Cranberry Orange Relish

I made cranberry orange relish today, just like every Thanksgiving. It's the earliest thing I can remember cooking — grinding the oranges and cranberries with Russell, the hand grinder clamped on a chair covered in newspaper.

The recipe is unimportant; I basically use what's on the back of the Ocean Spray bag — one orange, one bag of cranberries, and between a half-cup and 3/4 cup of sugar. No cinnamon or any of the other fussy stuff.

What's absolutely critical is the hand grinder. I tried it once in the food processor and it was mushy. I tried it once with the meat grinder attachment on my Kitchen Aid and it was...OK. But the hand grinder is perfect.

I think it has something to do with this:

All that juice runs off during the grinding process, and I use it to make drinks. It's not sticking around mingling with the sugar, making things mushy.

Here was my setup today.

 I use the middle grind size.

Old/New Thanksgiving Food

We had many of the usual dishes on Thanksgiving: Portuguese-style turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, applesauce, pumpkin pie, etc. I did manage to insert two new twists on cranberries and sweet potatoes, which we all enjoyed.

Sprouts sells these sweet potato chips, which are delicious. I often serve them with raw tomatillo salsa, but this time found a cranberry salsa recipe in the local paper. It was a satisfying and colorful appetizer.

Spicy Cranberry Salsa

1/2 small red onion

1 tablespoon canned jalapeno slices

2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro

8 ounces fresh cranberries

1/2 cup dried cranberries

2 tablespoons lime juice

2 tablespoons honey, or to taste

1/2 teaspoon or more salt

1/4 teaspoon pepper

In food processor, pulse onion, jalapeno, and cilantro to chop finely. Add cranberries and pulse until coarsely chopped. Add remaining ingredients and mix lightly. Serve with chips.

Instead of the usual sweet potatoes, I made baked wedges with a yogurt dipping sauce, which we had at Zinburger recently. I got the recipe from the Bon Appetit website.

Shrimp Tortilla after Thanksgiving

I somehow managed to not take one single photograph through four days of eating, cooking, and talking about food with Lawson's relatives. We were all socked away in a house in North Carolina miles from anything. In a classic liberal-conservative/Target-Wal*Mart split, Lawson and I worked on the new trail we're cutting up there, while almost everyone else stayed inside or rode ATVs in a circle around the yard.

After all that eating, though, we needed light food yesterday. We saved some leftover shrimp from Saturday night's oyster roast and shrimp boil, so I made a tortilla espanola with them: an onion and four cloves of garlic, sauteed very slowly for about 40 minutes until golden, followed by a diced roasted red pepper, about 15 big cooked shrimp, a handful of parsley, 5 beaten eggs, and salt and pepper. I cooked it in the pan for a few minutes more, then browned the top.

Pie for Breakfast

I never have room for pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving day; fortunately it makes an excellent breakfast the next morning. Here is the menu from yesterday's meal for six:

Tapenade* with Crackers

Cherry Tomatoes, Green Onions, and Radishes from Dad's Garden

Black olives from Raymond's tree which he cured himself!

Champagne

###

Portuguese-Style Turkey with Linguisa Stuffing and Pan Gravy

Mashed Potatoes with Garlic

Sweet Potatoes from your recipe--very popular yesterday

Chunky Applesauce

Port Wine Cranberry Sauce

Scalloped Corn

Green Bean and Tomato Salad

###

Pumpkin Pie

Mince Pie

*This is James McNair's recipe. It was a perfect appetizer because it was sharply flavorful rather than rich and bland. Easy to make ahead, too.

Tapenade

1 cup pitted Kalamata olives

1/2 cup basil leaves

3 tablespoons capers, drained and rinsed

2 tablespoons chopped garlic

2 teaspoons grated lemon zest

1/4 cup olive oil

2 tablespoons lemon juice

Chop first 5 ingredients in food processor, then add olive oil and lemon juice to make a smooth paste. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Thanksgiving Ho

I just wanted to post this reminder to myself and everyone else that we won't be eating gravy and butter-based dishes forever. Someday, maybe around the middle of next week, we will again eat lightly sauteed greens and pork-free beans and shiny golden beets and things like salads and whole wheat tortillas. Onward to the future.

I'll be out of town for a few days but will return with many stories of the way other people eat. Happy Thanksgiving.

Planned Side Dishes

It's important to plan over a healthy breakfast.

Lawson and I are assigned the side dishes for his big family Thanksgiving again. We are going to be much less ambitious than in years past, so I am feeling pretty good about it all. Here's what we're making:

- Collards, traditional Southern style. This involves a ham hock and several hours of simmering with plenty of water.

- Green beans, traditional Southern style. This involves a smoked turkey neck and several hours of simmering with plenty of water. Are you getting all this?

- Spinach-rice. Because the turkey is smoked, it isn't stuffed, and every year Lawson pores over stuffing recipes and spends hours making it and nobody eats very much. His stuffing is good, but I don't think it's a stuffing-eating family. So we're going with rice and spinach this year.

- Macaroni and cheese, which I have noted in the past is the weirdest of the traditional Southern Thanksgiving foods. We will be using the absurd Macaroni and Cheese Supreme recipe of the illustrious David Wade, TV chef and object of my scholarly and acquisitional interest. I can't wait. The recipe includes 2 cups of sour cream. It will clog arteries from 8 yards away.

- Cranberry sauce. I adore the extremely tart raw cranberry-orange relish we make every year with the hand-cranked meat grinder, but I'm going to try plain cooked cranberry sauce this year to see how it goes over.

- I may make some gingerbread.

So, all in all, it should be pretty low key. The only bad part is that we have to procure all our groceries tonight, along with the rest of the city.

Turkey

Thanksgiving turkey probably involves more advice, worry, clucking, and carrying on than any other meal in our culture. It's not that hard to roast a turkey! An added plus is that the Thanksgiving feast is so excessive that you don't have to cook for several days after.

My very simplest and best method for turkey is to brine lightly for 2 or 3 hours (soak in a solution of cold water with 1/4 cup of salt*); drain turkey and then rub all over with a mixture of olive oil, paprika, and salt. Stuff if desired. Place breast-side-up in a turkey roaster or baking pan. Pour 1 cup white wine or vermouth around it, and then bake at 325 or 350 for whatever the label says. I usually have a 12-pound turkey, stuffed, and it takes about 3 1/2 hours. It's not done until the dark thigh meat is done. Usually I cover the turkey for the first half, but it depends on the pan available, the oven, the company, etc.

Stuffing

12 cups dry bread crumbs (don't buy seasoned bread crumbs. Save old bread in the freezer for the month leading up to Thanksgiving and break it up in the food processor).

1 onion, chopped
1/4 cup butter

Cook the onion in the butter in large Dutch oven. Add bread crumbs and cook a little to toast lightly. Then add:

2 teaspoons dried sage
A little each of thyme, rosemary, and marjoram
A small handful of finely chopped parsley
Salt and pepper
Chicken or turkey broth to taste--our family likes very dry stuffing, so we just add a half cup or so. It will get wetter if it's cooked inside the turkey.

It's important not to overseason at this point. The flavors will develop as the turkey juices soak in.

You can also cook the stuffing in a casserole (30 to 45 minutes in medium oven), in which case you can be freer with the amounts of seasonings and broth. I usually put some inside the turkey cavity and the rest in a casserole.

Gravy

It's good to boil the turkey neck, onion skins, and any other spare parts for a couple of hours ahead of time to make broth. You can use it in both the stuffing and the gravy.

Once the turkey is done, remove it to a platter and let rest a little before carving, while you make the gravy. Assess your roasting pan: is there still some fat and liquid in there? If there's a lot, pour it off into a blender, add about a third or half that amount in flour, and blend. Put back in roasting pan and cook the paste (roux) until it's not raw anymore. You can make it as dark as you want the gravy to be. Then gradually add the broth, stirring constantly, until you have gravy. You could use about 5 cups of broth per cup of flour, I suppose, though I never really measure. Boil gently and stir. Season with salt and pepper. If it's too thin, boil more to concentrate. If it's way too bland, add some chicken bouillon granules. If it tastes "flat," add just a teaspoon of balsamic vinegar.

If your roasting pan has baked dry, you can put in a quart of water and boil it up to get the flavorful broth out of there. Pour off, make a roux using 1/2 cup butter and 1/2 cup flour, and use some of the broth you just created to make gravy.

Whenever you get gravy that's not as smooth as you like, puree it in the blender. No one has to know.

*Brining is easily accomplished in an ice chest. Throw in some ice cubes to keep everything cold. And--here's a great thing I discovered once when the turkey got done a whole hour ahead of everything else: preheat the ice chest with hot water, then drain. Put the cooked turkey in and it will stay very hot for a long time while everything finishes cooking.