Monday, November 22, 2010

Make your green bean casserole from scratch - Happy Thanksgiving!

Update: the recipe is here.

Since it's Thanksgiving Week, and my mind is elsewhere, Wuthering Expectations will postpone its ponderations about William Thackeray, Emily Dickinson, and, endlessly, Nathaniel Hawthorne for a week.

My heartfelt holiday advice is not to use a can of cream of mushroom soup in your green bean casserole, but to make the sauce from scratch.  You can do it all in one pan.  Everyone will be happier.  Let me know if you want the recipe.  My recipe is France-tested.  Meaning, it was served, and was un triomphe, at a Thanksgiving dinner in France, with French guests.  No, not Parisians, but jolly, friendly Normans.

Make the fried onion topping from scratch, too (separate pan for that).  Shallots fry up more prettily than onions.

Is anybody cooking a truffled turkey for Thanksgiving?  One of those truffled trukey posts has a recipe in the comments.  Man, back in 2007 I knew how to keep it short.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Postscript:  The Library of America blog wrote up my Wilder Little House week.  If you thought I was blowing smoke, but were too polite to say so here, go over there and tell them.  An LOA edition of Wilder is in the works - good.

6 comments:

  1. I love the idea of making the green bean casserole from scratch! It's so traditional in my family to make the admittedly kinda yucky kind with all store bought ingredients. I'll have to try this next year, or for Christmas. I'm just attending a drinks a dessert Thanksgiving this year. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Congratulations on being picked up by that other site! As a prairie writer myself, I'm glad to see more buzz about Laura I. She deserves it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Once you add the homemade fried shallots, even die-hard traditionalists will admit defeat.

    Shelley - yes, more prairie writing. I'm a prairie kid myself, and live on the prairie (or its plowed, paved, and scattered remnants) now. I don't know how to explain it, but the prairie sky is different than the mountain sky, which is different than the seashore sky, which is different than the desert sky. I love how Wilder captures some of that mystery.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Great advice about Thanksgiving! I so agree, about the mushroom soup and that is why I actually found your blog. For the past two years I have made my mushroom sauce from scratch but I lost the recipe and I would love to have yours! Thank you!

    ReplyDelete
  5. I would love your recipe for the homemade greenbean casserole. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  6. All right, I just put it up in a new post. What the heck!

    If you make it, feel free to let me know how it goes.

    ReplyDelete