Cranberry Port Sauce

My aunt has always made the cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving.  Ever since I was three she has made a reduced sugar version because my brother had recently been diagnosed with insulin dependent diabetes.  Her cranberry sauce is still sweet but it retains some of the tartness of the cranberries.  When you eat it paired with turkey you understand why cranberry sauce traditionally accompanies turkey, the bright tartness really balances the flavor of the meat.

I have tried on several occasions to recreate her recipe.  The first time she gave me a very general list of what was in it.  The sauce I made that time was not sweet or tart enough.  Last year I made the cranberry sauce with her, watching carefully as she pulled out her old newspaper clipping and adjusted the recipe to our tastes.  I tried again to recreate her version, although I did not have the original recipe as a guide.  In the end I think I did not have the right type of citrus, or I was just too heavy handed with it.  Whatever the reason, my latest attempt was too orangey and not balanced.

So I went a different route, finally trying a recipe a friend had mentioned years ago.  I lowered the sugar, replacing it with golden raisins, a trick I picked up from making cranberry sauce with my aunt.  The finished sauce is complex, tart enough to balance the turkey, but after a day or so sweet enough that I loved it spread on a crepe.  If you make it now you can freeze it until Thanksgiving.  Just pull it out to defrost one to two days before the big day.

Cranberry Port Sauce

adapted from Gourmet

This sauce can be made weeks or months ahead of time and frozen until 1 to 2 days before serving.   When it is first cooked it will still be very tart, as it sits the flavors blend and the raisins impart more sweetness to the sauce.  Do not add more sugar until it has rested for several days.  I have made it with lemon and also with tangerines, clementines and tangelos would also be good.

12 ounces cranberries, rinsed and picked over

3/4 cups brown sugar

3/4 cups golden raisins

1 cup Port (Choose Tawny or Ruby, either is fine)

1 tsp freshly grated lemon or tangerine zest (don't worry if you have slightly less)

2 Tbsp fresh lemon or tangerine juice (don't worry if you have slightly less)

1 cup water

Combine all the ingredients in a medium pan and simmer until the berries have all burst and the mixture has gelled.  Allow to cool before placing in a container in the refrigerator, or freezer for longer term storage.  Alternatively you can can it.  Follow the canning directions here.

Tuscan Cannellini Beans with Sage and Onions

With the end of Halloween I can begin obsessively planning Thanksgiving dinner.  Although I must confess, I started planning the menu for Thanksgiving long before October 31st.  Even before I became excited about costumes by realizing Lewis and I could join our chimney sweep and chimney as Mary Poppins and her umbrella, I was testing recipes for the end of Novemebr.  This is the first year Thanksgiving will be in Vermont, moving north from New York City.  With this change of state I decided it is time to change the menu as well to one that is local and seasonal with a protein for my vegetarian sister-in-law.  So this year there will be no ratatouille or string beans on the table.  Instead I will be serving Savoy Cabbage Gratin made with St Andre cheese, a vegetable dish I have not yet settled on, and these savory, sensuous, cannellini beans.

I make cannellini beans with escarole and my boys always love it, however they only tolerate the escarole, eating just a token amount. The part they love and happily devour is the beans.  This dish is more layered with flavor then the beans alone from beans and escarole, rich and full of flavor.  Cooking the sage in the oil before adding the beans makes the sage richer and softer and its flavor more nuanced in the finished dish.  This will be served here often, not just for Thanksgiving.

From Scratch Cannellini Beans (Think of this as a blank canvas for many meals)

I always soak my beans because I prefer to spend less time waiting for them to cook with the burner on.  If you forget to soak them or just prefer not to it will take longer to cook your beans but they will still cook.  If not soaking your beans start the cooking with 2 minutes of a hard boil before turning down to a simmer.

3 cups dried cannellini beans, rinsed and picked over
Water for pre soaking plus 6 cups water for cooking
1 fresh bay laurel leaf (if unavailable use dried)
2 tsp kosher salt (If you do not cook the beans with salt they can be salted later but they will never be seasoned all the way through)

Put the rinsed beans in a large pot and cover with 9 cups water.  Bring the pot to the boil and boil hard for 2 minutes.  Turn the heat off under the beans and cover the pot.  Leave out at room temperature for 2 or more hours.  I often soak my beans after boiling for longer with no ill effects.  Alternatively you can soak the beans at room temperature in cold water for 6 to 8 hours before cooking.

 After soaking drain and rinse the beans and place back in the stock pot.  Cover with 6 cups of water (You will need more water if you never soaked them) and add the bay laurel leaf and salt.  Bring to the boil over high heat, lower to a simmer and cooked partially covered until tender.  My beans cooked in around 45 minutes to an hour.  If you did not soak your beans first expect them to take longer to cook, also if your beans are not fresh they will take longer to cook.

Tuscan Beans with Garlic and Sage
Adapted from Rose Elliot's New Complete Vegetarian

3 small to medium onions chopped (or 1 large and 1 small)
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
4 garlic cloves, chopped fine
1 1/2 to 2 Tbsp fresh sage chopped fine
1 recipe From Scratch Cannellini beans with liquid or 6 14 oz cans cannellini beans
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
lemon for serving

Saute the onions in the olive oil over medium heat until translucent, add the garlic and chopped sage and cook until both the sage and garlic are fragrant, a few minutes.  Add the beans and their liquid and stir well before covering and cooking over a very slow simmer for with the lid on for about an hour.  f you are pressed for time you can cook the beans for less time but the flavor will not be as complex.

Season the dish with Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste before serving.  Delicious when first made but even better after the flavors have mellowed in the fridge overnight in the fridge.  We enjoyed it hot, warm and cold (well, Sebastian did not like it cold).  My plan is to make it a day or two ahead of time and serve it at room temperature for Thanksgiving.

Pomegranate Cranberry Sauce

I am afraid I need to make this a hit and run post.  I really want to make sure you have this in time to squeeze it into your Thanksgiving plans.  My original plan was to post the recipe last week.  I was out of town at a conference and was imaging plenty of free time in the evenings to write about it.  Unfortunately both the free time and the reliable internet connection were missing.  However, I came away with multiple new vocabulary words about poverty and, along with 159 other Americorps Vistas, learned approaches to eliminate poverty.

This recipe is a direct result of the case of 12 adorable bottles of Pom Wonderful Pomegranate Juice that I received as a gift from the company. I have to admit I told them yes, I would love their offer of juice because I was thinking, "You like me.  You really like me."  It was only after I received their box of generosity that I realized I needed to make something exciting with it and post about it.  I have made many things we enjoyed eating with the juice, but none of them worthy of a post.  I thought about posting brisket braised in pomegranate juice, however it felt like cheating.  It is truly wonderful, although I feel the onion confit did not add enough to the dish, and leave it out every time I make it.  But I should be posting a dish that is completely my own instead of one I adapted by leaving something out.

The pomegranate cranberry sauce is my own invention.  It may have the same main ingredient as the ridged condiment you tip from a can, however you would never know.  This one has a balanced tartness
that is a delicious counterpart to Thanksgiving dinner.  Although we loved it with braised lamb shanks as well.  This recipe is even easier to make than the pumpkin pie with a no roll crust my children are making for Thanksgiving dinner.  Adding it to your responsibilities for the week should not be a stretch.  It can even be made far in advance and wait for your celebration in the back of the fridge (in case you are thinking of making it for Thanksgiving 2011).

Before the recipe, just one quick totally unrelated Julian story.  I have always allowed my children to go by the five second rule for food dropped on the floor at home.  With young children it often feels like not allowing that would mean they would starve.  The other day, after picking something up off the floor to eat it Julian looked at me and said, "Did you know there is a zero second rule at school?"  Oy, so grateful I have no idea which adult had to tell that to him.  Lastly check out Thermapen's tips for cooking a turkey to a safe temperature.  Maybe the best piece of information is the required time a turkey has to be at 155° is one minute for food safety.  So cook your turkey until it is dry if you prefer it that way, not to make sure it is safe to eat.

Pomegranate Cranberry Sauce
Feel free to play with the amount of sugar in this recipe to suit your tastes.  I prefer my cranberry sauce on the tart side.  You could also add walnuts, crystalized ginger, cinnamon, red wine or port to the sauce.  While I did make this to highlight the pomegranate juice, you could also use concentrated apple juice.  If you use apple juice it will not have the same complex tart/sweet flavor.

2 cups Pom Wonderful Pomegranate juice
1 bag/3 cups/12 oz's fresh or frozen unsweetened cranberries
2 apple cored, peeled and chopped fine
juice of 3 clementines (1 rind reserved)
1 clementine rind, from juiced clementine, chopped fine
1 cup golden raisins
1 cup brown sugar (or more to taste)

Cook pomegranate juice in a small saucepan until reduced by half.  To measure the reduction I marked a chopstick with a sharpie pen to show the depth of the pomegranate juice before heating.  The juice was then reduced enough when it was halfway to the mark. Although eyeballing it is also completely legitimate, as it does not need to be exact, you want to reduce it some so the sauce is not too liquidy.

Add the remaining ingredients to the pan and cook until the cranberries have begun to burst and it is thick.  This should only take a brief amount of time boiling.  Cool to room temperature before serving.  This can be canned if you wish, following the guidelines for canning jam.

A Thanksgiving Tradition

My families Thanksgiving is not a quiet, laid back affair,not even before I had children. I have often thought it would be fun to track the routes of the different conversations around the table. The political debates would pass the literary conversations on their way to someone about to tell a loud joke, often about someone at the table. The funny thing about the loud political debates is we all really agree, we just like to declare that loudly as if we have another person to convince.

We are quite the international bunch. My aunt fled her home in Nazi germany as a young child, I imported my husband from England, my cousin-in-law is from Israel and my sister-in-law is from India. This year however for the first time since Lewis and I began dating we are all sitting down to the table as American citizens. That does not mean however that all our traditional Thanksgiving dishes can be found on tables across the country. Like my family our meal contains quirks and idiosyncrasies all our own. The quirks of my family and the whole meal might be part of why it is my favorite holiday. Even before the September 11 Naturalization proceeding, when Lewis was sworn in as a citizen, it has been his favorite as well.

This is the first year I have taken on my families iconic Thanksgiving's ratatouille. I don't know the history of how it became a Thanksgiving tradition for us, however it really blends beautifully with the rest of the meal. As a suitable vegetarian main course it enables us to let our menu remain the same even though my brothers family are mostly vegetarians, except now we use vegetarian stock in the stuffing. Noah, my brother, calls himself, a vegetarian with out rules. For those who have never encountered that phrase before, it means he eats meat whenever he wants. His wife and my nieces are strict vegetarians, horrified at Noah's version of vegetarianism.

Ratatouille is one of those dishes that is more about technique then a prescription you must follow exactly. My aunts version is from a yellowed and ancient clipping from the New York Times, mine is far looser in form, a dish I make in the summer with the vegetables I have on hand. For me the requirements that allow me to call it ratatouille are eggplant, zucchini, garlic and tomatoes, the rest are just options and change with my mood. I prefer to make it with sweet peppers as well but I have been known to do without. The other vegetables I choose to add often have more to do with what I have in my fridge, and how much I was hoping to make. This summer I was trying to cobble together a vegetable for dinner from the bits and bobs in my vegetable drawers. I added chard stems midway through sautéing the onions and I was very happy with the outcome. This time I added finely diced parsnip, its sweetness will help with the lower quality of the peppers this time of year.

The beautiful thing about serving this at Thanksgiving is it tastes better if it is made at least the day before serving, because it gives the flavors a chance to blend and marry. Leftovers are never a problem because they are so versatile. Amongst my favorites is an omelette with sharp cheddar cheese and warm ratatouille. It also makes a fine filling for a pita, sauce for pizza or lasagna, sauce for fish...

When I make it I always cut up the eggplant ahead, place the peices in a colander with a sprinkling of kosher salt and allow to sit. This step makes the eggplant collapse slightly so it does not absorb oil into its air pockets like a sponge. In addition it draws out some of the vegetables moisture and with it the bitterness. Personally I love eggplant whether or not this step is included but Lewis does not, so I salt it. In the summer I often just salt it for the length of time it takes me to prep the other ingredients, however the eggplant I cook with in the summer is less bitter then its winter supermarket equivalent.

Ratatouille (to be used as a guide, no need to slavishly follow)

1 medium - large eggplant peeled in stripes so that some of the peel remains, cut into 1 inch cubes

1 large onion diced (1 cup)

Extra virgin olive oil as needed (I use a lot, olive oil is healthy and really makes this dish)

2 Tbsp garlic minced

3 medium zucchini (courgettes) sliced in half lengthwise and then sliced 1/4 - 1/2 inch thick

2 - 3 small red, yellow or orange peppers, or 1 large

4 cups tomatoes canned in own juice, or 1 large can (or when in season fresh tomatoes peeled and roughly chopped)

1/2 cup finely chopped fresh parsnip

1 medium fresh or dried bay leaf

1 tsp fresh thyme chopped

Kosher salt to taste plus 1 Tbsp for salting the eggplant

Freshly ground black pepper to taste

(other optional ingredients include: carrots, chard stems, herbs de provence, fresh basil, rosemary, fresh fennel)

Place the eggplant in a colander in the sink and sprinkle generously with kosher salt I used 1 Tbsp). Allow to drain for 1 hour or while you prep the other ingredients. When done the eggplant should have brown liquid on it and some should have drained away. (In the summer I almost never give them a whole hour). Rinse the eggplant thoroughly with water to wash off the salt and either pat dry in paper towels or a cloth towel or you can squeeze it out with your hands. Squeezing it will give you a firmer texture.

While the eggplant is being salted add extra virgin olive oil to a preheated saute pan and add the onions and a pinch of salt. Cook the onions, stirring occasionally, over a low flame until pale brown and caramelized. Add 1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil to a medium dutch oven (I believe mine was 5 quarts) and add the tomatoes, cook the tomatoes over medium heat while the onions are cooking. Once the onions are almost cooked add the garlic and saute for a minute before adding to the tomatoes along with the bay leaf and the fresh thyme. Heat the saute pan again and add more olive oil and saute the eggplant until browned. Add the eggplant to the tomatoes along with kosher salt and pepper to taste.

Continue to saute the vegetables in olive oil and then adding them to the tomatoes and other vegetables. If the ratatouille begins to get to dry add some water. Once all the vegetables are sauteed cook the ratatouille for a few minutes and then taste and adjust the seasoning. Either serve right away or refrigerate and reheat before serving.