Happy Thanksgiving

"Happy Thanksgiving.

Now eat your vegetables!"

Garden Stories

Gwynneth was surprised that the halucinogenic effects of Ambien had not been more urgently spelled out on the bottle.

Thanksgiving Favorite

Everyone has their favorite dish to eat on Thanksgiving. For lots of people it is the turkey, many others love the stuffing or the green bean casserole or the pumpkin pie. For me, my annual favorite dish is the cranberry sauce. I have, over the years, honed and tweaked my special recipe and volunteered to make the cranberry sauce at every Thanksgiving dinner I have attended for at least 10 years running.

I get so excited when the grocery stores stack up the bags of fresh cranberries. It is the dish that I make well ahead of time so that I can sneak spoonfuls from the fridge in the days leading up to the Big Feast. It is the spot of brilliant color on a plate of beige and white and brown and green. It is the zest and freshness that compliments all other holiday food and lets your mouth know that this really IS a celebration of taste. I have, of course, already made my batch of cranberry sauce this year. And I just had another bite on the sly while rooting through the fridge for something else. I can only hope there will be enough left for everyone else on Thursday!

Holiday Cranberry Sauce

1 bag fresh cranberries
2/3 cup sugar
1 cup fresh squeezed orange or tangerine juice
grated and finely chopped zest from 2 oranges
1/2 cup frozen blueberries
2 or 3 oranges, sectioned

Combine the juice, sugar, cranberries and zest in a saucepan and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Reduce to a simmer and cook for 5 or 6 minutes, until the cranberries have popped. Remove from the eat an stir in the frozen blueberries. Cool. Fold in the orange sections.

Note: I often double or triple this recipe if I am cooking for a large group.

High on Vegetables

It all comes down to this for me: vegetables are fantastic.

I am mesmerized by the colors, shapes, textures -- the incredible variety of palpable aliveness. While meat is dead food, vegetables -- the really good ones -- are still living and vital well past the moment that you bite into them. No one could invent something as simple and as complex as a watermelon radish, a baby carrot with it's green tassels waving, a bowl full of tiny lettuce leaves.

You know how sometimes you see an apple, or a pear in a store display and wonder if it's real? And you pick it up to see and it turns out to be a wooden apple or a plastic pear, compelling at first glance but nowhere near the real thing upon closer inspection. Well, take that magnetic appearance and then add the fact that vegetables are edible. Beautiful and edible and exactly unique and magically nourishing. Vegetables are a simple opportunity to experience the vast brilliance of nature and our direct visceral connection to it.

Granted, a trip to the grocery store can be a buzz kill for the farmer's market devotee, with generic vegetables standardized for weight, color and minimal flavor. However, there is still a variety and array of color and taste that cannot be rivaled in the cracker aisle, at the meat counter, or in the bags of frozen food. The lovely and compelling and alluring thing about vegetables is that we didn't have to do a thing to invent them. They simply are, fantastic. Stop a moment and really contemplate a carrot, or the complexity of a broccoli crown: truly a wonder of existence. Now take it home and eat it, life energy from the earth directly into you.