Thanksgiving

You certainly don’t need me to tell you that the Big Food Holiday is next week. Everywhere you turn you see tips, tricks and ideas for Thanksgiving so you’ll understand me when I say that I’m going to join the chorus!

What are your plans? I’m giddy just thinking about our week: my parents fly in Monday, my sister joins us Tuesday, and we’ll all be celebrating a giant Thanksgiving meal here at our home. Adam will do the bird, I’ll be in charge of music, decor and the hosting duties, while we’ll be joined with our friends, neighbors and extended family.

We will toast a guest’s birthday, share what we’re thankful for, and wish my parents a 50th wedding anniversary all at the same time! While the exact anniversary isn’t until the end of December, I’d be a fool to not take the time to wish my loving folks the best of celebrations a bit early. When you make it to 50 Years you almost deserve to have those around you toast you many times over!

In a recent headline in the "Dining" section of the New York Times, the following question was posed: at Thanksgiving is it all about the turkey or the side dishes?

For me, hands down it has always been about the sides.   Never a fan of the tryptophan laden bird, I spend most of fall dreaming of the day in which gorging on cornbread dressing, broccoli casserole (made with Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup), and sweet potato casserole loaded with pecans and brown sugar is encouraged.   But the side dish I love the very most, the one that is made only at this special time of year, is pumpkin bread.

Whether served hot out of the oven with butter while the top is nice and crunchy; or the next day cold with a dollop of cream cheese...homemade pumpkin bread rocks! 

Especially the recipe for this tasty treat that has been knocking around my family for years now.  It's, by far, the absolute hands down best there is.   But enough of the hyperbole, here's the recipe for you to try, guaranteed to make this Thanksgiving a memorable one.

No Thanksgiving dinner table is complete without cranberry sauce. Cranberries and turkeys are both native to North America, so it's fitting that they have come to represent the holidays not to mention the wonderful pairing they make. Many of us have become accustomed to the cranberry sauce that slides out of a can. But it's really not that elegant. Cranberry sauce, compote, or chutney made from scratch is so much more special. For many years now I've been making one or the other. When guests who have only ever eaten canned sauce try my compote, they swear never to back to canned again. Fresh cranberries can be found everywhere in supermarkets this time of year. Combine them with other fruits and spices to create a very flavored sauce that everyone is sure to enjoy.

Cranberry compote can be made with a variety of fresh or dried fruits, which help to balance the tart flavor of the cranberries. I've tried all combinations: apples, pears, grapes, dates, and raisins. But the most unique combination I've created is with quince, a pear-like fruit originating from Asia. Like a cross between an apple and a pear with a light yellow-green skin, the quince is an immensely fragrant and flavorful fruit. Mostly quinces are a bit too astringent to eat raw and instead are used in cooking, baking, and jam-making. Quince can be found individually packaged in supermarkets during the fall and winter seasons. They are definitely worth picking up for this fall-fruit compote.

In November of 1980, I was the director of Juvenile Advocates, a legal advocacy program for incarcerated teens located in Morgantown, West Virginia. My job consisted of monitoring the treatment of juveniles who were locked up in county jails, detention centers and what were known then, as reform schools. Perhaps the most interesting part of the job was that about every two weeks I would drive the roller-coaster roads of the state to interview the kids locked up in the various institutions from the West Virginia Industrial School for Boys in Pruntytown to the West Virginia Industrial School for Girls in Salem and the Leckie Youth Center, located way down in the coalfields of McDowell County.

The names “Industrial School” and “Reform School” were vestiges of the early 20th century reform movement. Prior to that age of enlightenment, teenagers who broke the law were treated identical to adults. They were tried in criminal courts, locked up in state prisons along side adult inmates and even hung from the gallows. With the advent of the progressive movement, delinquency came to be thought of more as a social problem having its roots in poverty, discrimination and family disintegration. I could quote the great turn-of-the century social reformer Jane Adams, but I think the Jets provide the most eloquent explanation: “Dear Kindly Sgt. Krupke, you gotta understand, it’s just our upbringing upke that gets us out of hand, our mothers all are junkies, our fathers are all drunks, golly Moses naturally we’re punks.” Rather than punish delinquents in prisons, the thinking went, they should be sent to schools to be ‘reformed,’ made more ‘industrious.’