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Lighter Feasting for the Holidays
I clipped two dessert recipes from the November 1982 issue of Chicago Magazine, “Best of Dines, Worst of Dines.” Four decades later, they are still in my recipe file. One is complex and very rich, while the other is true simplicity and light in both preparation time and calories. I further simplified the simple recipe to universal acclaim this past week. For Thanksgiving, I will prepare a cranberry relish, made from scratch, that is both flavorful and ridiculously healthy. I suspect I will also make cornbread muffins, relatively healthier than general-purpose flour breads. What tasty, tempting recipes have you enjoyed with Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts and parties?
When I first carried the two restaurant dessert recipes away from school in Chicago, I took the first occasion to wow home audiences. The first was a flourless chocolate cake, that requires a springform pan. This was gluten-free before gluten-free was a thing. The volume of the cake is created by six egg whites beaten stiff. The substance comes from finely chopped nuts. The chocolate is semisweet. For garnish, either dust with powdered sugar (perhaps with a pattern/stencil) or follow the original recipe for another level of chocolate ganache. If you like chocolate, if you really like chocolate, you will love this.
The other recipe, even in its original form, is far simpler, far quicker, and far lighter. Pears, poached, with fresh berries, reduced to a sauce over low heat, that is all. Now the details.
You might be asking yourself, what cave have you been living in that you missed a famine in our own country? You haven’t missed it at all; the famine we’re suffering through, however, does not cause ordinary starvation as we see in Burkina Faso, Congo, Nigeria, or South Sudan. We don’t see the desolation of hunger and deprivation. Instead, America is going through a famine the likes of which we’ve never seen: it is the famine of the mind, the heart and the soul. And unlike the famines in other countries that we watch with heartache, we try to turn away from the ugliness, or blame others for what has occurred here. To some degree, we are all partly responsible for what is happening: there are perpetrators but there are also the silent witnesses.
