Thanksgiving

In our house Thanksgiving is the one day a year my wife is in charge of the cooking.  Because I work at home, part of my day-time ritual is to shop for and cook our dinners.  But for Thanksgiving, I’m her sous chef.  She tells me the menu and I prep the mise en place, so everything is ready for her.

Besides corn bread stuffing with Italian sausages, dried apricots, and pecans, a 24-pound organic turkey with mushroom gravy, home made cranberry sauce, string beans sautéed with almonds, oven roasted Brussels sprouts, and an arrugula salad with persimmons, pomegranate seeds, and roasted hazelnuts, she makes garlic mashed potatoes. 

This past year I’ve been experimenting with sweet potatoes.  I made them for her to see what she thought. With a light dusting of cayenne, after you’ve enjoyed the sweetness of the sweet potato, your mouth is surprised with a hint of heat that drives you back for more.  She agreed that the yams are delicious: sweet, salty, savory, “meaty” (from the mushrooms”), and buttery from the butter.  For Thanksgiving they’ll be added to the menu.

This year, in our house, we're cooking our version of Suzanne Goin's succotash.  Of course, Suzanne Goin doesn't call it succotash; in her book Sunday Suppers at Luques, she calls it sweet corn, green cabbage and bacon.  We call it succotash because we throw in some lima beans and way more butter:

Cut 6 thick slices of bacon into small pieces and cook in a casserole until crispy.   Remove and drain.   Melt 1 stick of butter in the remaining bacon grease and add 1 sliced onion and some salt and pepper.   Saute for a few minutes, then add half a small green cabbage, sliced, and cook until wilted.   Add 2 packages of cooked frozen lima beans and 2 packages of frozen corn.   Cook about 5 minutes, stirring, till the corn is done.   You can do this in advance.   Reheat gently and add the bacon bits.   (Of course you might be able to get fresh corn, in which case feel free to overreach.) 

- Recipe courtesy of Nora Ephron

There are tons of pumpkin pie recipes, and in November all of the food shows and magazines are filled with both classic and innovative recipes. I think I’ve tried all of them – most started with canned pumpkin, and then the ingredients vary - some use heavy cream, others swear by evaporated milk, some are heavily spiced with cinnamon and cloves.

I love pumpkin pie, but have never found what I would call the BEST pumpkin pie until recently. I was watching an episode of America’s Test Kitchen (the leader in test perfected recipes) called “An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving”. The ingredients and the method were quite original and I couldn’t wait to try it.

There are a few extra steps, but well worth it. If you don’t want to make your own crust, you can use a Pillsbury Ready Made crust. Feel free to alter the amount of cinnamon (I used Penzey's Extra Fancy Vietnamese Cassia Cinnamon Click here for Penzey's), but the fresh ginger is key to the pie’s flavor.

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.’