive, but in the end you have adorable, single-serving treats that are prettier and more interesting than most cookies but can still be picked up and eaten without a plate or fork.
First take a look at the crust recipe, which is the same as for the savory mini-quiches. This dough recipe pops up all over the place, and it’s just great. You may think that it has too much cream cheese/butter in relation to the amount of flour, but it doesn’t. I have made a minor tweak to the amounts as originally written, since that recipe called for 3 ounces of cream cheese, a size that used to be sold individually, and therefore upped the flour a bit. These new amounts give you a slightly larger amount of dough to work with.
More Pre-Holiday Food Thoughts
Well, I had a nice post planned for today, something about the difference between self-awareness and self-absorption. Instead, I’m writing about food again, this time quoting from another book, Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite
I mentioned this book in another post, over a year ago, and I was reminded of it by a little phrase that popped into my head: “one tiny chop.” I knew the words were from this book, and I was determined to find it and put it into
The Happiness of a Big Event
I have a separate blog called Intentional Hospitality, but my purpose in writing this post isn’t so much to give you recipes and timetables as to talk about a major source of happiness–and nervous breakdowns—in my life: throwing parties.
I have always liked to cook, going way back to my grade-school days. In fact, one of my fondest memories from about fourth grade is the time that my mom put me in charge of cooking dinner and I made everything from the
In Which I Take Ownership of My Chorale Cooking
The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery and Meaning in an Ordinary Church by Margaret Visser, originally published in 2001, now available in hardback, paperback, and Kindle versions. Link is to Amazon page.
In this book, the historian and anthropologist Margaret Visser takes the reader through a Roman church, Saint Agnes Outside the Walls (Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura), exhaustively describing the architecture, history and current activities centered on this ancient structure. Sound boring? Oh believe me, it’s not. It is one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read, and I’m so sorry that we didn’t visit this church when we went to Europe back in 1993. We’ll do so someday! I had read the book many years ago (it came out in 2001) and then again in 2013 when we went on our big driving trip to LA.