Thanksgiving

Have an organic, free-range, local Thanksgiving

If you’ve waited ’til the last minute to buy ingredients for your Thanksgiving feast, allow us to suggest that you seek out turkeys of the organic, grass-fed, free-range, local, and/or heritage variety. Because no one’s thankful for pesticides in their gristle (or for butylated hydroxytoluene, for that matter). Apples, celery, and potatoes are all high […]

In which we attempt to calculate how much an organic feast would cost

There’s something about Thanksgiving that seems to prompt people to think about where their food comes from. Maybe it’s all the cornucopias and sheaves of wheat depicted in supermarket circulars, or maybe it’s the focus on the harvest. Visions of farmers bringing in the crops may lead people to think about how food gets to […]

Readers share instructions for tasty Thanksgiving treats

Try your hand at reader recipes. Photos: iStockphoto A couple of weeks ago, we asked you, dear readers, to send in your favorite Thanksgiving recipes. We got a smorgasbord of replies, from Dilly Dip to The Best Pressed Pie Crust In the World — and nary a hint of tryptophan in sight. We’ve collected your […]

A recipe for no-boil pumpkin lasagna

For most of my adult life I’ve been anti-lasagna. It’s not that I refuse to eat it. Quite the reverse! I love to eat lasagna. I just refused to make it. The idea of boiling giant, unwieldy sheets of pasta always got on my nerves. It didn’t seem worth it, no matter how delicious the […]

Thanksgiving isn’t just about the food; it is about relationships

The Thanksgiving holiday serves to focus our attention on man's relationship with nature. In a celebration of the fall harvest, we express our appreciation for the bounty we have received.

In American tradition, the Pilgrims' survival in the New World was enabled by the Native Americans, with whom they joined in a great feast of thanks. Every year Americans set aside a day to hold their own feast of Thanksgiving which features traditional foods that are native to the Americas, such as, turkey, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, corn, turnips, and pumpkin pie.

Our celebration of Thanksgiving is the perfect opportunity to reinforce our connection, not only with the earth which still provides us with such a bounty but also the members of our community who have made raising these foods their life's work. While opening a can of yams, defrosting a frozen industrial turkey and buying a boxed pumpkin pie may have meaning in continuing some parts of the Thanksgiving tradition, I suggest we celebrate our relationship with the present as well as the past by making an extra effort to eat as many of these traditional foods from local, humanely raised sources as possible. Here in the Northeast that is pretty easy for most of the meal, but what about the turkey?

How to pick wines that don’t taste computer-programmed

How to choose wine for the Thanksgiving table?

There will either be pressure, financial and otherwise, to grab big bottles of cheap plonk off the supermarket shelf, or conversely, pressure to consult Wine Spectator or some other "expert" source and find bottles receiving high scores. Resist both impulses. Here's why -- and how.

Two non-turkey recipes for the Thanksgiving feast

Thanksgiving is a funny holiday. It's a weird mix of frenzy and sloth, gratitude and greed. What should be a fun and peaceful time spent with relatives and friends is often preceded by the chaos of having too much to do and too little time in which to do it.

If you are the person responsible for cooking the Thanksgiving meal, you know that Extreme Grocery Shopping is the hallmark of the holiday. Simply getting your groceries home can be the stuff of nightmares if you live in a crowded city or suburb. Cooking the meal is a cakewalk by comparison.

Every year as I approach the local Whole Foods in the days running up to Thanksgiving, I see couples in the parking lot dividing their lists in two, synchronizing their watches, and saying things like, "Commencing operations at Oh Seven Hundred! We reconnoiter in Spices and Baking Needs! Go! Go! Go!"

Thanksgiving

Giving thanks is a struggle this year.

In the past 12 months we have been struck by three body blows from Mother Nature: the South Asia tsunami, Hurricane Katrina on the U.S. Gulf Coast, and the Kashmir earthquake. In each case, the destruction wrought by nature was exacerbated by a lack of foresight and criminal negligence on the part of governments. In each case, the suffering is ongoing.

Taken individually, each is a tragedy. Taken together, they are unimaginable. Numbing.

Yet we do not have the luxury of numbness, for every day the dimensions of two interlinked crises -- the disruption of global climate and the exhaustion of the world's primary energy source -- become more clear. These crises portend disasters like those we've seen this year, ever more frequent and more severe. Still the world's governments stumble forward with shameful disregard, shackled by habit, by ignorance, by greed, content on some level that they will not have to weather the worst of it.

It is a particularly bitter year for those of us in the U.S. We continue to see our nation's reputation and credibility eroded by a series of foreign policy blunders. We are in a position to lead the word to a cleaner, healthier, more prosperous future -- yet instead we find ourselves mired in a debate about the legitimacy of torture. We spurn all efforts to address climate change. We burn heedlessly through the world's remaining oil. We wage war.

When confronted with the three epic natural disasters of the past year we have displayed a parsimony that borders on the repugnant.

In the hills and mountains of Northern Pakistan, hundreds of thousands of penniless, hungry men, women, and children sleep in tents, their houses and lives reduced to rubble, waiting the coming of a harsh winter that a horrific number of them will not survive. Yet the U.N. has been able to raise less than $300 million to help them -- as much as we spend in a few days in Iraq, a negligible rounding error in our GDP. Already they have begun to die.

On 9/11/01, one kind of malaise breached our shores; this hurricane season, another did. Our isolation from the world's struggles, our glorious island, is falling away. We will soon have to accept the challenge of forging a better, more equitable, more sustainable future, or we too will see ours sink into strife and misfortune.

So it is difficult to search our hearts for gratitude, in a season of darkness, for bearers of light that seem ever more scattered and overwhelmed. But bearers of light there always are, in governments, in businesses, in schools, in communities across the world. We all know of them. Now more than ever we are called to give thanks for them, to support them -- and to join them.

For my part, I am acutely conscious of the blessings I enjoy, my privileged place in a shrinking world. So above all I give thanks for my family, my wife and my two boys, who at the end of every day I spend studying the globe's ill health await me at home with warmth and joy.

Three paths toward a green — and tasty — Thanksgiving

Of all the crimes against nature Thanksgiving inspires — SUVs clogging the highways, planes shuttling fliers around the country, factory farms churning out millions of frozen turkeys — the most grievous may be culinary. First, the above-mentioned turkeys typically taste like sawdust; cranberry “sauce,” a gelatinous goo that ominously retains the shape of the can […]