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

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

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

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.

You might need light sweaters and some extra calories this weekend if you are going to walk around Chestertown and enjoy the spectacle that is Downrigging Weekend. Your mother was right, and breakfast is still the most important meal of the day, so start it off with something tasty. Keep the pencil shavings and twigs for during the week, and gobble up some hearty apple-sultana cinnamon swirls. Save room for sultana scones, too.

My mother was the odd duck on our block who handed out boxes of raisins on Halloween. Can you imagine the shame? While Mom was imposing her sensible vision of order on the neighborhood, I was dancing from house to house, scarfing up as much forbidden candy as I could get. Other households doled out wonderfully decadent candy bars unknown in our house: Baby Ruths, Butterfingers, $10,000 bars, Dark Hersey bars, Clark bars, and Three Musketeers. Such lavish loot! But I lived in the house where crimson boxes of Sun-Maid raisins were the Halloween treat. My mother could well have been handing out toothbrushes. If she were still alive, she probably would be enthusiastically giving out bags of organically-sourced kale chips to all the little Blueys and sand worms and Hermione Grangers who would have come knocking on her door.

I do not mean to disparage raisins completely, but every once in a while, it seems perfectly reasonable to enjoy a kid holiday; something extraordinary and special. Be kind, and generous, with your little ghosties and ghoulies tonight – let them enjoy to spoils of kid-dom. Go ahead – give out Snickers bars. Tomorrow will be time enough to revert to the healthy and home-baked path to righteousness and good health. And to enjoy the Schooner Sultana and Downrigging. https://downrigging.org There will be tall ships and blue grass music, and all that Chestertown has to offer.

The rest of the world enjoys “sultanas” – we Americans have Thompson seedless raisins. (And, of course, Chestertown enjoys the tall ship Sultana.) Don’t quibble. Bake. You can use raisins, golden raisins, sultanas or currents in these recipes. Raisins and Sultanas

Your kitchen will smell wonderful and autumnal while you are baking apples, raisins and cinnamon. This is excellent preparation for Thanksgiving, which is just around the corner: Sultana Cinnamon Swirls

I just love the mechanics of rolling and cutting the dough for these cinnamon rolls. My children grew up with store-bought, vacuum-sealed Pillsbury cinnamon rolls for special breakfast events. These are better. These are much more delicious, and haven’t been doused in preservatives. Cinnamon Rolls

Of course, Food52 always has good ideas: https://food52.com/recipes/24943-grandma-bercher-s-cinnamon-rolls Have a couple of cinnamon rolls, don your sweater, and take to the Chestertown streets. Watch out for the geese.
The inimitable Mary Berry has a recipe for homemade scones: Mary Berry’s Scones

“We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea – whether it is to sail or to watch it – we are going back from whence we came.”
-John F. Kennedy

Here is a link to all that is happening this year for Downrigging Weekend

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