A Cooking Life

Notes on Thanksgiving

I cooked Thanksgiving here again this year, and had some great successes by doing a few things a little differently: I mostly boned the turkey and roasted it flat, fiddled with the creamed onions, and figured out how to bake a custard pie without a soggy bottom crust (and perfected a buttermilk pie while I was at it). I just wanted to write up some notes for posterity.

Chestnut Rum Jam

‘Jam’ is really something of a misnomer for this seductive purée. It may be perfectly delicious on toast – I wouldn't know. I prefer to treat it as a sort of luxe dessert ingredient (when I'm not eating eat straight from the jar). Plainly spooned over best vanilla ice cream, it shows just how exotic ‘simple’ can be. Blended into whipped cream, buttercream, or dense chocolate ganache, it becomes a decadent filling or frosting for crepes, tortes, and roulades. Hilaire Walden (my recipe is adapted from hers in Sensational Preserves) suggests layering it with whipped cream in parfait glasses. I'm of a mind to work it into a bavarian cream for a Christmas charlotte.

’Tis the season, of course, and chestnuts are in markets everywhere. Perfect timing, as this jam is a fine thing to have around for the holidays. It even cans well, and put up in fancy jars makes a lovely gift. The recipe follows, along with some useful tips for buying and peeling chestnuts.

Garden’s End

It's a melancholy thing, putting the garden to bed. Never mind the heartbreak of hacking back, uprooting, burning, and composting plants that were so lovingly nurtured. I can think of no more poignant herald of the long, cold months to come.

But gardeners are optimists by nature, and no sooner have I finished tearing down a season's effort than I've begun preparing and planning for another round. Maybe it's just a sophisticated form of denial.

Double Gingersnaps

When I was a kid, my favorite cookies were my Mother's gingersnaps – mahogany-colored with a good spanking of spice, they took some effort to bite into, they were so crisp. Her recipe came from a woman named Phyllis Dawes, the mother of a friend who was a good half-generation older than she. That would date the recipe to somewhere before the turn of the last century. Googling around, though, I find that the recipe is nearly identical to almost every gingersnap recipe out there, except for one critical difference: the quantity of flour. While the other ingredients are exactly the same, Phyllis's recipe calls for 3 cups of flour compared to only 2 cups in the other recipes. This, I believe, accounts for the dense crunch I so love. That, and giving them a proper baking.

Dish of My Dreams

Eight years ago on Labor Day I threw what was probably the most significant dinner party of my life. The universe had pointed out the guy I would spend the rest of my life with, but I was at a loss as to how to secure his attention. That night, I hosted a Mexican feast and invited the fellow in question along with a number of friends we happened to have in common. He was about to move into a house a mile up the road from me, and inviting him to dinner seemed like the neighborly thing to do. He stayed after everyone else had left, and we sat and talked long into the night. We've hardly been apart since – we were married 5 months later and live happily in the house a mile up the road.

When I mentioned last week that I'd invited guests for dinner over the weekend, my wise husband suggested that I cook Mexican.