Archives for posts with tag: Thanksgiving food

Dear Madge (a Letter to My Deceased Mother)

November 30, 2025 //
4

Dear Madge,

My Thanksgiving dinner was two days late this year. I got a virus a week before Thanksgiving and was not well enough to shop and do food prep. My neighbor Eileen, who lives just around the corner, suggested that she could take me to Grocery Outlet on Wednesday morning and we could have dinner on Saturday, so that’s what we did.

Prices have gone up. The “free” turkey that you get with purchases required $125.00 of spending at Grocery Outlet and $150.00 at Safeway. And some things on my list were not on the shelves at all — maple syrup, for instance.

Friday morning I was standing in the kitchen, noticing how well the fast burner on my stove browned onions. I knew you would be pleased. I actually had to turn off the heat for awhile while I chopped celery and grated carrots.

I learned a new trick for roasting chestnuts: after you cut the cross in the shell, you soak them in water for an hour before roasting them. Oh. You and I didn’t know that. It worked like a charm.

What I really miss, Mom, is your kitchen: the zinc-lined bread drawer, the bread boards, the double ovens, the cooler, all of those big low cabinets and drawers. You and Stan the carpenter did a great job of designing a practical working space.

It’s all gone now. The people Bryan sold the house to took out many desirable things, converted closets to bathrooms, ruined the bay window in the breakfast room to make a deck (handy for the chilly Kensington summers). We were fortunate to live in that well-designed house for so long.

I was tired on Saturday morning because your cat Onyx jumped over my head at 2:45 AM. She came here to live with me this month. Surprisingly, at fifteen and a half she still goes up and down the stairs — I feed her in my bedroom, but she likes to supervise the opening of the can, which happens in the kitchen. When she woke me, I realized that I was hot and that the hallway outside my door was hot.

I had tried out the heat in the kitchen and adjoining dining room for the first time on Friday, anticipating dinner guests who would expect me to heat my house. I knew I had turned the heat off, but it was clear that it had been blasting away. Basically, the control knob malfunctioned: it turned, but it didn’t make contact with the mechanism that controls the temperature. I wrenched it off again, hoping that I had been successful (The vent was so hot that I couldn’t tell if it was still on).

I went back to bed after 3:00 AM, but could not get back to sleep. I forced myself down to the kitchen at 8:15 AM where it was still warm enough to go barefoot. Usually it is about 45 degrees in there this time of year, good for rolling out pastry.

Then I just worked: I stuffed the turkey and put it in the oven, pulled the neck out and started a stock pot with vegetable scraps. I made Grandma’s roll dough and your pie crust, pumpkin pie filling, cranberries. I trimmed and poked yams. I trimmed Brussels sprouts and cut crosses in the bottom.

My neighbor Eileen arrived when I had reached the point of utter exhaustion and was functioning on determination and willpower. She had a workman in tow (Her husband begged off because he is currently subject to coughing fits). Dave the workman brought the glass top from the old breakfast room table up from the garage, unwrapped it, cleaned it up, and set it on its pedestal. I had dragged up the pedestal and chairs on Thursday.

I don’t love it in my dining room — it’s too big for the space, especially the chairs — but I had to have a table in place for holiday entertaining so it will stay there at least until January 6th. Kelly, my friend and former landlady, is coming for pie and coffee in the next few days and she will appreciate having a chair at a table. I eat in my bedroom and on the front porch a lot.

Anyway, the food was delicious — all the things we usually made, except salad: working alone I can’t make a salad on Thanksgiving Day. I had thought to make a kale salad with lemon-tahini dressing because it improves as it sits, but I didn’t have the energy to make it on Friday, or the time to make it on Saturday. I asked Eileen to carve the turkey and to mash and season the potatoes because I was decanting dressing, making gravy, shaping rolls. I had her make after dinner coffee, too, while I whipped the cream.

Thank you for teaching me to cook this good, basic Midwestern food. I still enjoy cooking it and eating it and sharing it with others. Eileen pitched in to do a lot of the clean-up — she’s much more careful about wrapping food than I am. I sent her home with food for her husband, packed into my cake pans and then I had a hot soaking bath.

Onyx is enjoying a small dish of turkey scraps every day. She would like a bigger dish of them, or perhaps for me to serve them more frequently, but i don’t want her to develop digestive problems. She is much more vocal than she used to be: she runs through her repertory of yowls and howls and complaints every morning when she wants to be served breakfast earlier than I wish to get up, but she’s basically a good kitty and has largely adapted to life in this house. She hides in the bedroom closet if she hears a stranger on the stairs. She still roly-polys occasionally and I sing her little Onyx songs (“If i Were an Onyx,” “Rock-a-bye, Onyx,” and “Roly Poly, Onyx little cat girl”). She is definitely a survivor cat.

I don’t know what else to say. I just wanted you to know I was thinking of you and all of those holiday dinners we made together and thinking of your mother’s eagle eye when I was peeling and de-eying potatoes. Today I enjoyed a breakfast of pie, coffee and rolls and started listening to Christmas music. My house has wide window sills so I will scavenge greenery and put up birds and ornaments.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Love,

Sharyn

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Categories grocery shopping, home cooking, seasonal recipes

November Transformation: A Family Tradition, a Healing Hand and a New Opportunity

November 29, 2013 //
26

Painting shows ingredients for turkey-apple stew, plus a border collie.

Turkey-Apple Stew. 12″ x 12″ gouache and watercolor pencil. Sharyn Dimmick

Thanksgiving Day found me with my family in the house where I grew up, preparing traditional Thanksgiving dishes with my mother. At eighty-three Mom still does the heavy lifting, so to speak: she makes the dressing, stuffs it into the turkey. She makes her never-fail pie crust, which we fill with pumpkin, eggs, evaporated milk, brown and white sugars and spices and with sliced Pippin apples (The Gravensteins are long gone by Thanksgiving Day). I make rolls from my Grandmother’s recipe, only pausing to sneak a half cup of healthy whole wheat flour into the dough. Wednesday afternoon we peel potatoes and snap the ends off fresh green beans from the Bay Fair Farmers’ Market and boil and peel chestnuts for the dressing, cook whole cranberries with a little sugar and water. Thursday afternoon I make salad dressing and whip cream while Mom prepares a simple brown gravy from pan drippings, flour and water. We roast yams in the oven after the pies come out, cook the green beans in the microwave and the potatoes on the stove. I scoop the dressing from the bird. Bryan carves the turkey and lays slices on a platter.

Original watercolor painting shows ingredients for apple pie

Gravenstein Apple Pie. 8″ x 8″ gouache and watercolor pencil. Sharyn Dimmick.

At two o’clock we sit down to a bountiful table, the three remaining Dimmicks and our guests Johnny Harper and Art Peterson, who will play music in the living room after they have eaten their fill. This year I am struck by how long this has been our family tradition, how many years Mom and I have made this meal together, dividing our tasks and cooperating to get the food on the table in a timely fashion. We do have skirmishes: I am a careful baker, sifting the flour into a cup on a flat surface, heaping it high and leveling it off with my hand, but I find that I cannot sift easily with my recovering wrist. When I ask Mom to sift, she holds the cup in the air, occasionally shaking it to settle the contents, and hands me cups that I don’t think are full enough to level. We laugh about this later, after I have told her how much I like making this meal with her every year. We are the last two generations of our family and we do not know how much longer we will get to do this together. I enjoy the simplicity of a day spent preparing a feast and the routines we have developed.

The day after the holiday finds me with many fall tasks undone, due to a thirteen-week hiatus with a compromised right hand. My winter sweaters need hand-washing. It is time to start making cookies for Christmas and for an early Chanukah party. Add to my schedule three hours of hand and wrist exercises per day and I wonder, like many of you, how I will ever get everything done. The only answers I can come up with are to keep it simple and to just do the next task, to jettison things that seem too much for this year, as I work to transform my injured hand and wrist to new strength and health.

At the same time as I celebrate old family traditions, a new opportunity has arrived: my friends Maia Duerr of Liberated Life Project and Lauren Ayer of Quilts of Change have put together a Virtual Holiday Faire for 2013, where you can purchase my Paris CD and two original watercolor paintings, plus notecards, quilted bags, coaching services and other offerings. Please visit the Faire to have a look for yourself. Your purchase will help support independent artists and consultants.

Last, but not least, Susan of Susan Eats London, kindly sent me a care package to raise my spirits: she went to her favorite bulk bins and picked out aleppo pepper, dukkah, farro, Puy lentils and Nigella seeds, none of which I have ever used, plus blue cornmeal, fresh fig jam and three kinds of chocolate! I shall be having some cooking adventures in the future. If any of you want to provide suggestions or links for using these ingredients, the Comments field is open. I am thankful for all who enjoy reading The Kale Chronicles and grateful that my hand will allow me to type a blog post for you.

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Categories baking, pie, Uncategorized

Pear Clafouti with Brown Butter, Dried Cranberries, Fresh Ginger and Lemon

September 5, 2012 //
29

I still have a lot of pears in the house from my friend Margit’s tree, sitting in a brown bag in the back of the refrigerator so that they will stay as green as possible for as long as possible: my mother only eats pears when they crunch — I’ll eat them slightly softer than that, but I do not enjoy pears that have turned yellow (It’s that mushy texture).

Yesterday I pulled out the pears and found about five yellow ones, two large and three small. I had volunteered to make a dessert last evening — my mother has a sweet tooth and is eating soft foods until her current round of dental work is over. Plus, I had done something that made her uncomfortable and needed to work my way back into her good graces.

Original watercolor painting shows pear clafouti, dried cranberries, pears.

Pear Clafouti with Cranberries. 6″ x 6″ watercolor pencil on paper. Sharyn Dimmick.

What to make? I could roll out pie crust and make another pear tart tatin. But Johnny once said he wanted to elope with that when I served it at Ballad group, so it would be better to make that when he is around to enjoy it. Carly Sullivan had posted a recipe for clafouti that I had saved. I took a look at it again, and then adapted it for ingredients we had. Basically, I used white sugar instead of honey, milk and half and half instead of buttermilk, omitted the vanilla and added dried cranberries to the fruit layer, browned the butter and cooked the pears in it, throwing the sugar on top to caramelize, cooking it down until the mixture was fairly dry, giving the pears time to absorb butter, sugar, lemon, ginger and cranberry flavors. The cranberries made it pretty, too.

To make the clafouti I just made:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Select 2 large yellow pears (or 3 smaller ones). Core and slice them thinly, but do not peel them: the skins help hold the pear slices together.

Melt 2 Tbsp butter over medium heat in a skillet, allowing the butter to brown, but not burn, before adding the sliced pears.

Sprinkle about 1/4 cup sugar over the top and jerk the skillet a few times so that the sugar gets distributed among the pears.

Allow mixture to cook down until the pears have released their liquid and the liquids have reduced to a thin caramel.

Turn off heat.

Add the juice of half a lemon, a generous grating of fresh ginger (use your microplane and grate directly over the fruit), a small handful of dried cranberries.

Pour the fruit mixture into a tart pan or pie plate.

Now make the batter:

Crack 3 eggs and whisk them.

Add 1/3 cup granulated sugar and whisk again.

Whisk in 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour

Add 1/4 cup half and half and 3/4 cup milk*

Add vanilla extract (I poured it into the cap from the vanilla bottle and used about half a capful).

Whisk until just blended.

Pour batter over prepared fruit in pan.

Bake for thirty-five minutes. Serve warm or cold, cut in pie-like wedges.

* Our standard milk is 1%. If you have whole milk, like Celi, just use a cup of whole milk — I added the half and half to make the milk richer, but you can make it with any kind of milk you have, including soy milk, nut milk or coconut milk.

Food Notes: This made a easy, delicious dessert, creamy and custardy with crisp, buttery edges. Cooking the fruit first on the stove meant no watery flavors. This would make an excellent Thanksgiving dessert if you are not utter traditionalists like we are, having to have pumpkin pie with whipping cream, made from the recipe on the Libby’s can, slightly modified. (We also make fruit pie of some description, cherry or apple or blueberry or mixed berry, depending on what is around).

The Lauren Project: Lauren is back in Santa Fe, still cooking up your recipes. Please be patient: we will announce the prize winners by the end of this month.

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Categories desserts, fruit, seasonal recipes

Turkey-Apple Stew: Leftovers We Love

November 23, 2011 //
30

Painting shows ingredients for turkey-apple stew, plus a border collie.

Turkey-Apple Stew. 12″ x 12″ gouache and watercolor pencil. Sharyn Dimmick

The day after Thanksgiving we are happy campers: we camp in our house. We have leftover rolls. We have leftover pie. We have leftover roast turkey, cranberry sauce and a few extra baked yams. Sometimes we have mashed potatoes and brown turkey gravy. When we get hungry, we grab a roll, heat up a slice of pie, filch some sliced  turkey off the platter. But when we get tired of grazing, sometime in the next day or two I make turkey-apple stew, employing leftover turkey, gravy and stock, with the additions of carrots, apple cider and fresh apples. I have to keep an eye on the gravy supply and make sure I make the stew before my brother feeds the gravy to Ozzy, the border collie. We make a rich, dark brown gravy from the drippings in the roasting pan, flour and water, and Ozzy loves to come for Thanksgiving.

What I use to make the stew is mostly dark meat. I strip it from the thighs and drumsticks, throwing the bones and sinews into the stock we started Thanksgiving day with the giblets, odd pieces of celery, any unwanted skin. Eventually, we will strip the entire carcass and throw it in our biggest pot for stock. We will probably make turkey and noodles with that, but stew comes first in the post-Thanksgiving rotation.

I begin by slicing apples and cutting carrots into batons. I use four apples and three carrots, usually, but you can adapt this to your own tastes. I don’t peel the apples. Because my Mom does not like eating pieces of onion, I will cook a small, peeled onion whole in the stew and remove it before serving. If you like pieces of onion, go ahead and add a cut -up onion or two to your stew.

Saute 3 carrots, cut into batons and

4 sliced apples (and optional onions) in a few Tbsp of olive oil and butter.

Sprinkle vegetables with dried thyme (stripped from five or six stalks)

When vegetables begin to brown,

Add some turkey stock and 1 cup or so of apple cider (I saute the vegetables in a standard skillet and add stock and cider until it is full). If you want it more savory, use more stock and less cider. For a sweeter stew, reverse the ratio.

While vegetables simmer, strip your turkey and cut it into pieces you can put in your mouth.

Put turkey pieces in your pot of leftover gravy (If you don’t have leftover gravy, you’re screwed as far as this recipe goes unless you can scrounge up some brown drippings and make some more. In a pinch, you can thicken stock  with flour, but it will be a pale imitation of the real thing).

Heat the turkey in the gravy, as you would for hot turkey sandwiches. When vegetables are tender, add vegetables to turkey and gravy. Taste and season. I like to add Tabasco at this point — just a little. You might prefer salt and pepper. Nutmeg is a nice addition, too, and I can imagine that ginger might be good. The original recipe (published years ago in the San Francisco Chronicle’s magazine) calls for adding cream. Sometimes I throw in just a splash of half and half to round it out, but it is not strictly necessary.

I have served this plain in a bowl to eat with leftover rolls. I have served it over rice. I have served it over soft polenta. You could even eat it over mashed potatoes.

Food notes: You can, of course, make this stew with white meat if that floats your boat. For goodness’ sake, please don’t make it with cream gravy — even gravy mix is better than that. In our house when the gravy supply is low, we extend it with brown fluids: coffee has been used, or Kitchen Bouquet, or meat drippings from some other meal.

You can gussy this up by adding cream or half and half to your taste. If I have brandy, cognac, applejack or hard cider I’ll toss a jigger in with the apple cider and stock. If your sauce is thinner than you like, you can make a quick roux of flour and butter to thicken it — we usually reduce our gravy to save it so mine doesn’t need any additional thickening. If you have parsley on hand, chop some finely for a beautiful and flavorful garnish. If you want to be the next Martha Stewart, carve some crab apples into fancy faces, roast them and garnish with that. Don’t tell Martha I said that.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! See you next week.

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Categories stews, Uncategorized