THANKSGIVING RECIPE INSPIRATION

​Attention Shoppers; both apple and honey cakes are no longer available in the holiday aisle. Personally, I’m not sad about it nor will I be dipping my toe into the gluten-free pumpkin-chocolate-chip quick bread waters. For the next 47 days, my focus will be on 9” aluminum pie plates and 11 oz. circles of pie dough. Not that I’m counting the days, or the pie shells, or the dwindling number of vacant shelves in the freezer adjacent to my workspace. It’s early in the pre-Thanksgiving game, affording plenty of time for critical thinking, strategizing and cautious yet fleeting optimism. In a few short weeks, just about the time toothy Jack o’ Lanterns lose their grin, my optimism will be replaced with complete and utter dread.
 
Right now, I’m looking away from American Thanksgiving and looking forward to this very Monday’s Canadian Thanksgiving. Combing through my well-worn expandable file of recipes, I’m fixated on everything pumpkin, cranberry, and apple. These are the recipes plucked from every Thanksgiving I’ve ever encountered as a professional baker. Each one is scribbled with notes, the excruciating details that analyze oven temperatures, baking times, parchment linings and foil tenting. Filed under “P” is a recipe for an embarrassingly large quantity of pecan bars, circa 1998. Baked in a full sheet pan outfitted with a pan extender, one recipe yielded enough nuttiness to feed a casual gathering of 96 guests. Scrawled in orange Sharpie marker across the top of the recipe are the words, “NEVER BAKE ON TOP RACK OF CONVECTION OVEN. EVER.” Navigating a sheet pan weighted down with pounds of nutmeats suspended in hot, sugar syrup is best attempted at eye level. These are the kitchen life lessons acquired over too many years and far too many oven burns.
 
I pause for a moment at a recipe for Poached Pears with Spicy Gingerbread, a cake baked in pans with deeply fluted sides and removable bottoms. Emblazoned across the top of the recipe is the not-so-gentle reminder to, “LINE PANS WITH PARCHMENT CIRCLES EXTENDING BEYOND THE PAN BOTTOM.” The memory of gingerbread batter seeping between pan bottom and sheet tray instantly conjures the fragrance of scorched molasses. The recipe for poached pears conjures a totally different fragrance memory. Set afloat in a saucepan of white wine, bobbing alongside cinnamon sticks, curls of orange peel, and speckled vanilla beans, the pears were both spicy and perfume-y.  Scribbled in the margin of the recipe is the reminder, “DON’T FORGET- PARCHMENT CIRCLE COVERING PEARS IS HOT.” I must have forgotten more than once.
 
In my ridiculously over-expanded, expandable file are a few recipes I’m considering for the weekend. On Saturday, the first round of strategic dessert planning will commence. We will gather in my sister’s Toronto kitchen, with good/bad pop music from the 80s blaring in the background. We will discuss and reminisce about recipes; restaurant recipes, Jessie recipes, recipes plucked from magazines and cookbooks, vacillating between what I want to make and what my sister suggests. We will talk about dessert in excruciating detail circling back around and around again. My sister is a brilliant strategist and planner, capable of making wise decisions. I am the problem, unable to truly decide the dessert story until I stand face to face with the produce at the St. Lawrence Market. My initial plans will undoubtedly change once again until my sister, the wise one, will stop the madness by saying, “Why do you ask for input when in the end, you will just make what you want to make?” Which is the very reason why an expandable, recipe file filled with inspiration is as critical to the holiday as a reliable pair of stretchy pants with an expandable waistband.