For Those About to Thank, We Salute You

It's a Friday Newsletter on a Tuesday! I've got the one thing your Thanksgiving table needs, an elegant Thursday morning cocktail, great music, movie recs and more!

Hello, friends. Happy Friday.

[touches earpiece, listening to production assistant off-camera] what do you mean it’s Tuesday. no that doesn’t sound right at all

Whatever. It doesn’t matter.

We’re in the second-most unmoored-from-time week of the year, behind only the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Time isn’t being measured in days this week, but in prep and cook times. Thanksgiving is nearly upon us, and I couldn’t be happier. It’s one of my favorite days of the year, and preparations in the House of Cookbook are already well underway.

Now, normally, I’ll show up in your inboxes on Friday with my biggest newsletter of the week—one packed with recipes, drinks, music, entertainment recs and more—but with the big day coming on Thursday, I decided to shift that schedule up this week. It’s a Friday Newsletter on a Tuesday, and today I’m geared toward your last-minute prep. I’ve got the one thing you need to add to your Thanksgiving table, a luxurious pre-dinner cocktail, some night-before-Thanksgiving-appropriate music, suggestions for what to watch while you’re couch-bound by a food coma, and more!

Friday is only a state of mind.

Let’s put this week to bed early.

My annual plea to bring some heat to your holiday table

I am not going to be like other food bloggers this time of year.

I am not going to try to tell you how to make your turkey.

I am not going to suggest a novel way of making potatoes or stuffing.

I am not going to tell you that you should bring an unexpected vegetable to the Thanksgiving table.

I am fully accepting of the fact that the primary elements of your Thanksgiving menu were likely set long ago, bound by family tradition or simply firm-set preference—and that’s even assuming you’re the one calling the shots for Thanksgiving.

No, I come today to make one specific suggestion, one that I have been beating the drum for on this newsletter for more than five years:

You should make spicy cranberry sauce.

The other elements of Thanksgiving dinner bring a lot to the table in the salt and fat categories, but they’re sorely lacking in acid and heat. Cranberry sauce is a great way to bring in the acid—but why not bring in some heat too? It’s the perfect vehicle for it, and it comes together remarkably easily.

It’s also surprisingly satisfying—you can go from a bag of solid cranberries to a jar of sauce in about fifteen minutes of stirring.

Even if the rest of the Thanksgiving menu is set, even if it’s entirely in someone else’s hands, you can show up on Thursday with a jar of Hot Cranberry Sauce and have a delicious condiment to set off all that protein and starch.

Now, I’ve played with the formula for this a bunch over the years.

I’ve often used fresh jalapenos, sauteeing them to soften before blending into the sauce. That creates a bright, sharp sauce that’s quite delicious. (Though, I should note that I accidentally filled my house with pepper gas the first year I did this.)

This year I’m aiming for a subtler, smoother (and much simpler) version. It’s got just a handful of ingredients, and the effort-to-payoff ratio is as good as it gets.

Hot Cranberry Sauce

• 12 ounces fresh cranberries

• 1 cup sugar

• 1/2 cup water

• Juice and zest of a large orange

• 4-6 canned chipotles in adobo, plus some of the adobo from the can

• 1 diced habanero pepper (optional)

• 1 teaspoon kosher salt

Add the cranberries, sugar, water, orange zest and orange juice to a small saucepan. The liquids will not cover the berries, and if you have not done this before it will not look like it’s going to work. Trust the process.

Set this pot over medium heat, stirring occasionally. The berries will begin to swell and soften after a few minutes; keep turning them as they begin to give off liquid. After a few minutes more, you’ll be able to squish them against the side of the pan with a rubber spatula. Keep stirring, and they’ll keep breaking down. Once it’s down to a thick, spoonable consistency, add in the chipotle peppers, and use an immersion blender to pulse them into the sauce.

(You can also transfer the whole thing to a standard blender or food processor if you don’t have an immersion blender. Barring that, you could also dice the peppers really fine with a knife and stir them in, but blending is preferred.)

If you’re a learned soul who understands that the culinary peak of Thanksgiving is actually making shameful sandwiches in the days after, then you should trust that this is a spectacular condiment for those.

Now, let’s talk before-dinner drinks.

Flip it and reverse it

My annual go-to “cocktail” while preparing Thanksgiving dinner is delicious, but it’s not exactly sophisticated: I take Martinelli’s Sparkling Cran-Apple juice and pair it with gin. My wife and I call it “The Kids’ Table”, and we’ve been making it for our cook-time enjoyment for a decade-plus.

I am absolutely going to make that again this year, but I’d also like to offer up something a bit more elegant for the post-parade hours, a luxe pre-dinner drink with a slight nod to the flavors of the table: a Cranberry Negroni Flip.

Cranberry Negroni Flip

• 1 ounce Beefeater gin

• 1 ounce Campari

• 1 ounce Cocchi sweet vermouth

• 1/2 ounce 1:1 simple syrup

• 1/2 teaspoon cranberry bitters

• 1 egg (yolk and white)

• Rosemary sprig, for garnish, and because you already have it

Add all of the ingredients (save for the garnish) to a cocktail shaker without ice, and dry-shake for a solid thirty seconds. Carefully open the shaker, add in 3-4 ice cubes, and shake for an additional 15-20 seconds.

Strain into a chilled coupe, and garnish with rosemary.

It’s a striking color, and velvety-smooth, with the bitterness of the Campari coming in as a contrasting backnote to the eggy richness.

Are you put off by the idea of putting a whole raw egg into a cocktail? I get that.

But you know what? It’s Thanksgiving, and you may not have noticed, but Uncle Gary left that turkey out to thaw on the porch last night before frying it. If you’re getting a food-borne illness this holiday, it’s not going to be from this cocktail.

Just buy good-quality eggs, IMO.

Let’s talk menus

Spicy cranberry sauce aside, I have a very rigid notion of what goes on a Thanksgiving table, which means that I’m always fascinated to hear what other people do. To wit: I have never once in my life experienced macaroni and cheese on a Thanksgiving table. I love mac and cheese, but it’s simply never come up.

With this in mind, I want to hear: what’s your Thanksgiving menu?

For us, it’s like this:

• Turkey, spatchcocked and dry-brined for three days (it’s in there now), herb-rubbed and roasted

• Mashed Potatoes

• Sausage and Sage stuffing, specifically this Real Simple recipe we’ve been making for years

• Green Bean Casserole, the recipe from the can of fried onions

• Hot (and regular) Cranberry Sauce

• Gravy, which I will probably forget to make until the last minute

• Pies, imported from Westerville, Ohio’s Just Pies

• Crescent Rolls, of which my nine-year-old son will eat a troubling amount

For many years, we would also make the Brussels Sprouts Slaw mentioned in this newsletter from years ago, but—delicious though it is—it ended up being one too many things to make each year.

I’m especially interested to hear if you’ve got what might be considered “non-traditional” plans for your Thanksgiving menu. I’m always tempted to do this, but I couldn’t bear to break from my once-a-year favorites.

Tell ‘em about your pal Cookbook

Hey! The Friday Newsletters are usually paywalled, but this one isn’t. (Granted, today’s not actually Friday.) Point being, this one’s free, and I’d love if you shared it and spread the word about this newsletter.

Also, hey, the holiday gift-giving season is coming up, and what makes a better gift than a newsletter where a guy makes weird food and cocktails and also sometimes writes strange short fiction?

(That’s a rhetorical question. We all know that a hoverboard is a better gift.)

I know it ain’t that bad but it still hurts

It’s tough to say what music goes with Thanksgiving dinner, so I’m not going to even try. This week’s musical selection is music for the night before Thanksgiving, when you’re back in your hometown and feeling a bit angsty: Better Luck Next Time, the 2023 album from Atlanta-based indie-emo-garage band World’s Greatest Dad.

Off that album, here’s “KO”:

And music just makes me sad now
And none of my friends ever wanna hang out
Yeah, I know it could be worse
I know it’s not that bad, but it still hurts
And all my rowdy friends are either settling in
Or six feet under ground
Feeling like I wanna get in a fight
But I’m KO’d already, turn out the lights

Movie sets, what a concept

Okay, so here’s my ten-cent review of Wicked, which I went with my wife and kids to see on Friday night: it was great!

Seriously, I really enjoyed it, and I wasn’t really expecting that going in. I’m warmer to musical theater than the general public, but my preferences are much more Stephen Sondheim than Stephen Schwartz. I saw Wicked once on Broadway, but that was like twelve years ago and I just thought it was fine.

They nailed the adaptation, though.

Even at two hours and forty minutes for what’s basically Act I of the musical, it didn’t feel overlong, and what was added—additional character development from the book the musical was based on—make it feel much more like a movie than just a stage-to-screen port. The kids loved it, the casting was terrific (Jeff Goldblum as a sleazy Wizard is impeccable, and Bowen Yang was a delight as Glinda’s mean friend), and despite reports on social media no one in my packed showing was singing along.

Here’s what really struck me, though—it felt like actual moviemaking, and I even remarked on the drive home how it didn’t feel like the CGI-heavy slop we’ve become accustomed to from blockbusters. The sets felt real, and not like the characters were just standing in front of green-screens.

That initial impression was apparently correct, as I learned from watching this great Architectural Digest video segment featuring production designer Nathan Crowley.

In it, he talks about building massive, five-story sets, a huge water tank for boats, and planting nine million actual tulips for the fields of Munchkinland.

There’s a great bit around 05:30 in the video where Crowley talks about the right way to use CGI, removing a few stagehands from a shot rather than crafting the world out of it: “that’s what we should be doing, in my opinion—everything is real, and we take out the guys in green suits”.

Also I enjoy that Crowley sketches with a Pentel Sign Pen in this video, which is also my preferred marker for sketching. (It’s an architect thing.)

Okay, but what if you’re staying in?

Maybe you don’t want to brave the multiplex this weekend, because that would require putting on pants, and for some reason your pants no longer fit. Never fear!

I have realized that Thanksgiving Night—assuming you’re not interested in any of the football that’s on, and I’m often not—is a very particular movie-viewing scenario.

That is—the movie needs to be something that will broadly appeal to everyone, but is hopefully something they haven’t seen in a minute. It doesn’t necessarily need to be for kids, but it should also be something they can be in the room for. (I don’t need a random sex scene popping up when I’m watching with my parents either.) It should be fun and not sad or intense, and it should not be a Christmas movie.

(That’s what Friday is for.)

The perfect movie for this scenario is in fact See How They Run, the 2022 Saoirse Ronan / Sam Rockwell 1950s period-piece murder-mystery film.

It’s very charming, it flew under the radar on release, it’s 98 minutes long, and it’s on Hulu right now. You should watch it.

Some other broadly-appealing movies you could watch this weekend:

• Sneakers (1992)

If you have subscribed to this newsletter for a while you already know this is one of my favorites of all time. It’s the perfect caper movie and the cast is incredible.

• My Cousin Vinny (1992)

This movie will never, ever get old. Even the youts can enjoy it!

• While You Were Sleeping (1995)

Per my wife: “It’s just Sandra Bullock walking around being an asshole for 90 minutes, it’s great.”

• The Thin Man (1934)

Every time I drink a cocktail, in the back of my mind I am William Powell about to solve a crime with my similarly-drunk wife.

• Adventures in Babysitting (1987)

I will abide no criticism of this movie. It is incredibly dated, but in the best way possible.

• The Holdovers (2023)

This one just got nominated for a bunch of Oscars last year so it’s not like it’s something you’d have forgotten about but it might be the best “watch with family and everyone likes it” movie made in years.

Aside from See How They Run, that is.

A moment of thanks

I know I’ve already asked one question of you today, but I’ve got another, and it’s an important one.

What are you thankful for?

The internet can be a pretty negative place—sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not—but this is a time to deal in positivity as best we can.

I’m thankful for good health, a bit of career stability, and kids who are growing into fascinating, wonderful and cool people all their own. I’m also thankful for you—thankful that you’ve given me this venue to share my interests with you and hang out.

Seriously: thank you for this.

You know what else I’m thankful for? Pets.

It wouldn’t be a Friday Newsletter without some pets, and even though it’s actually only Tuesday, let’s send this short week out on the right note.

First up this week, Rhys D. has something on the mind other than turkey:

We welcomed Roast Beef into the fray last week - other residents adjusting accordingly. He is not locked in here with us; we are locked in here with him.

I love the accepted naming conventions for cats. It’s always like “here’s my dog Mary Anne, and here’s my cat Bacon Egg and Cheese Sandwich”. Please trust I am being sincere in this, I celebrate the custom.

Great cat.

Finally, this weekend we celebrated our big boy Olaf’s Gotcha Day—he came home with us three years ago Saturday, and while he was an absolute wild man for the first year or so, he’s really settled into being a good dog in addition to being a good boy (which he always was).

Here’s a 2021-vs-2024 comparison:

There is far less crazy in those eyes now.

That’s it for today, friends.

I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving, however you’re spending it, and I hope that you get a chance to rest and relax this weekend.

Thanks for being here.

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)