Many people say this is their favorite time of year. The weather gets cooler, the trees change from greens to autumn hues, then winter bareness. It’s also the return of pumpkin spice; coffee, muffins, candles… pumpkin spice everything. And it’s the time to celebrate with our families around the dinner table, a feast of warm and savory seasonal foods.
There’s an ingredient that you can add to your menu that will add zip to your recipes, and I’m not talking about pumpkin spice. Cranberries can brighten every part of your holiday menu. Cranberries come in several forms; they’re readily available and easy to use.
A Berry Good Addition
You may already enjoy cranberry juice on a regular basis; it’s also a great ingredient for holiday cocktails. Dried cranberries are available year-round. They are a healthy snack, often found in the better-quality trail mixes They also make a great addition to a salad, especially with toasted nuts and blue cheese.
Fresh cranberries are too tart to be eaten on their own. Cooking them with something sweet like sugar or maple syrup helps balance the tartness. A homemade cranberry sauce can be a great addition to your Thanksgiving menu. Making it with fresh ginger and orange juice creates a condiment that goes well with turkey and stuffing but here’s a tip about homemade cranberry sauce that most people don’t realize: it’s even better on pumpkin pie. Topping your pie with whipped cream and homemade cranberry relish makes an often ho-hum dessert extra special.
Canned is Okay, Too
Store-bought canned cranberry jelly is usually served in a perfect cylinder with imprinted ribbed lines from the can still intact. There’s a very good chance you know someone who loves this stuff; my father-in-law certainly does. I make a blowout Thanksgiving feast with homemade everything. Even the cream of mushroom soup for the green bean casserole is homemade, but someone still sneaks in canned cranberry sauce for the family patriarch.
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Years ago, my wife, Janice, and I took in our three nephews while their mother recovered from a car accident. They’re in their 20s and early 30s now but all were under school age when we had them.
I told the 3-year-old to sit on the hassock so I could tie his shoes. “What’s that? My butt?” I realized that many of the common words that were used by our pre-Boomer parents were part of a different language.
When we visited my grandmother, she told us to hang our coats in the chifferobe and have a seat on the davenport. You scrubbed pans with a “chore boy” and canned foods were kept in the basement in the fruit bin, usually a room that was converted into a pantry that used to store coal.
We drank out of garden hoses, babies sat on their mom’s lap during car rides with no seat belts and we ran around with sparklers on the Fourth of July. If the weather was “close” (humid) you suffered through it because who had air conditioning? And that brings me to modern conveniences.
Say What?
I made the mistake of mentioning to a classroom of college kids that where I live, we aren’t allowed to hang clothes outside. “Why would you do that? Is your dryer broke?” No, they smell better!
Mistake number two: I mentioned that a lot of old houses had home incinerators in the basement. “Wait a minute! You burned trash in your house? You built a fire in your basement!?” No, it was a controlled fire in a container. The concept was foreign to them.
Then there was the party line. “You’d have a party on the phone? Why don’t you just invite them over?” This comes from a generation that has never actually dialed a phone or has heard a dial tone.
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