The First Thanksgiving - Sweet Potato Pie

"Our national holiday really stems from the feast held in the autumn of 1621 by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag to celebrate the colony's first successful harvest."

Forget everything you ever learned in school about the first Thanksgiving.  As any 20th century new bride can tell you, the first Thanksgiving is really all about that first big dinner you hosted and cooked for two dozen relatives, in an apartment barely big enough for you, your husband, and a small dog.

A very small dog.

Rob and I were married on October 20, 1974, and immediately moved into our own one-bedroom apartment in West Babylon, with a kitchen the size of a shoebox.  When we got back from our honeymoon, I promptly invited everybody for Thanksgiving dinner.  Back then, everybody was a lot of bodies.  All our closest relatives were alive and well and on speaking terms with each other.  The tablecloths my sweet mother-in-law had made for me were brand new and completely spotless. I knew how to cook scrambled eggs, meatloaf, and anything under a broiler - chicken, hamburger, lamb chops.  I could open a can of Campbell's tomato soup like nobody's business. I had an egg beater (non-electric), a gas stove, a cookbook (The Joy of Cooking) and a potato masher.  And I had a working telephone with which to call the help line, which was manned 24/7 by my grandmother (Mom) and my mother-in-law (Mom). This girl's on FIRE!

I had no knife skills - I did not even own a decent knife, and did not know I needed one - but I seemed to have an innate talent for following a recipe to successful results.  When I think back, this was a skill likely honed during my summers taking bacteriology in high school, applying what the teacher, Marvin Waks, referred to as "cookbook chemistry" when brewing up batches of tasty agar for the various bacterial colonies to feast upon. Oh yum, right?

Either the dinner was a huge success, or both sides of the family were being extremely kind.  I managed to make the stuffing according to my grandmother's directions.  I can't call it a recipe, because that implies fairly specific amounts of each ingredient, but it was close enough and the stuffing wasn't bad at all. Robert carved the turkey, which I remember being the size of a VW beetle, and best of all, we had my grandmother's sweet potato pie as the tastiest side dish ever.  Except I didn't make that one, she did.  And sent it along with my Pop, because she was home with walking pneumonia and had to miss my first Thanksgiving.  Everybody there went nuts for the "pie" and so I've been making it for almost every Thanksgiving since then, as well as for Christmas, Rosh Hashanah, New Year's Eve, and a couple of Tupperware parties.  If I try to change it at all, I am promptly chastised.  In the words of Joseph Stalin, "deviation is treason."

This Thanksgiving, November 27, is my grandmother's yahrzeit, the anniversary of her passing in 2000.  Thanks for the memories, Mom.  And most of all, thanks for the recipe.

Mom's Sweet Potato Pie

2 large cans of yams (or sweet potatoes), well drained

1 stick of butter, melted

1/2 cup brown sugar (light or dark)

1 large can crushed pineapple, well drained

Cornflake crumbs for the topping (Kellogg's is the only brand I know of)

Additional melted butter for the topping

In a large bowl, mash the drained yams with a hand masher.  Melt the butter in a small pan, and then blend the brown sugar into it.  Pour the butter-sugar mixture into the yams and mix well to combine.  Season with a little kosher salt, to taste.  Layer half of the mashed yam mixture into a baking dish.  Top this with all of the drained pineapple, and then the rest of the yams.  Cover the top with cornflake crumbs and drizzle over this some melted butter.  Bake at 350 degrees for one hour.  This serves at least eight as a side dish.

I like to make this in a 2 quart glass souffle dish, because the amount fits perfectly, and the dish is taller than your normal 2 quart casserole, and so it shows off the layers nicely.

Today, however, because we are a party of just 5, with a couple of really small eaters, I cut this down to fit into a smaller soufflé dish, about 1 1/2 liters, and also shortened the prep time by first beating the potatoes with an electric mixer, then adding the butter, cut up rather than melted, and the brown sugar, right into the bowl with the potatoes.  This presumes you are using a glass or otherwise microwave-safe bowl.  Microwave for about a minute to soften the butter, and finish beating the potatoes with the electric mixture until fairly smooth, and the butter and sugar are well-combined.  Layer the sweet potatoes and pineapple, cover with plastic wrap, and put into the refrigerator until 2 hours before you plan on serving.  Let the dish sit on the counter for about an hour, sprinkle on the cornflake crumbs, drizzle the additional melted butter, and bake in a preheated 350 oven for an hour.

For this size dish, I used two 29 oz. cans of sweet potatoes (Hanover brand), 6 tablespoons butter, 1/3 cup light brown sugar, and an 8 oz. can of crushed pineapple.

Have a happy, healthy, wonderful Thanksgiving.  Stay safe, drive carefully, and for Heaven's sake, carve the turkey BEFORE you get to the table.

When Childhood Flies

Today's ear worm is courtesy of Elton John and Bernie Taupin, circa 1970.  If you want to make me cry, just play this song.

I hope the day will be a lighter highway

For friends are found on every road

Can you ever think of any better way

For the lost and weary travellers to go

Making friends for the world to see

Let the people know you got what you need

With a friend at hand you will see the light

If your friends are there then everything's all right

It seems to me a crime that we should age

These fragile times should never slip us by

A time you never can or shall erase

As friends together watch their childhood fly

With all my finger-flapping about food, food shopping, cooking food, food strategies, food failures, and more of the same, I haven't had the chance to write about how absolutely lovely my weekend was, especially Friday night.  I got to meet up with some old friends, from a time long ago and far away.

(Forget the dude in the middle, he is totally irrelevant to this story.)  

Clockwise from the dude is Barbara, then Kathy, me and Lynn.  

We were babies - this was New Paltz, 1971.  

I was 18 years old and that is my real hair color.

Not sure if Mark wasn't in the picture because he was taking the picture, but that is highly likely.

Sandy and me, 1975.  Oh dear God, weren't we young???

Steve and me, 1972.  Still haven't been able to meet up in person 

but we managed to Skype a few times, and we play Words for Friends.

Talk about young! You can see that Vicki is wearing Dan's fraternity pin.

Does anyone even do that anymore?

We still have not been able to gather all of us together at the same time, but some of us have gotten together in various shortened permutations.

My grandmother told me time and again that the best friends you will ever have are the ones you make when you are young.  This was one of those few times I could not argue with her, because looking back across those 50 or so years that whooshed by much too fast,  I still have a number of friends from my teen years.  That is not to say that I have not made and kept close "new" friends but even my new friends are getting up toward the 20 year mark.

The majority of my "old" friends date back to my time at SUNY New Paltz.  Some, like Kathy, Mark, and Vicki have been constants, while others, like Barbara, Lynn, and Steve, were "found" through the miracle of the internet and Facebook.  

It is wonderful to meet up after 30 or 40 years to find that the bond of youth still exists.  So on Friday evening, we had a lovely, funny time, eating good food at the Ale House, drinking $2 margaritas, and enjoying each other's company, although we were nowhere near as raucous as we were last year when Mark, Sandy, Barbara and I got together, with a couple of patient spouses, at Toojays. We even managed to Skype Lynn into the party.  The waitstaff was delighted, as were Barbara and I, because getting New York-style deli is next to impossible in Central Florida, so we all got to share really good food with really good friends, a perfect combination.

I am thankful for my friends, old, new, and renewed.

Commercial Properties - Staten Island Peach Cobbler

Not sure how, but recently Brenda and I veered off into a short conversation about TV commercials, specifically the Bright House Network commercials with Jim the installer and football great Derrick Brooks.  I love the "bromance" between Derrick and Jim, and they always make me smile, especially when, at Derrick's insistence, they sit down to watch a DVR'ed episode of "Days of Our Life" ("can't a man watch his stories?")

I have no idea why, but I love watching commercials that, despite the endless repetitions, affect me each and every time they are shown.

The one that still stands out as my very favorite, hysteria-inducing commercial of all times had Steven Colbert stalking Mr. Goodwrench regarding tires.   The line "those poor cows, those poor rubber cows" can still set me off into a fit of laughter so loud and so prolonged that my pets seek shelter.  Another huge favorite were the GEICO cavemen commercials, but they're gone now.  I like Flo from Progressive and Lily from AT&T.  During basketball playoffs, I never tire of Chris Paul's State Farm commercials (Chris and his "twin" Cliff Paul, separated at birth).  Animal icons such as the GEICO Gekko and the AFLAC Duck are okay, but the California milk commercials feature cows that crack me up.  What is it with me and cows?  And I hate milk, too.  Oh, and Maxwell the GEICO pig - his original "whee whee WHEE!" commercials left me in a puddle.

The Wounded Warrior Project, St. Jude's, Shriners Children's Hospitals, and any commercial involving pets are likely to rip out a little piece of my heart, but the saddest commercial ever was televised only one time, during Super Bowl XXXVI in February 2002.  Google "Budweiser Respect" and follow any of the You Tube links to watch it.  (I tried, I really tried to fix the broken link with absolutely no success.  The good news is, I edited the whole darn post.)

I developed a real affection for those Sprint Framily Plan ads, featuring the Frobinson family in which the father is a hamster, the mother doesn't seem to notice that dad is a hamster, the daughter has little birds twittering around her head, and the middle son's college roommate, Gor-Don, wears black lipstick reminiscent of Tim Curry in Rocky Horror, and considers the hamster to be his dad as well.  Unfortunately, Sprint dumped the whole Framily Plan campaign after just a few short months, and broke up with the Frobinsons, leaving us all hamster-less (and if you think Andrew Dice Clay was not funny as the voice of the dad hamster, you've never watched any of the commercials).

I guess that makes me a victim of television, but I do exercise some discernment.  I cringe at any commercial by an attorney.  I am old-fashioned enough to believe that my profession does not need those ads or big, honking billboards, showing shiny, oversized attorney foreheads, on the side of the road.  Another pet peeve are those weight loss program commercials, featuring a lot of has-been celebrities, and those dreadful weight loss product commercials (although I think the FCC is already on their tails).

My Pop used to say that my grandmother was a victim of television because she might see a product on TV, and would buy it on her next trip to Waldbaums.  It actually didn't happen all that often - she never did get into Hamburger Helper - but occasionally she would rock our world with a brand new product like Rice-a-Roni, frozen vegetables, or liquid margarine.

There are other reasons that I have labeled myself a victim of television, as I explained in this post from the beginning of the blog, and that hasn't changed in the intervening years.  You know it's serious when I am standing in the middle of the living room, pointing at the screen excitedly while watching The Kitchen on Food Network, proclaiming, "see, see?  Geoffrey Zakarian doesn't believe in brining turkeys!"  Or calling Robert to watch how Bobby Flay adds honey to all his super spicy dishes, or how Michael Symon adds cornstarch to his flour when preparing a tempura batter.

I may have 1000 cookbooks, but all it takes is one episode of Giada De Laurentiis preparing shrimp scampi on couscous, and I'm jumping off the treadmill and running down to the computer to find and print out the recipe.  The inspiration I get from watching the different hosts is the kind of victimhood I can embrace.  So I won't be brining my turkey - I never do - but I will be spatchcocking it, which is nothing naughty.

The day has come that I finalized my plans for Thanksgiving dinner.  That means I now have a final menu, and based on that I am going to print out or photocopy each recipe.  Next comes the shopping list, and finally the cooking schedule.  If this sounds excessively obsessive, try preparing even a simple dinner without jotting down a specific plan.  You are going to get stressed, I promise you.  You won't have a chance to sit down and enjoy any part of the dinner with your guests.  You will swear to never ever ever try to cook Thanksgiving dinner again.

Speaking of your guests, there is nothing wrong in accepting their offers to bring a dessert or a side dish or anything else for that matter.  So this year, I took the Staten Island Peach Cobbler off my menu when my mother-in-law offered to supply dessert.  But since I promised my friend Barbara I would give her the recipe, here it is, totally out of season:

Several weeks ago, while coming home from the Atlanta suburbs, we carried through our plan to make our favorite stops along I-75.  This excluded our close encounter with the deer, but included Lane Southern Orchards, or as we always refer to it, The Peach Farm; Ellis Brothers Pecans, also known as The Nut Store; and Carroll's Sausage & Country Store at their Ashburn location.

There were no peaches at the peach farm. Quel disappointment!  But not unexpected, as I was pretty sure Georgia's peach season was over.  Instead, we were confronted by that scourge of autumn ...

Pumpkins, dozens of pumpkins, carelessly displayed and stodgily annoying.  How did someone look at a bunch of pumpkins and see a Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte?  Was there some illegal substance being ingested, or was the inventor having an unfortunate brain fever?

So instead, I picked up a jar of Lane's peach halves, thinking that for the first time I would try making the cobbler with something other than fresh peaches.  The peach halves are gorgeous, large, undamaged, and sweet. Although I am not making this for Thanksgiving this year, I expect it will pop up as a family dessert sometime in the next few weeks.  

6 large, firm, ripe peaches

1 cup flour

1/2 cup sugar

pinch of sugar

1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 stick butter

1 egg

1/3 cup whole milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Grease a 9 x 13 baking pan.

Wash the peaches and dry well.  Cut in half and remove the pits.  Sift together the flour, sugar, salt and baking powder.  Crumble in the butter with a fork.  Add the egg, milk, and vanilla.  Spread the batter thin in the baking pan.  Lay the peaches, cut side down, on top of the batter, 3 across and 4 down, and sprinkle with sugar.  Bake for 30 to 45 minutes.  The batter will puff up to encase about 2/3 of the peaches.  Let cool and cut into 12 squares to serve.  Cover and store in the refrigerator.  This is good at room temperature, or you can give it 30 seconds in the microwave, and then top it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

The aluminum tin pan queen strikes again, but for some reason I baked this peach cobbler, immediately right of the cream pie, in a glass pyrex dish.  Still came out good.

... and so it begins ...

For the next four days, I will be chipping away at my cooking list so that when Thanksgiving rolls around, I won't be spending the day according to that old military adage:

When in danger or in doubt

Run in circles, scream and shout

I am working the first three days of next week, and I have court hearings on two of those, so there is not going to be time to take a whole day off to cook, which is actually better for me, as standing on my feet for big blocks of time is less than optimal.

So today, before I go out to cruise Publix and BJs to soak up the holiday mood and to fill up my cart with holiday food, I will bake the cornbread I will be using for the oyster and sausage dressing.  Now is the time I make a small confession:  I use a box of Jiffy mix.  All I do is add some black pepper to the mix, but otherwise, I make the Jiffy according to the directions on the back of the box.

You can make your favorite recipe or buy cornbread at the local bakery, but keep in mind that not all cornbreads are created equal.   My favorite homemade cornbread is a sour cream cornbread, very rich with brown sugar and melted butter in the batter.  Delicious on its own, but too moist and too sweet for the dressing.

Remember this bread?  The Thanksgiving bread that I baked in the bread machine a few weeks ago?  Very useful for the oyster and sausage dressing.  Already seasoned, containing bits of onion, and baked up into a hearty texture that contrasts nicely with the cornbread.

I bake the cornbread in an 8 inch square pan, and when I cut it into 1/2 inch cubes, it yields about 5 cups.  You want about the same amount of the Thanksgiving bread also cut into 1/2 inch cubes.  Place the bread into two separate 9 x 13 pans.

Preheat the oven to about 350 degrees.  Put the pans of bread cubes in the oven to dry out.  This will not take more than a few minutes for the cornbread, so watch carefully.  The Thanksgiving bread will take a few minutes more.  When they're both done, and the cubes are cool, combine them into one pan, cover and hold at room temperature until ready to use.

Oyyyyyyy .... so I did my food shopping, and wore myself out.  There will be no further cooking today, folks.   Watching the remake of "Total Recall" and missing Arnold.  Wanting to unwind before Monday morning.

Got the Big Bird in the fridge, resting until Thursday morning when I will start by ripping out his spine and cracking his breastbone.

Got Grade B maple syrup, the real stuff, for the cranberry sauce, and the sweet potatoes and pineapple for the pie that isn't a pie.  Broccoli in the freezer, Brussel sprouts in the other fridge, tiny potatoes on the counter.  It's beginning to look a lot like Thanksgiving.

What, no ear worms? - Pumpkin Gooey Butter Cake

Must be because I am now officially in the Thanksgiving groove.   But before I even get to that I recently needed to prepare a dessert for our holiday luncheon.   That decision turned out to be really easy - pumpkin gooey butter cake.   Oh I considered brownies, and better than sex cake, and even pig pickin' cake.  But those ideas whooshed so fast through my brain there was barely a lingering scent of warm chocolate from the brownies.

Speaking of whooshing ideas, I have already changed the Thanksgiving dinner menu. I'm going with oyster stuffing. With two kinds of bread, some sausage, corn kernels, red bell pepper and some other stuff. Leeks instead of ordinary onions.  Stuffing should have interesting stuff in it and this one certainly will.  Fishy stuff, piggy stuff, veggie stuff, herby stuff and you get the idea  And I can prepare it in advance. Working with recipes that can be prepared in advance is the most important strategy for Thanksgiving dinner.

Back to the dessert - I once got verschicknert on pumpkin gooey butter cake. True story. This was Thanksgiving 2003, and for the first time since 2000, we were home for the holiday.  It was also almost 6 months since my gastric bypass surgery and I was 80 or 90 pounds down.  Those six months had been full of new eating adventures - discovering what I could and couldn't eat; rediscovering coffee; learning that dumping is not just something that happens at Jersey landfills.  I am not going to lie, there were rough times.  I do not recommend this surgery to anyone, because not everyone is mentally or physically ready for it.  Some people get terribly sick or die.  Some get divorced.  And others gain their weight back, all of it.  Would I go for the surgery again?  Absolutely.  But that's me.

Anyway, I made the pumpkin gooey butter cake as one of many desserts.  I had not been eating sweets for 6 months - really had no interest in them - but this was a brand new recipe for me, and it was creamy almost like a cheesecake, so I sliced a wafer-thin piece from the edge, just to taste.  Nirvana.  I tasted a few more times. I stopped when I developed the sugar-fueled, completely  irrational belief that I was going to wake up the next morning having gained back all of those 90 pounds.  Shortly thereafter, I felt like I was going to toss my cookie bars.  My head started to spin, I felt queasy, and ended up having to lie down on the couch for a good half hour.

It's called dumping, a super-hypoglycemic reaction to sweets experienced by us posties (post-surgical gastric bypass folks) in the early stages of recovery.  I still have it happen occasionally, and recently gave up even the smallest amount of ice cream for good, because it just isn't worth feeling like I had drunk two strong Cosmos while on a cruise ship caught in a hurricane.

I haven't baked the pumpkin gooey butter cakes since then, and I surely will not take a chance and taste them at the holiday luncheon, but that's no reason my coworkers shouldn't enjoy something really really delicious.

This is my version of the pumpkin bars.  I switched, cut, and added some ingredients for a slightly more complex combination of flavors and texture.  More festive for the holiday.

Cake base:
1 (18 1/4 oz) package spice cake mix
1 stick butter, melted

1 egg

1/2 cup pecan meal

1/2 cup lingonberries

Pumpkin filling:

1 (8 oz) package cream cheese, softened

1 stick butter, softened
3 eggs

1 (15 oz) can pumpkin puree
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 (16 oz) box powdered sugar (next time I cut this back a bit)
1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice

Preheat oven to 350°.

Prepare cake base: 

While oven is preheating, melt the butter in a 9 x 13 inch baking pan.  Remove from the oven once melted, and set aside to cool.   In a large mixing bowl, combine the cake mix and the melted butter and mix with a wooden spoon.  Set aside the baking pan, which is now greased and ready to go. Next add the egg and mix well.  If the dough is a bit difficult to work together with the spoon, switch to your hands. Add the pecan meal.  Pat the mixture into the baking pan and bake for 5 minutes.  Let cool a few minutes, then spread the lingonberries over the crust.

Prepare filling:

In a large bowl, with a hand mixer, beat the cream cheese and softened butter together until smooth and light. Next beat in the pumpkin. Add the 3 eggs and the vanilla, and beat together.

Next, add the powdered sugar about 1/3 at a time.  Use a sieve so that the sugar isn't clumped up.  Finally, add the pumpkin pie spice and mix well.

Spread pumpkin mixture over the cake base and bake for 40 to 50 minutes. Make sure not to over bake as the center should be a little gooey, but you don't want the center to be runny.  Refrigerate overnight before serving.

Now the funny part - not ha ha funny, but funny - I never made it to the holiday party and neither did the pumpkin bars.  I woke up early to make sure they were all cut neatly, and then left them in the refrigerator and headed to court for another day, and hopefully the last day, of a lengthy trial.  My plan was to scoot home at lunchtime, retrieve the pumpkin bars, bring them to the office, eat a forkful of mashed potatoes, and head back to court.  Didn't happen that way because of the need to restart the trial one hour earlier than anticipated, so ... tomorrow is another day.  It might not be a party, but my legal peeps will have a little sweet treat, always nice any day of the week.

Not sure you can see the layers of cookie base, lingonberries, and pumpkin filling, but I have it on good authority from the Official Taste Tester that they are delicious.  Maybe I'll leave a few home for him.

You can serve these with Cool Whip or real whipped cream.  Since I can no longer eat Cool Whip - it hates me, and after a lifelong relationship, that hurts - I would have to go the real stuff route.  Or eat 'em naked (the bars. I plan on wearing clothes.)