Thanksgiving comes early

Thanksgiving came early to our house this year.

It's all Jodi Foster's fault. She directed this totally charming movie called Home for the Holidays, which I like to watch every year around Thanksgiving. Last month I kept putting off watching my Halloween specials (Is it really Halloween without the Great Pumpkin?)--and as a result never got to watch them at all! 

So when the dark set in early last night (I hate hate hate it when Daylight Savings time goes away), I comforted myself with the movie equivalent of tryptophan, and started in on my Thanksgiving roster. For those interested, the rest of my Thanksgiving films include Hannah and Her Sisters, The Ice Storm, and The House of Yes. I would, by they way, love to hear any recommendations to add to my list. 

Anyway, while all of these are terrific films, with just the right touch of family insanity and weirdness to capture the holiday (and the inevitable slide into that next great winter festival, Christmas), the only one that's really heartwarming is Home for the Holidays. In the DVD player it went. 

It left me, as usual, a little happy and a little heartsick. I mean that in a very good way. It also left me with an appetite for Thanksgiving dinner. Most of all, I wanted stuffing. 

I persuaded Nick that what we both needed was a breath of fresh air, and out into the great world we plunged (in what we later realized were identical outfits. What do Nick and Nadine wear for a Sunday evening walk around the neighborhood? Cute sneakers, jeans, and a hoodie under a vest. Sigh. In any case, this was the last pre-baby outing for my vest: it is officially too small around the belly for any further wear until next fall. Into the basement it goes). 

One of the things I love about our old-school American Italian neighborhood is the exuberance of the holiday decorations. Last night we could enjoy leftover Halloween spiders and jack-o-lanterns, generic fall shading into Thanksgiving bales of hay, sheaves of dried corn, and piles of decorative gourds, and what are in some cases early Christmas lights -- and in some cases Christmas lights that get left up all year round. We strolled and admired them all. We looked, in vain, for the house where I once peeked in the window to a lighted living room and saw between fifteen and twenty animal heads mounted on the walls. 

We went to the grocery store, and bought stuffing mix. Purely for the dried bread, of course. It was a tad late to really do it up, which means baking my own bread and then drying it, all as a prelude to truly superior stuffing. I inspected a turkey breast, but it was already dinner time, so I kept it simple. 

Stuffing and cranberry sauce. That was dinner last night, and it was delicious. Tonight I'm gonna get some deli turkey and good bread and make Thanksgiving sandwiches, which may turn out even superior. 

Nadine's Easy Fruit and Bacon Stuffing

2 slices thick cut bacon, cut into 1/4 inch slices

1 small onion, diced

1 stalk celery, thinly sliced

1/2 apple, diced

1/4 cup dried cranberries

dried bread from pre-packaged stuffing mix, plus whatever ingredients, like water or butter, that the mix calls for

Fry sliced bacon in a saucepan until crisp. Remove bacon and set aside. Add onion and celery, and butter, if the mix calls for it. If not, just a little oil if the bacon hasn't left enough in the way of fat. Fry for about 5 minutes. Add apple and dried cranberries, and cook for 2 minutes more. Stir in dried bread and whatever liquid is called for by the mix. Add salt and lots of black pepper, to taste. 

As for the cranberry sauce, Epicurious had me covered with this easy and delicious recipe for Cranberry Sauce with Crystalized Ginger. I made about a third of the recipe. 

Hello Thanksgiving, festival of eating!