We have had a minor delay in exploring our new neighborhood this week. We have been ticking off the daily drudge chores that come with moving – getting garbage and recycling cans, updating our driver’s licenses, acquiring library cards, visiting the recycling center with numerous carloads of flattened cardboard boxes. Yesterday was a real timesucker as we sat for an hour and a half at the DMV. There was lots of good people-watching, though, so I do not begrudge the time spent in the sticky bucket seat in the dreary over-heated waiting room. (I had no idea that Hoka sneakers had become so popular! )

On Wednesdays, now that we have moved, we like to venture out from under the welter of cardboard moving boxes and plastic storage containers, the books and propped-up paintings, the piles of kitchen gear and table linens and family photos, to venture out of the house, to hunt and gather. There are novel grocery stores and exotic food markets for us to discover here. We almost never leave the house with a plan, or an actual shopping list. And it’s not as if we ever successfully organize a meal plan, but we talk about it a lot. We enjoy entertaining the possibility of a meal plan. Mr. Sanders likes to think about meals that we can cook once, and have as leftovers for another dinner, or lunch, or two or three. I admire his ambitions – as well as enjoying his lovingly prepared spaghetti and meatballs for days on end.

On Wednesdays we have discovered that the crowds are thin at Trader Joe’s. It’s possible for me to walk slowly through the store, clutching my weekly bouquet of hydrangeas, peering at the frozen foods and assessing the newest variety of Joe-Joes cookies. (I will have to look to see if there are colorful Hokas mixed in with the earnest Blundstone Chelsea boots and scuffed Doc Martens army boots on the stylish, though thrifty, shoppers.)

There is a thinner crush of driven shoppers at Costco on Wednesday mornings, too. When we sashay into the massive warehouse space to get our biweekly rotisserie chicken we aren’t run over by folks focused on wheeling around their stacks of flannel shirts, John Grisham’s latest, wheels of cheese and sides o’beef.

Then we zip off to a bright and shiny Wegman’s for my weekly ration of cheap white wine, cans of tomatoes, and a tour of the extensively curated and vast deli and bakery departments. There we find jeweI-case-worthy arrangements of mortadella slices, glistening Iberico ham legs, with bowls of glistening olives. I have never seen so many prepared pizzas magisterially arrayed as I did one year the weekend before the Super Bowl. So impressive!

And that is how Food Friday usually spends our Wednesdays – research in the field, getting ideas, sound bites, tiny samples and quick impressions of what other people are buying to make for their dinners. This week Mr. Sanders has been sick with a rather loud, stinking head cold. We have not been discussing the notions of timely, economical winter cooking. There have not been any thoughts of Boeuf Bourguignon; no Creamy Garlic Chicken, no Braised Short Ribs, nor any meatloaf, Shepherd’s Pie, Chili or Squash and Sausage Gnocchi. Nope. None of them. What we have had around the clock is chicken soup. Lots of chicken soup. Steamy, cold-busting chicken soup. No wonder I was thrilled to pieces yesterday to get out of the house and spend a quality afternoon sitting at the DMV.

Words to the wise: you are going to need chicken soup sooner or later this winter. There are colds and flus out there, waiting to pounce. Your soup will never taste as good as your mother’s, or your abuelita’s, or anything from some mythical Lower East Side Jewish deli, with containers of chicken schmaltz on all the tables. And that’s OK. You are making new memories, (and dinner) and it is your homemade creation. It will help ward off the flu, and you will feel talented and virtuous for boiling up a huge stockpot of your own soup! Think of how many times you can reheat it. Hmmm.

Homemade Chicken Stock
1 deboned chicken carcass, including skin OR 1 whole chicken (you could even cheat and buy a rotisserie chicken!)
6 quarts water
6 garlic cloves, smashed
2 carrots, roughly chopped
3 celery stalks, roughly chopped
1 small onion, chopped
1 tablespoon butter
4 black peppercorns
1 bay leaf
Salt (optional!)
1.Use a large stock pot, and add butter and chicken over medium heat. Brown them a little bit.
2.Add all the rest of the ingredients, and bring to a boil.
3.Boil for 3 minutes, then turn heat down to low.
4.Cover, and simmer for about 3-4 hours, stirring every once in a while.
5.Once it’s a golden color, strain and let cool. Put in the refrigerator overnight, then skim the fat off the top.

This is much better than Lipton’s Chicken Noodle dried-powder and freeze-dried chicken bits. And certainly better than Campbell’s. Have you ever seen those pinkish chicken nubbins in the bottom of a Campbell’s can? Ick!
Winter colds are inevitable, luckily you might only have to wait yours out for a couple of days on the sofa with a fat cat and a good book, sipping lemonade and eating Saltines, napping fitfully. There are many helpful and tasty recipes floating around the ether, ripe for the picking. And silver lining: you have a moment or two now to gather your thought for planning next week’s meals!

New York Times Chicken Noodle Soup (gift article)

“Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.”
― Edith Sitwell

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

“Happy New Year,” a cheerful stranger exhorted last weekend as she strode past me in a parking lot. I was a little startled – surely we were done with such niceties? It seemed as if it had been 2026 for weeks already – but the reality was it was only Sunday, January the 4th. Time flies while all our good intentions have yet to be resolved.

How are you doing with your new year’s resolutions? I haven’t exercised one jot, but I did walk for half an hour yesterday. I’ve been reading more, but somehow that first gold star of the new year isn’t comforting at 4:30 in the morning when I can’t get back to sleep, and I turn on the reading light for more time with Susan Orlean. I have remembered to tidy up the kitchen before I go to bed, but there are still endless nagging moving boxes piled artlessly in three other rooms, and they don’t seem to be unpacking themselves. My mother used to tell me that I would have to learn to take the bitter with the better. And so it goes.

It’s difficult to adjust to changes, let alone embrace them. We have finally moved into our new house, which is bright and shiny and clean, and it’s still not home. I walk up the stairs (I haven’t lived in a house with stairs since 1992!) and I can’t remember if I turn right or left at the top to go to our bedroom. There is a lot to do every day: unpacking, hanging blinds, figuring out how to use the washer, and how to engage with the just-delivered stove. Washington College gave me an excellent education, but it did not prepare me for the brand spanking new appliances of the twenty-first century. Nothing has buttons or knobs these days, but everything chimes or lights up when I do press the keypads correctly. There is hope for me.

Mr. Sanders is adapting nicely. Since he is practically perfect in every way. He knows just what to do now when we set off the smoke alarm cooking bacon. He’ll keep the broom nearby to reach the alarm button tonight when we crank the new oven up to 550º F for the first Friday Night is Pizza Night in this house. Just it case, it should still be warm enough outside (even though it is January!) to keep the front and back doors propped open – in addition to the stove vent and a kitchen window.* The crazy weather will enable us in our pursuit of the familiar, our comfortable homey ritual. Maybe all the garlic will make the new place smell like home, instead of new paint, and cardboard.

Last Sunday morning, a couple of hours before my new best friend greeted me warmly in the parking lot, we made a comforting, familiar Sunday breakfast. Sundays call for a shared, cooked meal instead of our usual cold breakfasts: bran cereal with half a banana for me, and some overnight oats with chia pets and yogurt for him. On Sundays we like something warm and sinful: pancakes, or biscuits and gravy; something that drips butter or swims in syrup – like croissants, frittatas, a Dutch baby, omelettes, French toast. Or a breakfast that has just too many calories to count, like pain au chocolate. Yumsters. Just writing about it makes me yearn for a fistful of crusty French bread, split and spread with a thick impasto of creamy, salty yellow French butter, paired with a heavy china mug full of tongue-scalding thick, hot chocolate. If these breakfasts don’t make me get out to exercise, nothing will.

Have a calorie-rich, warm breakfast feast on Sunday. Be kind to yourself this new year, and remember to greet a stranger in a parking lot. Monday and good habits are coming soon enough. Don’t burn the bacon. Or the pizza.

Weekend French Toast – for two

Ingredients
1 cup whole milk
1 pinch salt
3 brown eggs
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 generous dollop rum
1 tablespoon brown sugar
8 1/2-inch slices day old French bread

Whisk milk, salt, eggs, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla extract, rum and sugar until smooth. Heat a lightly oiled and buttered griddle or frying pan over medium heat. Soak bread slices in mixture until saturated. Cook bread on each side for a couple of minutes, until golden brown. Serve with maple syrup and powdered sugar.

No Fuss Bacon


Preheat the oven to 425° F. Line a rimmed baking sheet with aluminum foil. We like to use thick-cut bacon these days, otherwise we tend to incinerate the bacon, and that new smoke alarm is very, very loud. Plop the bacon sheet in the oven for about 10 minutes. Keep checking every 2 or 3 minutes after that, to ensure even cooking. There are no fat spatters on the stove top if you cook the bacon this way. The aluminum foil helps, but isn’t perfect so there is still a certain amount of denial about cleaning the cookie sheet, but you can sneak it back into the cooled oven for a little while, at any rate…

“Okay, this is the wisdom. First, time spent on reconnaissance is never wasted. Second, almost anything can be improved with the addition of bacon. And finally, there is no problem on Earth that can’t be ameliorated by a hot bath and a cup of tea.”
― Jasper Fforde

*Go check your smoke alarm batteries. It’s a good time of the year for maintenance.

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

Holiday greetings from the venerable Spy Test Kitchens! I am writing this week’s column just before gearing up for lots of holiday food prep, but you will be reading this post-Christmas. I hope you enjoyed yourself with lots of noise and wrapping paper, ubiquitous pine scent wafting through your house, and today you are still playing with new toys, or sleeping late. Then I hope you walk away from your screens, go read your new books, or sit quietly in a chair and stare out the window, watching the snow. Not every bit of the holidays has to be frantic – slow down. Watch an icicle dripping in the sunlight.

I have finished baking Christmas cookies for this year, but there is a little more baking in my immediate future: a breakfast sausage and egg casserole, a Boston cream pie, and some dinner rolls. And that does not include the important proposition of making (yet again) another batch of tempting pigs-in-blankets. I will leave the agonizing cooking decisions about the post-Christmas feast of leftovers to Mr. Sanders, who is pouring over the dozens of approaches that he can employ in re-heating. I’ll blanch the asparagus, and slice the potatoes for Potatoes Anna. Christmas dinner was an enormous calorie encounter. And as it is going to be gelid and bitterly cold for the next few days – we deserve the extra high test rocket fuel.

The perfect way to warm up during the chilly winter weather is with a steaming hot cup of hot chocolate. I was wandering through a high end boutique-y grocery store last weekend, eyeing the Christmas gift food displays, which are siren songs, luring you onto the rocks to grab your wallet and shake you down for every penny you have earned with your hard work and sweaty brow. I did not give in to the bright, shiny packaging of cellophane-wrapped Hot Cocoa Bombs, or Santa’s Sweet Shop Cocoa Wonderland Cocoa Bottle Assortments. Heavens to Betsy. 8.1 ounces of hot cocoa bombs will set you back $12.99! Trust me, it is better for your thrifty epicurean soul to make your own mixture of chocolate and cocoa powder. And since it is the holidays, maybe you’ll even make a smidge extra, and share it with your neighbor who doesn’t seem to mind that your messy pine tree has been shedding needles all over his otherwise tidy front walk for the last couple of months.

For Yourself – Simplest Hot Chocolate

1 ounce semisweet or dark chocolate – chopped
1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cup milk
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 pinch salt

In a small saucepan, mix the chocolate, cocoa powder and half of the milk over low heat. Stir continuously until the chocolate is completely melted.
 Add the rest of the milk and the salt. Stir, until steam rises.
 Add sugar. Pour into a mug and top with mini marshmallows or whipped cream. Yumsters.

Feeling mad scientist experimental? Try adding a drop of peppermint extract or cayenne. Or even a dash of Bailey’s Irish cream. It is the Christmas season, after all.

Our friends at Food52 have a recipe for hot cocoa mix to share with your saintly neighbor: Hot Cocoa

Martha, who always manages to make the rest of us look drab and ordinary, has a recipe for white hot chocolate. Of course, she suggests putting it out for Santa. Well. I hope Santa still likes my gingersnaps.
Hot White Chocolate

Stay warm, drive carefully, and look out for your neighbors. It’s going to be slippery. Merry, merry!

“Some days you get up and you already know that things aren’t going to go well. They’re the type of days when you should just give in, put your pajamas back on, make some hot chocolate and read comic books in bed with the covers up until the world looks more encouraging. Of course, they never let you do that.”
― Bill Watterson

 

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

Sunday is the winter solstice – the shortest day, and the longest night of the year. I hope you are all bundled up and ready for the holidays. We took the last packages off to the post office on Wednesday, mailing our love tokens of books and socks, and Christmas cookies. We stood in the conga line of similarly festive folks, patiently waiting, and smiling, listening to the clock tick. It’s almost time to settle in for a long winter’s retreat in the living room. We have books, and movies, and popcorn, and some of the remaining homemade Christmas cookies. This year we will have an actual fireplace for a proper visit from Santa! There is a turkey thawing in the fridge, potatoes in the larder, and the ingredients for a family favorite flourless chocolate cake. Cue the snow.

I like to have a little pot of something boiling away on the stovetop during the Christmas holidays. It fills the house with cozy, childhood aromas. Wafting clouds of orange, cloves, and cinnamon linger in corners, reminding me of homey scenes from Little Women, or the Little House books. Remember the year that Laura and Mary found oranges in their stockings? The snow was deep out there in the vast, lonely Dakota Territory, but Santa still located the deserving Ingalls girls. What a wonderful Christmas that was.

Christmas movies and old television specials easily toy with our vulnerable, sentimental hearts. There are Christmas commercials that make me cry. All these holiday feelings are easily triggered by singing about the Who Hash and the rare Who roast beast. Listen to that squeaking as the Grinch easily separates little Whos from their candy canes. What an outrageous, Grinchy thing to do!

I love The Bishop’s Wife, with its chaste romance and its debonair angel-in-business-suit. No Christmas tree since has been covered by that much tinsel, and so quickly. Oh, for Dudley to keep my glass full with warming, inspiring – though never inebriating – sherry. I’d love to have luncheon with Dudley and Julia at Michel’s, without the paprika.

Clarence, the endearingly clumsy angel in It’s a Wonderful Life, is more my speed. I, too, would stumble into Nick’s rough Pottersville joint and attempt to order something inappropriately fey, like hot mulled wine. And could I have some tasty nibbles, too?

In honor of Clarence, and the whole Christmas season, the Spy Test Kitchen researched hot, mulled wine. And considering we are about to spend lots of time on the sofa, it’s nice to have choices. Let’s start simmering with the queen, Ina Garten: Hot Mulled Wine

Martha has a white wine version: and a red wine version – which she says is, “like Christmas in a glass.” I wonder what Snoop thinks? As much as I like a cheap white wine, I think mulled wine calls for a nice red. It’s winter, and Christmas, and it’s cold outside. Give me something that is full-bodied and heart-warming.
Like this: Erin Clark’s Mulled Wine

Even Reddit has an opinion about the best wines to use for mulled wine: Reddit Mulled Wine

And the young folk on TikTok have a genius approach – to use a slow cooker! Finally, we can pull ours out of the pantry and use it for something other than beef stew or chili! Tiktok slow cooker recipe

Our stockings are hung by the new chimney, in hopes that St. Nick finds them there. Oranges are welcome, but I would like some new colored pencils, too. Courtnei wants a hot glue gun, Santa. (I hope he delivers.) Ho, ho, ho.
Merry, merry, gentle readers. Enjoy the holidays.

“You must be the best judge of your own happiness.”
—Jane Austen

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

May the Hanukkah lights find you together with loved ones.

We had our first snowfall the other night. It made me wish to be a school child again – not for playing outside in it, but because school around here was canceled for two whole days. For a quarter inch of snow. Heavens to Betsy – there wasn’t even enough to scrape together a snowball, let alone a snowman. And then the sun came out. At least it stayed cold. We are inching toward winter. I’m planning a Hanukkah-adjacent supper for Sunday night. It will be a warm and cozy meal, with a crackling roasted chicken, and the comfort of candlelight. And we will count our blessings.

After the elaborate (and fraught ritual) of roasting a turkey for a multi-generational Thanksgiving, cooking a chicken seems delightfully simple. And yet, it took me years to end up here. It might be that my learning curve for the elemental is very steep – it took me about 20 years to master cooking rice, after all. No one is seeking Michelin stars for this roasted chicken, but it is a meal will nourish both body and soul. I am more in my element when it is a low stakes, low pressure meal – unlike all the meal coordination and varying cooking styles and the dietary restrictions that come with a large family get-together. It will be just the two of us.

Jessie Ware and her feisty mother, Lennie, host a delightful food podcast, Table Manners. Lennie is very proud of her Jewish roots and her traditional Sunday roast and veg. Most weeks they cook a meal for their celebrity guests, while consuming copious amounts of wine, and chattering and talking with their mouths full.
Table Manners

I love all the laughter that the Wares share in their cozy kitchen. We need more light-hearted moments these days. Maybe this Hanukkah there should be some amuse-bouche – how about some Torah hot dogs? You can never go wrong with these sausages. Just make sure you are using kosher hot dogs, please. The crowning touch is the star of David decoration – go rummage through your cookie cutters – you’ll be sure to unearth at least one.

Torah Hot Dogs
1. Hot Dogs
2. Puff Pastry
3. Egg

Wrap the dogs, place on parchment paper-lined cookie sheet, and brush with egg wash.
Bake at 400ºF for 15-20 min.

Here is the Instagram tutorial: Torah Hot Dogs

I found dozens of ideas for Hanukkah on Instagram this year, which is a good thing, because all my cookbooks are still packed in an impenetrable warren of boxes in the Wendell Extra Room Storage Unit. Instead of thumbing through my trusted and much-loved collection of books I got to spend some time, legitimately, for once, trolling through IG. It was easy to slide away from politics and window treatment videos to holiday cooking. Where else was I going to find instructions for constructing menorah-shaped challah bread?
Challah Menorah – Weinernorah

I always find it difficult to pull off latkes. I think it has been because I haven’t wrung enough moisture out of the potatoes, or even use the wrung-out potato starch. This was an eye-opening demonstration.
Latkes

What are ritual foods if they don’t make us time travel back to happy moments? Much has been written about the chic and delicate French madeleines, but what about the humble jelly doughnut? Every one of us who has ever eaten a jelly doughnut can remember oozed jelly on our shirtfronts – not exactly transformational epiphanies, but definitely universally undignified moments. Jelly doughnuts are the cosmic pratfall of sweets compared to the madeleine – not the stuff of French literature. The madeleine moment, as evoked by the taste of a delicate cake-like cookie, is fleeting. Jelly doughnuts bring to mind an entire holiday. It is a raucous family celebration. Jelly doughnuts cover us with powdered sugar joy.

Popular traditional foods for Hanukkah are brisket, latkes, kugel and jelly doughnuts, or sufganiyot. The doughnuts help us to remember the miracle of the oil that burned miraculously for eight nights – tributes to that single cruse of oil that lasted eight days.

Thank you, Instagram for these:
Easier Doughnuts

Happy Hanukkah!

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
—Leonard Cohen

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

We had hoped to simplify Thanksgiving this year. We have recently moved to temporary lodgings in an apartment while the new house is being finished, and confidently, and foolishly, have stowed most of our household gear in a storage unit. You couldn’t find Rosebud in that crammed storage space. Indiana Jones couldn’t find the Grail tucked in all those boxes and piles and rolls of rugs. It’s not crucial that I have turtlenecks just yet, but it might have been convenient to have the measuring cups, the garlic press, or a decent knife during the past month. I have been drinking my cheap white wine from a plastic wine glass left over from our Florida pool days. We have no festive Thanksgiving platters or cheery Pilgrim candle holders on hand. No good china. No electric knife. No gravy boat. They are tucked deep in the bowels of the Extra Space Storage Building. It’s looking grim here.

Next week we will be gathering together in a rental cottage near Savannah to share the Thanksgiving festivities with our daughter and her partner, and their two dynamo boys. Holiday cooking in rental houses can be fraught with complications because you never know what to expect, or how well-stocked the nearest grocery store is. Usually I overcompensate and overpack: the KitchenAid stand mixer, the cookie sheets, the roasting pan, the rolling pin, the gravy separator, the electric knife, a few platters, rolls of aluminum foil, parchment paper and Saran Wrap for the leftovers, mayonnaise for the leftovers turkey sandwiches, candles, tablecloths. Crafts for the boys. You name it, I would have packed it. We have never traveled light before. This will be an interesting year for us all. Interesting being the key word – like a grim passage in Dr. Spock, foretelling disaster and unmet developmental marker expectations. Irreversible disaster, and ruin.

At first Mr. Sanders and I had supposed that we could make changes to the traditional menu and streamline the prep. We floated that idea on a group call yesterday – where our suggestion that we skip the turkey this year was met with shocked silence. Dead air. A vacuum. Disbelief.

Then we suggested bringing a nice big homemade lasagne; heavy with sauce and cheese and spicy meatballs, redolent with garlic and memories of home. We had rationalized that we could just heat up the lasagne, and have lots of time to go for walks, find shells, rent bicycles. We didn’t realize that we had produced a hide-bound traditionalist, who was raising children steeped in Americana myths and legends. With the precision of an Ivy-trained lawyer, she argued that we must have turkey. Thanksgiving needs hot rolls and lumpy gravy. How could we expect them to go without green beans and cranberries and pie? Life is just not worth living without stuffing and candlelight and mac and cheese. Her final argument: what about the children?

Some of those bright and chirpy food writers say that you can prepare all of the Thanksgiving dishes ahead of time. They also have well-stocked test kitchens, staff, and expense accounts. Please excuse my very unladylike guffaw. In this rental apartment, which is just like a college dorm room, we have one cookie sheet, one nonstick frying pan, one mixing bowl and one battered old brownie pan – so I will not be preparing anything in advance. We don’t even have a Hot Pot. I harbor the fear being in a strange kitchen with its inevitable dearth of potholders. There was one year in a Thanksgiving rental that we were spatchcocking a 24-pound turkey, for the first time. Ever. Six college degrees were deemed useless as we grappled with the enormous carcass and one potholder.

I am considering hocking my soul and buying a Thanksgiving dinner already prepared by the closest grocery store. That will pry open the children’s eyes to the grim realities of modern living. This is the year that the boys will probably also figure out the truth about Santa. Bye, bye childhood. Sigh. Being an adult is hard.

Wish me luck next week. I am going to listen to Julia Child who believed: “If you’re alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who’s going to know?” This is excellent advice as we might have to resort to instant mashed potatoes, and gravy from a jar this year – and no one will be wiser. I bought the pie crusts yesterday. I know for a fact that the Pepperidge Farm dinner rolls that we will pick up Tuesday night at Food Lion are going to be delicious, too. Which will leave us plenty of leisure time for family walks and photo ops and whipping the cream. Use your time wisely. Life is short. Bring potholders. Gobble, gobble.

Even Joan Didion used store-bought side dishes. In Wednesday’s New York Times: “She paid assistants to help cook and serve for these big occasions, and didn’t sweat details that could be finessed with store-bought ingredients like frozen artichokes or canned sweet potatoes.” We can rest reassured by Didion’s literary precedent setting. Joan Didion’s Thanksgiving: Dinner for 75, Reams of Notes, By Patrick Farrell.

“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.”
― Mark Twain

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

November is the busiest time for cooks and food writers – we cannot get enough of complicated planning, and scribbling bulleted lists, and charting menus and spread sheets for the Thanksgiving meal where we will gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing. I amaze myself by discovering how much time I can waste thinking about place cards. Place cards! There will be just six of us for Thanksgiving dinner this year, two of whom will be under 12 years old, and one of whom does not yet read. They will not appreciate the carefully inked swirls of calligraphic artistry. It might be best to just simplify.

Every year we like to remember Thanksgivings past. Like the year when we ran out of chairs, and the children’s table was children sitting cross legged on the floor around a coffee table. And how, like clockwork, we almost always manage to forget to cook the green beans until after the parade of food from the kitchen to the table has begun. Did you know that you can make the mashed potatoes ahead of time? Traditionally we always have to waylay a couple of mashed potato workers, one who peels with aplomb, and another who mashes with glee. What if I make the potatoes myself on Wednesday, and re-heat them on Thursday? Oooh – the time space continuum in the kitchen has been radically expanded!

One Thanksgiving when we lived in Florida we ate outside, at tables we had rigged up with sheets of plywood and saw horses, because it was a pleasant temperature and we had lots of friends there with their lots of wriggling children. We fired up the fairy lights and moved the stereo speakers onto the back patio. It was an adventure to eat formally, with candles and sterling, with the ancestral china, and tinkling crystal outside, but not one wriggling child fell into the pool. It was a good meal, and so memorable.

It is too early to know if outdoor dining is feasible for Thanksgiving this year. Thanksgiving dinner is rarely impromtu, or improvised because we are already scrawling our shopping lists here in the first week of November. But I have to say that the al fresco Thanksgiving was delightful, with zephyr breezes and elbow room and bright twinkly lights. Everyone who attended brought a covered dish and a chair. If we try it again this year we know that we can skip using the good china, just this once, and break out the finest of paper plates. It will be dark-ish, after all. And maybe we can think about grilling a turkey breast instead of risking life and limb by deep frying an entire bird – and you can spend even more time outdoors: Grilled Turkey Added bonus: the white wine will chill itself, especially in red Solo cups.

So start your low-key Thanksgiving planning. Be innovative. You don’t have to go outside. Skip our green bean tradition and try forgetting to roast the Brussels sprouts this year. Sprouts Bake a spice cake, and swirl on the cream cheese icing, instead of doing elaborate calligraphy. The under-twelves will love it. Spiced Pumpkin Layer Cake

If you are going to be a smaller family unit this year, how about making your life even easier? Roast a chicken. You can still eat drumsticks: Roasted Chicken Then splash out for some really nice wine, and assuage your guilt by making a labor intensive and decadent dessert involving choux pastry, chocolate and creme pat: Decadence Or pick up a pumpkin pie at Costco – who will know? The five-year-old won’t tell.

A dose of romance could liven up a more modest Thanksgiving: lots of candles and a brace of Cornish game hen, wild rice, a green salad and store-bought chocolate eclairs, Beaujolais Nouveau, and fewer dishes to wash. Take a nice meandering walk in the cold, and have an evening streaming comforting Diane Keaton films. Find something to make yourselves happy. And in 20 years, you’ll have a story about the nice, simple Thanksgiving when nothing went awry.

“The best way to find out what we really need is to get rid of what we don’t.”
― Marie Kondō

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.