Tag Archives: Thanksgiving

Thanks, science

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Unlike a year ago, I’m not writing a post-Thanksgiving post from my own house. Instead, my family and I were able to travel and spend this holiday with my mom as well as my brother and his family. And one of the many things for which we’re thankful is the unprecedented worldwide effort that allowed us all to get vaccinated, with the two youngest members of this family reunion getting their first doses earlier this month.

That was what I had hoped might somehow be possible once the awfulness of the pandemic broke through my early denial, but there was no guarantee that the scientists of the world could fulfill that hope. And there was even less reason to think that the United States would have three effective vaccines in sufficiently wide distribution to have more than 196 million Americans now fully vaxxed.

I am profoundly grateful to everybody who has spent long days in laboratories, hospitals, clinics and other medical workplaces to get us to this point. They have cleared a path for us all to move forward into the broad, sunlit uplands that Winston Churchill spoke of during another time of worldwide peril.

(Seeing this effort firsthand and making a microscopic contribution to it as an occasional vax-clinic volunteer with the Virginia Medical Reserve Corps–most recently, a week before Thanksgiving, when I had the welcome sight of parents lining up with under-12 kids–has been a tremendous honor.)

At the same time, a year ago I would not have guessed that an early rush to get vaccinated would fade as people either thought the pandemic was done and they could sit out getting a jab–or believed the conspiracy lies of politicians and propagandists about vaccines. I also would not have thought that vaccine distribution around the world would still be this uneven this far along.

Today’s agonizing news of yet another coronavirus variant is the reminder we shouldn’t have needed that taking our eyes off a moving target will cost us. But while you cannot count out humans’ capacity for stupidity and sloth, the last year and change should also offer more than enough reminder that it’s unwise to bet against human ingenuity.

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Thanksgiving almost entirely from scratch, and on short notice

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More than three decades after I moved out, I finally cooked Thanksgiving without parental help. This was not my original plan for the holiday, but the pandemic led us to scrap that a week before the holiday–giving me just enough time to shop and plan a downsized meal.

The turkey was the first item to cross off the to-do list. I thought about buying just a turkey breast, but when I realized that Virginia’s EcoFriendly Foods had half turkeys for sale, I picked up one at the Arlington farmers market on Saturday. FYI, it is significantly easier to carry less than 7 pounds of half a bird–yes, I lived up to local stereotype by buying a left-wing turkey–than 14 pounds of a complete one.

I also came home from the market with a few pounds of potatoes, leaving surprisingly little shopping for other ingredients over the next few days: sweet potatoes, fennel, and stuffing mix.

Thanksgiving itself started a little before 9 a.m. with mixing dough for two baguettes. Julia Child’s recipe from The Way To Cook spans five pages and requires three rises; it’s far more effort than the no-knead bread I’ve done in previous years, but a complete baguette freezes better than half a loaf.

As the dough rose, I made the crust and filling for pumpkin pie from my usual recipe; getting dessert finished before 1:30 p.m. was a good morale booster. The baguettes went into the oven next (accompanied by a head of garlic), while on the stove top I boiled the potatoes.

But what about the turkey, the entree that my brother’s wife had handled when we had family Thanksgiving here last year? I had been tempted to follow Kamala Harris’s advice about wet brining but didn’t get around to that Wednesday, so I limited myself to rubbing butter on the bird and then seasoning it with salt, pepper, herbes de Provence and some diced rosemary from the garden.

I mostly followed the roasting directions in my go-to cookbook, Mark Bittman’s How To Cool Everything, except that I cooked it at 450 degrees instead of 500 for the first 20 or so minutes before backing down to 350 degrees. I stuck the temperature probe for a ThermoWorks Dot into what seemed the thickest part of the bird and set the alarm on that remote thermometer to 165 degrees.

Meanwhile, my daughter helped mash the potatoes as I threw too much butter and some of the roast garlic into that pot while my wife handled the stuffing and crafted some tangy cranberry sauce from scratch, using a recipe she’d looked up that afternoon.

After about two hours in the over–another advantage to getting half a bird–the turkey was done and looked and tasted amazing. Folks, this doesn’t have to be hard; like many other areas of cooking, throwing butter at the problem works. Speaking of which, I whipped up some gravy from the drippings in the pan. I will admit that the results were lumpy, not that anybody cared.

The only real misfire in this entire cooking production was the roast vegetables–putting that dish of sweet potatoes, carrots and fennel on the top rack in the oven meant that I didn’t see it when I took out the turkey and so left them a bit overdone. But roast veggies are pretty fault tolerant, and everybody ate enough of everything that we had to walk around the neighborhood to check out the earliest Christmas decorations before indulging in dessert.

Thanksgiving was not the same with relatives only visible on an iPad’s screen, but at least we did dinner right. And now we’re going to see how long Thanksgiving leftovers last with only three people around to eat them.

Is it even Thanksgiving if you don’t travel?

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For the first time more than three decades, I didn’t have to travel anywhere for Thanksgiving–my brother and his family and my mom came to our house this year. So what did I do with all the time I didn’t have to spend traveling up and down the Northeast Corridor?

I worked until about 5 p.m. Wednesday. Of course that was going to happen. And then I got dinner on the table stupidly late because I thought I’d try a new Instant Pot recipe that wound up introducing me to that device’s dreaded “burn” error condition.

Fortunately, the really important dinner came together fine Thursday, with an enormous amount of help from my extended family. With my sister in law taking charge of the turkey, I didn’t have that much more work to do than I would have in an away-from-home Thanksgiving. My two Thanksgiving standbys, almost-no-work bread and pumpkin pie, were outright easier because I didn’t have to think about where to find utensils and ingredients.

In the bargain, we finally got to break out the good china (after washing it to remove years of accumulated dust), and now we have all the leftovers. I am thankful for that.

But the downside of having people come to you for Thanksgiving is that they’re spending their own money, miles or points to travel and may decide to compromise their schedule to reduce that hit. For my brother and his family and my mom, that meant flying here Tuesday and going home today. So after three days of having five extra people bouncing around our house, the place now feels too empty and too quiet.

Credit where it’s due: Thanksgiving tech support has gotten easier

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I spend a lot of time venting about tech being a pain in the neck, but I will take a break from that to confirm that my annual Thanksgiving-weekend routine of providing technical support has gotten a lot easier over the last 10 years.

The single biggest upgrade has been the emergence of the iPad as something usable as the only computer in the house. It took a few years for Apple to make that happen–remember when you had to connect an iPad to a computer for its setup and backups?–but Web-first users can now enjoy a tablet with near zero risk of malware and that updates its apps automatically.

As a result, when I gave my mom’s iPad a checkup Wednesday afternoon, the worst I had to do was install the iOS 12.1 update.

That left me free to spend my tech-support time rearranging that tablet’s apps to keep the ones she uses most often on the first home screen.

Things have gotten easier on “real” computers too. Apple and Microsoft ship their desktop operating systems with sane security defaults and deliver security patches and other bug fixes automatically. The Mac and Windows app stores offer the same seamless updates for installed programs as iOS and Android’s. And while Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox aren’t in those software shops, they update themselves just as easily.

But the openness of those operating systems makes it easier for people to get into trouble. For example, a few weeks ago, I had to talk a relative through resetting Chrome’s settings to get rid of an extension that was redirecting searches.

Other computing tasks remain a mess. On a desktop, laptop or tablet, clearing out storage to make room for an operating-system upgrade is as tedious as ever, and it doesn’t help when companies like Apple continue to sell laptops with 128-gigabyte SSDs. Password management continues to be a chore unless (duh) you install a password manager.

Social media looks worst of all. Facebook alone has become its own gravity well of maintenance–notifications to disable to curb its attention-hogging behavior, privacy settings to tend, and propaganda-spewing pages to avoid. There’s a reason I devoted this year’s version of my USA Today Thanksgiving tech-support column to Facebook, and I don’t see that topic going out of style anytime soon.

A Thanksgiving baking project: almost-no-work bread

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Well over a decade since I got into the habit of baking sandwich bread from scratch, I still remember how nervous I was at first about winding up with a deflated loaf. The recipe I’m sharing here cuts that risk as close to zero as possible; all it asks in return is about 24 hours of time.

Because I, too, am a little hesitant to try out a recipe with that much latency, I waited to try the “No-Work Bread” recipe in my well-read copy of Mark Bittman’s “How To Cook Everything” (which you may have seen in the New York Times as “No-Knead Bread”). I shouldn’t have: This product of Sullivan Street Bakery owner Jim Lahey is the most fault-tolerant bread recipe I know, and if you start it by mid-afternoon Wednesday you can have it ready for Thanksgiving dinner.

(My apologies if you’ll be spending Wednesday afternoon on highways or in the air. Maybe bookmark this for Christmas?)

  • 4 cups all-purpose unbleached flour
  • 2/3 teaspoon active dry yeast
  • 2 teaspoons salt
  • 2 cups water, about 70 degrees
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 1 tablespoon cornmeal (or flour)

Mix the flour and salt in a 2-quart bowl. Stir the yeast into the water, and after a few minutes mix that into the dry ingredients for longer than seems necessary. This may look like a mess, but as long as you don’t have any chunky bits left, you should be fine.

(Bittman’s original recipe calls for half a teaspoon of instant yeast, which I never buy because Costco sells regular yeast in a 2-pound package. The last time I made this, I forgot the 1:1.33 instant-to-active-yeast conversion and threw the non-instant yeast in with the dry ingredients. Everything turned out fine; as I said, fault-tolerant.)

Take a 3-quart bowl and coat it with the olive oil. Dump the dough into it, cover with plastic wrap, and leave it alone for about 18 hours. You’ll know it’s done, or close enough, when it’s risen to near the top and it’s covered with bubbles as if they were craters on the surface of the moon.

(While the dough enjoys that long rise, you may want to watch an episode of the Great British Baking Show for motivational purposes.)

Dust a clean surface with flour and pour the soggy dough onto it–taking a moment to enjoy the aroma of the risen, fermented yeast. Fold the dough over a couple of times into a ball, more or less, and cover it with plastic wrap for 15 minutes.

After that rest, scatter more flour on the dough and re-form it into a ball. Scatter the cornmeal (or more flour, if you’re out of cornmeal) on a silicone baking mat, wax paper, or a towel (as in, something that you can grab to lift the dough off the surface), cover with plastic wrap, and leave the dough ball there for two hours.

About an hour and 15 minutes into that last rise, put a 3- to 4-quart pot, cover included, into the oven and preheat it to 450 degrees. Half an hour after the oven hitting 450°, open the oven, remove the lid and dump the dough into the pot.

This is when the results–a damp glob slumped unevenly in the pot, part of it stuck to its side–may look like a culinary catastrophe. Ignore the untidy appearance, put the lid back on, and shove it in the oven for 30 minutes.

Open the oven, remove the lid and you should see that the bread has settled back into a somewhat flattened ball. Set the lid aside, close the oven and bake for another 20 minutes. If the crust looks browned like something in a real bakery, it’s done; otherwise, try another 10 minutes.

Let the bread cool for 30 minutes. Try not to eat it all at once.

Updated 12/25/2018 with a few clarifications.

I can’t quite say I miss I-95 and the Jersey Turnpike. And yet…

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This is the first Easter since 1999 that hasn’t involved some quality time on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, Interstate 95, the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway. My mom recently moved from northern New Jersey to the suburbs of Boston, and so our holiday pilgrimage took place in the sky instead of on the roads.

NJTP ticket at toll plazaThat is good overall. Those drives from D.C. to Bergen County for Easter and Thanksgiving routinely got bogged down in traffic, prolonging what should have been a four-and-a-half-hour schlep to six, seven, or eight hours. It was maddening, soul-crushing and usually inescapable.

I soon learned to break up the trip by segmenting it according to the sights. Beyond the service areas and the signs counting down the distance to NYC (what ever happened to the 100-mile sign?), my mental mileposts include Ripken Stadium, the Susquehanna River, the Our Lady of the Highways statue of Mary, the Delaware-toll detour (sometimes with a stop at what must have long been the northernmost Waffle House in America), the “Cruiser in a Cornfield” Navy testing facility, the NJTP’s split into car-only and car-and-truck lanes, the handful of crossings above or below Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor line, and the urban gash the Garden State Parkway cuts through the Oranges.

(If none of this description resonates with you, please read Randy Kennedy’s December 2000 New York Times feature on I-95 in the New York Times and Hank Stuever’s fantastic August 2001 Washington Post essay on the Turnpike.)

I also quickly settled on a soundtrack: WRNR’s freeform rock from Baltimore to Delaware, then either Springsteen’s Live: 1975-85 or the first three discs of Tracks.

But even with those mind games and slight improvements over the years–EZ-Pass, highway-speed tolling in Delaware and New Jersey, the widening of the Turnpike between exits 6 and 9, and Google Maps routing us around traffic–the prospect of this trip still filled me with dread.

Departing DCAAnd then my last three trips on this route weren’t all that bad. Hauling some of Mom’s furniture back to D.C. in a rented SUV in November was less punishing than I expected (I outright enjoyed paying my tolls with cash, Tony Soprano-style, to dodge Budget’s EZ-Pass surcharge), and early-morning departures around Thanksgiving allowed for two traffic-light journeys.

In particular, the drive north for the holiday that began when we hit the road around 7 a.m. Wednesday was almost miraculous in its ease. And when Google advised we stay on the Turnpike instead of switching to the Parkway to save a few minutes, the magnificent hellscape of industry and transportation that is the NJTP around Newark Airport led to some unintentional hilarity when my wife asked “What’s that smell? Is it something with our car?”

That’s no longer a possibility, and our holiday travel won’t be the same without it.

Flying is safer and more scenic–especially going in or out of National Airport. But it costs more, and it’s not immune to disruptions of its own. Friday morning, American Airlines canceled our nonstop to Boston and re-routed us that afternoon through LaGuardia. That delay and the unplanned connection at Joe Biden’s favorite airport meant we arrived in Boston some nine hours after we left home, or about what it would have taken us to drive had the traffic gods smiled upon us… which they almost never do.

The holiday season, as seen by a tech journalist

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To those of you with normal jobs, this time of year means things like eating and spending too much, long travel to see far-flung relatives, having to remember where you stashed the ornaments, and wrestling with wrapping paper.

WreathIn my line of work, however, the holiday season includes all of those things and then a few extras:

  • Gift guidance: We’re expected to reel off lists of what computers, phones, tablets, other gadgets and games to buy, even if knowing that CES will offer us a peek at the next year’s crop of consumer electronics discourages gadget purchases at this time of the year. (I have escaped that particular obligation so far this year, but my Yahoo Tech colleagues have been busy offering tech-procurement advice; won’t you please check it out?)
  • Watching people make purchases they’ll regret: You will inevitably see somebody you care for buy the wrong device or app–perhaps because they read somebody else’s misinformed gadget-gift guide–and you can’t get too bent out of shape over that.
  • Holiday tech support: Taking a look at issues on the computers, phones, tablets and other gadgets of the people we see over the holidays is part of the deal. I can’t say I mind, since I can count on getting at least a couple of ideas for my USA Today Q&A column every holiday season.
  • A break from business travel: December is second only to August for its paucity of tech events likely to land on my travel schedule. I’m okay with that!
  • CES is coming: My enjoyment of quality time with friends and family always gets eaten away by the realization that only a few days after New Year’s, I’ll have to leave all that behind and spend five or so hours in a pressurized metal tube on my way to Vegas for this annual gadget gathering. CES is a good and useful event, but I sure would like to see it happen later in January.

Things a freelance writer can be thankful for

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Clients who say yes to your pitches–or at least politely say no and explain why they didn’t work for them.

Thanks

Clients who offer you unexpected assignments, preferably near a dollar a word.

Clients you don’t have to invoice twice–better yet, who pay before you can get around to sending an invoice.

Contracts that don’t have work-for-hire or indemnification clauses. (How often does the latter form of legalese save any company from legal trouble?)

That moment when a crafty lede pops into your head, fully formed.

The state of flow in which words seem to fly onto the screen by themselves, and you only need to keep your fingers over the keyboard.

Having your reporting lead you in an unexpected direction, in the process reminding you that this profession should be roughly equal parts learning and teaching.

Catching a stupid error that you were thisclose to sharing with the world.

Discovering that you’ve written a phrase in a headline that Google has never seen before.

Editors who ask good questions that reveal flaws in your argument, or at a minimum don’t edit in mistakes.

Anybody on a copy desk who quickly fixes the mistake you discover after publication or posting.

Readers who appreciate what you do.

Happy Thanksgiving, all!

Pumpkin pie, from scratch

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One lesser-known fact about me is how analog I get in the kitchen. One example: For the past 10 years or so, I’ve been making pumpkin pie from scratch–no pumpkin from a can, no pie crust from the freezer case.

See after the jump for the routine I’ve settled on. It started with Epicurious’s “Spiced Pumpkin Pie,” then folded in a Post recipe for pumpkin puree and Mark Bittman’s flaky pie crust from How To Cook Everything, my usual go-to cookbook. (The pie crust is the easiest part–seriously, if you have a food processor, never buy frozen pie crust again–and the recipe needs no alteration, so I left that out of the instructions below. Update, 11/24: After making this pie crust without a food processor on Thursday, I realized that Bittman’s recipe doesn’t address that situation and that I had also departed from it in a few minor ways, so I added my take on it, plus two photos from Thursday’s production.) Lessons learned from mistakes led to the rest of my pie procedure, although further mistakes may change it again.
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