Holiday Goodies

Thanksgiving may be my favorite holiday. Families gather. And as they surround the dining table they celebrate and give thanks for all blessings, including the bountiful meal before them.

When my mom was living, she prepared most of the Thanksgiving meal herself. Trying to please everyone, she’d make baseball-sized dumplings and sauerkraut for my German dad, lump-free mashed potatoes for the grandchildren, sweet potatoes with a crunchy topping of melted marshmallows for her daughter-in-law, stuffing for her son-in-law, and lentils for herself and me. My brother wasn’t hard to please. I think he ate everything. And, of course, there was always a huge turkey. I am not kidding when I say there was hardly room on the table for our dinner plates.

Not to be forgotten was the wild rice. In Minnesota, where wild rice is plentiful, most cooks have favorite ways to prepare this “gourmet grain.” It seems my mom could never come up with a recipe that lived up to her expectations. Too dry, too mushy, not enough flavor, too much sage or thyme…just never quite right. Her wild rice challenges may have been due to the fact she had been transplanted in Minnesota from Indiana, where she had never even heard of this aquatic grass seed, the only grain native to the North American continent.

All I want for Christmas is my caviar pie. Which is a jolly good thing, since it's the only dish I take joy in creating.

Born without the cooking gene, my talent was always for producing and managing parties, until Brent Power, my best friend from grade school served up a delectable dip Christmas Eve 1982 at my wedding shower and I was hooked. I actually broke down, copied the recipe (my first ASK ever) and have been serving it and bringing it as my pot luck contribution ever since to ooh's and ahh's.

Another classic Christmas cookie - Shortbread is a traditional Scottish dessert that consists of three basic ingredients: flour, sugar, and butter. According to Wikpedia, this cookie resulted from medieval biscuit bread, which was a twice baked, enriched bread roll dusted with sugar and spices and hardened into a soft and sweetened biscuit called a Rusk.

Eventually, yeast from the original Rusk recipe was replaced by butter, which was becoming more of a staple in the British Isles. Despite the fact that shortbread was prepared during much of the 12th century, the refinement of shortbread was actually accredited to Mary, Queen of Scots, in the 16th century.

The name of one of the most famous and most traditional forms of shortbread, petticoat tails, were named by Queen Mary. This type of shortbread was baked, cut into triangular wedges as they are in this recipe from Cook’s Illustrated.

Every Christmas I used to cook a pecan pie from a recipe I found in one of Ann Landers holiday columns sometime in the sixties.  Since I was thinking of making it again this year, I was thrilled to learn that Dear Abby also had a pecan pie recipe.  Hoping to combine recipes to create my own distinctive version of the dessert, I got a copy of each. 

After studying them carefully, here are the only differences that I could find:  Ann tells us to use white corn syrup; Abby suggests using light corn syrup.  Although both women's recipes call for a cup of dark brown sugar, only Abby wants us to make sure the cup is firmly packed.  Ann tells us to use a pinch of salt and a dash of vanilla; Abby, clearly wanting to leave nothing to chance, recommends using 1/2 teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of vanilla.  Otherwise, the recipes are exactly the same.