Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [97]
3. Melt the butter in a skillet and add the onion. Cook until very soft. Stir in the sage, currants, pecans, and bread cubes. Add salt and pepper to taste.
4. Stir in about 2 cups stock.
5. Pour the mixture into the casserole and bake, covered, for 30 minutes. If you’re serving people who love a crusty stuffing, uncover the casserole for the last 10 minutes or so.
Makes about 8 cups
CRANBERRY SAUCE
My brother-in-law makes a cranberry sauce that entails poking each individual cranberry with a needle, thereby allowing it to release its juices without bursting. When cooked, the berries resemble a bowl of jewel-like cherries. That is his family tradition and it is lovely. About fifteen years ago, I made Paul Prudhomme’s fresh cranberry relish, which involves grinding cranberries with a lot of sugar, oranges, lemons, and a full tablespoon of vanilla. It’s fruity and supersweet, and that’s become our family tradition. It is also lovely. My friend Melanie likes cranberry jelly that slides from the can and keeps the cylindrical shape. That’s her family tradition and it’s as good as any other. Cranberry sauce is there to embellish a piece of poultry and pretty much any sauce—homemade or canned, spicy or sweet—that makes you remember happy Thanksgivings past is going to be the right one.
MASHED POTATOES
Though I’d never bought them before, I was dead certain of what I thought about Betty Crocker Potato Buds: disgraceful. Then one rainy fall evening, I opened a box. I boiled water with a chunk of butter and a big pinch of salt, and then poured in a little cold milk and a cup of the buds, which looked like goldfish food. I stirred the bizarre mixture with a fork. Man, was I slumming.
What happened next shocked and chastened me.
“Isabel!” I yelled. “Come look!”
“What is it?” she said.
“Mashed potatoes!”
She peered into the pot and said, “So?”
“It took five minutes.”
She was underwhelmed. But then she has never peeled potatoes. She has never experienced the tedium, the damp knuckles, the grimy bits of brown skin stuck to every surface. In the pot was a cloud of beautiful, fluffy spuds. We tasted the buds. Good! Perhaps a bit stickier than home-mashed, but certainly acceptable. I could have sat down and eaten the whole pot.
As with biscuits, I had to reexamine my snobby prejudices. I can see that a convenience like this must have meant a lot to someone in my grandmothers’ generation, when mashing potatoes was a more regular part of daily life, when you couldn’t just say, nope, I don’t feel like making mashed potatoes and pot roast, tonight, we’re having quesadillas.
Were I expected to mash potatoes for my pin money, I would find potato buds very alluring. But I only mash potatoes when I want to—mashed potatoes are a choice and a treat. And real mashed potatoes are better.
Make it or buy it? Make it.
Hassle: Peeling potatoes
Cost comparison: Homemade: about $0.40 per cup. Betty Crocker Potato Buds: $0.50 per cup.
2 pounds russet potatoes Salt
1 cup milk, heavy cream, buttermilk, or half-and-half
4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter
1. Peel the potatoes, cut them into chunks, and drop them into a pot of cold, salted water.
2. Put the pot on the stove over high heat and bring to a boil. Simmer for about 25 minutes, or until the potatoes are soft.
3. Meanwhile, in a small saucepan, gently heat the milk and the butter until the butter melts.
4. Drain the potatoes in a colander and return them to their dry cooking pot. With a masher, start pounding them.
5. Add the butter and milk, a little at a time, mashing and pouring until the liquid is absorbed and the potatoes are as smooth or lumpy, thin or thick, as you like them. Salt to taste.
6. Serve immediately.
Serves 4
SWEET POTATOES
Mashed potatoes from buds aren’t all that bad; canned sweet potatoes, soggy and stubby, are a woeful substitute for fresh sweet potatoes.
Make it or buy it? Make it.
Hassle: Hardly any