This year's non-traditional Thanksgiving was back to Mexican, because there's no American like Mesoamerican. Last time (2010) was based on Roberto Santabanez's Truly Mexican; this time, we made a menu of the recipes of Pati Jinich. I now have three of Jinich's cookbooks, and we've been watching our way through her PBS series (we're on Season 8: Sinaloa), and between those it was easy to put together a full menu for our small family gathering. Still just the few of us thanks to The Plague.

We always do no-turkey Thanksgiving meals, since none of us like it. Well, not really no-turkey; turkeys were present, it's just that they were eating instead of being eaten.

Since enchiladas were on the menu, and there's a nice little market where I can buy fresh masa, I decided to make my own tortillas. It's not particularly hard, or even time-consuming if you have the right equipment: a tortilla press and a large griddle or comal. I think it took me around 70 minutes to make 3 dozen tortillas. I made some mini-tortillas for making mini-tostadas later.

By coincidence, all three savory dishes featured corn in some form. Well, that's Mexican food for you. It's also coincidentally gluten-free.

Our first course was Jinich's Avocado/Panela Salad. I made some small changes to it, though: I fried the panela cheese, which I strongly recommend for this; and because some people in my family are capsicum wimps, I replaced the pickled jalapeños with pickled banana peppers. These changes worked and the salad was still delicious.

I fried up those mini-tortillas so I could make the mini-tostadas (tostaditas?), putting a spoonful of avocado salad on top. These were big winners.

In keeping with the theme, instead of wine we drank 54'40" Brewing's 1862, a tasty, light Mexican-style lager.

Half the main course was a Thanksgiving standard, green beans. Only these were the Green Beans with Corn Sauce and Pepitas from Treasures of the Mexican Table. This was a surprisingly complicated recipe for a vegetable side dish, requiring a pan, pot, and a blender, but it was completely worth it. These were absolutely delicious and could have easily been a vegan centerpiece on their own.

The other main dish was far from vegan: Crab and Pea Enchiladas in Sour Cream Sauce, this time from Mexican Today. This was another success, rich, decadent and delicious, despite actually being faster to make than the green beans (if you don't make your own tortillas, that is). These are very rich; you really won't need more than two per person. Def a holiday dish. Like the other dishes, I toned down the heat by swapping in milder peppers.

This may look like a light meal but we were stuffed by the time we finished the main course. So we took a two-hour break before re-convening for dessert, prepared by my sweetie. This was hot chocolate and a cajeta custard, this time a Jinich online recipe. Sublime but light and small, which we appreciated at that point in the evening. Tip, though: use a torch to caramelize the sugar for the custards just before service.

So, that's our no-turkey Thanksgiving for 2022. What was yours?

(No recipe in this article; you can find two of the Jinich recipes in the links)

Yes, yes, I realize I'm posting this a full month after Thanksgiving ... bookmark it and save the ideas for next year, OK?

This year's non-traditional Thanksgiving menu was inspired by The Mosquito Supper Club cookbook, which came out this year to broad acclaim. Having eaten Melissa Martin's Cajun cooking in New Orleans, I was eager to reproduce some of the dishes. And Thanksgiving seemed like the only time to do it, given that many of the recipes in the cookbook take 3 or more hours to prepare.

Since it was just the four of us (thanks, Covid!), we kept it relatively simple, with just a single course for dinner.

My sweetie made sweet potato biscuits from Food Wishes. These were interesting as they deliberately include chunks of unblended sweet potato. They were nice and flaky.

Where the three hours of prep came in was the shrimp jambalaya. One big difference between Cajun and Creole cooking is that, while Creole cooking relies heavily on spices and cream, most of the flavor in Cajun cooking comes from long, slow cooking of ingredients, particularly onions and peppers. The jambalaya starts with caramelizing the onions for well over an hour until they are a deep, dark brown; Martin's estimate was 60-90 minutes, but I think it took me around 105.

The result of all of this cooking was rich, dark flavor on the rice without much in the way of spices. That said, it wasn't as flavorful as I was expecting; I don't really feel like I got my 100-minutes-of-caramelizing worth. Not sure what I did wrong.

According to Martin, jambalaya is often served with some kind of homemade pickle, so I made a batch of pickled beets. As a distinctly Cajun touch, the pickles are seasoned with bay leaves and cane vinegar. Since I couldn't find Steen's Cane Vinegar in time, I used Philipino cane vinegar instead, which was a bit sharp; I expect the Steen's would have been better.

The recipe I'm most likely to repeat out of this dinner, though, was the simplest one, for a side dish of peas and potatoes. We wanted some kind of green vegetable with dinner, but were hampered by the fact that Cajuns apparently don't eat a wide variety of green veggies, and most they do eat are "summer" veggies for the rest of us, like zucchini. Hence the peas. These were unexpectedly delightful, so my adaptation of Martin's recipe follows.

Cajun peas-and-potatoes

• 2 Tbs vegetable oil
• 1 large onion, chopped fine, around 1.5 cups
• 1 lbs baby red potatoes
• 1 to 1.5 lbs good quality frozen green peas, or fresh peas in season
• 1/2 to 1 tsp salt, to taste
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 1/8 to 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1/4 to 1/2 tsp ground black pepper
• 2-3 Tbs butter

Scrub and cut the red potatoes in halves or quarters depending on size. Dump the frozen peas into a collander to thaw while other ingredients cook.

Heat the oil in a large, deep pan over medium heat. Add the chopped onions and saute for 10 minutes, until translucent. Add in the potatoes, and stir around. Reduce heat to medium-low and cover, and cook for another 10 minutes, until the potatoes are partly cooked.

Uncover, and add the peas and seasonings, and stir. If the peas are still frozen, then turn up the heat for 2 minutes to thaw them before turning down to low again. Add a small splash (1-3 Tbs) of water if the mixture seems dry. Cover and cook for another 10-15 minutes, until the potatoes are completely done (check one with a fork).

(For the seasonings, add cayenne pepper according to your taste for spicy things. If adding very little of the cayenne, use the greater amount of black pepper).

Add the butter, and stir in until melted. Serve in a large bowl as a side dish. 4-8 portions, depending.

continued from part 1

Having finished our salads, everone took a break while I finished cooking the main course. This took about 1/2 hour, giving everyone some time to digest.

Instead of rolls this meal, we had Karelian pies, a traditional Finnish snack that my sweetie first tasted when she went to Tampere to sing with the Finnish National Orchestra. I'm pretty sure that the reason why she wanted to do Skandinavian this year was so she could make these again. She made them using the Beatrice Ojakangas recipe.

This traditional recipe is enough work to really make them a holiday food. It's also got to be holiday food considering the amount of milk and butter, and that you top them with mashed egg butter. They worked well for the low-salt diet we had to cook to, but would not have suited a low-cholesterol diet!

For the main course, I chose a recipe from Lagom that would make discrete servings (so as not to create leftovers), but would look dramatic and festive. And taste great, of course. What I settled on was this dish of cod with brown butter shimp. The stacking makes it look very restauranty, but shrimp and cod is a pretty standard Swedish combination.

In keeping with American traditions, the base is garlic mashed potatoes. On top of that is cod baked with lemon and dill, and that's topped with shrimp fried in browned butter with sage. The layered flavors of butter, sage, dill, and garlic really created a palate-pleaser, even though I made the whole thing low-salt.

Finally, dessert. My sweetie combined a German apple cake recipe with the rosemary apple cake from Lagom. The result was amazing; you wouldn't think that rosemary would work with apples and cinnamon, but it really does. Since there were only the four of us, she made a half-recipe in a 6" baking pan, which meant one slice each.

So that was this year's non-traditional Thanksgiving. How was yours? Did you get creative, given this year's restrictions?

Petite Apple Cake with Cardamom and Rosemary

(based on Luisa Weiss’s Versunkener Apfelkuchen from Classic German Baking and Steffi Knowles-Dellner’s Apple Cake from Lagom)

1-1/2 medium apples (a good sweet-tart apple is best, or use a mix of sweet and tart)
Zest and juice of ¼ lemon (approximately)
¼ cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar 5 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
¼ teaspoon vanilla 1-1/2 eggs (crack one egg into a bowl and beat it, then use about 2 tablespoons)
¾ c. flour 1 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoons salt
Heaping ¼ teaspoon cardamom
1 rosemary sprig, smallish, leaves stripped and chopped
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon 2 tablespoons dark brown or demerara sugar

Heat your oven to 350 degrees, and line the bottom of a 6-inch cake pan with parchment paper, preferably one with “handles”—if you don’t have that kind of parchment, use a 6-inch springform pan.

Peel, core, and quarter the apples. Thinly slice each quarter lengthwise, but don’t cut all the way through, leaving the slices hinged together like a fan. Place them on a plate (keep the slices together) and set aside.

Zest the ¼ lemon into a mixing bowl, and squeeze the juice out into a small bowl and set aside.

Add the sugar and butter to the lemon zest in the bowl and beat either with a mixer or with a wooden spoon until fluffy and pale. Scrape down the sides of the bowl and add the vanilla; beat until incorporated. Add the whole egg and beat until combined, then add the ½ egg and beat again; scrape down the sides of the bowl and make sure it’s well mixed.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, salt and cardamom. Beat the flour into the butter mixture in two additions just until combined, then beat in the reserved lemon juice.

Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top. Sprinkle the apple slices with the rosemary and cinnamon, then place decoratively over the batter. Sprinkle with the sugar, and then with the pine nuts.

Bake for 10 minutes, rotate the pan, and continue baking until the cake is golden-brown and a tester inserted in the cake (not an apple) comes out clean, about another 10-15 minutes.

Place the pan on a wire rack to cool for 5 minutes; run a thin knife around the edge of the cake, then use the parchment “handles” to remove the cake from the pan (if you’ve used a springform pan, remove the ring of the springform). Let cool to room temperature.

Serve with whipped cream, if desired. Makes one six-inch cake, serving 4 generously, or 6 in small portions.

We never do traditional American Thanksgiving at our place, but this year particularly called for something a little different. With only the four of us, we really didn't want to have a lot of leftovers, so we wanted a cuisine that encouraged restraint. That's why my sweetie suggested Scandanavian. We hadn't done that before, so I said yes.

Many of the recipes used in this meal came from the cookbook Lagom which was an excellent source for lighter, Swedish-themed dishes. We also relied on The Finnish Cookbook.

To pace ourselves, we divided the meal into 4 courses, starting with some storebought Finnish crispbread and snack foods. The little tastes were herring pickled in wine (of course!), chantrelle mushrooms marinated in oil and herbs, gietost cheese, and lingonberry jam. If you can, I recommend doing this: a taster course while you prepare the later courses of the meal will get folks settled at the table, without making you finish the entrees at 4pm.

The standard libation to go with these kinds of snacks would be aquavit, but with only two of us drinking alcohol, that didn't seem worth the expense. Instead, we washed down the meal with Scandanavian-themed Oregon beers, such as Little Beast's Folkvangr, a very drinkable "dark Norweigan" ale.

The real standout of the evening was this kale salad. Yes, really. Not only was it delicious, it was perhaps the quinessential fall dish, with kale, hazelnuts, cranberries, and apples. The recipe is from Lagom; below is my version with some small variations.

kale-hazelnut-apple salad

based on a recipe from Lagom

1/2 cup pearled spelt (farro) (subs. pearled barley)
10-12 oz kale leaves, stems removed and roughly chopped, around 2 quarts volume, ideally both red and green curly kale
1 lime (about 2 Tbs juice)
1 cup/5oz toasted hazelnuts, roughly chopped
2/3 cup dried cranberries
1 tart apple
1/2 cup mild olive oil
1 Tbs cider vinegar
pinch each of salt and pepper
2 tsp fresh thyme leaves, or 1/2 tsp dried
Equipment: pot, large bowl, blender

Boil 1 quart water with a pinch of salt. Put the spelt/farro into it and simmer for 20-24 minutes, until the grain is tender by still chewy. Drain and let cool.

Place the dried, chopped kale in a large bowl and squeeze the juice out of the lime over it. Massage the juice into the kale but squeezing and turning it with your hands, until it softens. This takes 2-3 minutes, but you'll feel the change in texture.

Split the kale between 4-6 plates. Sprinkle over the spelt, then the hazelnuts, and the cranberries, distributing uniformly.

Now, make the dressing: cut the apple into chunks and put it into a blender or food processor. Pour over the oil and cider vinegar, and add the thyme, salt, and pepper. Puree until smooth.

Drizzle each salad evenly with the dressing. Serve within 20 minutes of making it.

Once stuffed with the zakuski, the family retired while I finished cooking the main course. They were fine with the half-hour break, since there had been so many zakuski.

Of course, we had to have varnyky. Or is that pirogi? As far as I can tell, these dumplings are the same, even having mostly the same fillings. The name just changes depending on which country you're in (varnyky in the Ukraine, pirogi in Poland, and either in Russia). Regardless, they're delicious, and an absolute requirement for any serious Russian/Polish/Ukranian meal. The ones in the picture are filled with a potato, onion, and twaróg cheese mixture, and then tossed with butter and browned onions. The recipe was mostly from Please to the Table, but I made some modifications.

I'll do full instructions, with pictures, on how to make varnyky later.

We also needed some nutritional balance to the meal, so I included a beet, cucumber, and potato salad from Mamuska, with both red and golden beets. This was excellent, although I recommend adding the red beets in last or everything in the salad turns a muddy red.

To make it a festive meal, I wanted to have a fish dish, but nothing too complicated. A Pomeranian (the province, not the dog) flounder dish from Polska seemed perfect. However, the dish required a whole flounder, which was out of the question (actually, not, but see the footnote to this post), so I had to make it with about 1.5lbs of "Dover" sole filets. This let me adapt the dish to use more apples, and become kind of a fish casserole. See the recipe at the bottom of this post.

We served all of this with dark beer, rather than wine. I really don't care much for Russian taste in wine, which tends towards sweet reds. But Russian-style beers are terrific. These were Oregon beers, though: a porter and a dark lager.

Finally, dessert: a hazelnut layer-cake. This recipe comes from my sweetie's family friend Vera, who has it from her Russian family. It's a cake made from ground hazelnuts and egg whites, with "boiled" chocolate frosting. With a different frosting and a minor tweak, the cake could be gluten-free. Regardless, it was delicious and really rich ... the perfect finish to a Russian/Polish Thanksgiving!

Now, what cuisine should I do next year? Leave your ideas in the comments.

Pomeranian-style sole with apples

based on a recipe from Polska

• 1.5 lbs of flounder or "Dover" sole filets
• 4 medium apples, peeled and sliced about 3 cups
• About 8 Tbs butter
• 2 Tbs lemon juice
• 1/2 to 3/4 cup sliced raw almonds
• salt and pepper
• 1/2 cup minced parsley
• 8" x 10" baking pan

Heat the oven to 375F. Melt the butter. Toss the apple slices with 3 Tbs of butter and the lemon juice as soon as you've peeled and sliced them (otherwise they'll turn brown). Create a single layer of apple slices in the bottom of the baking pan; you'll have to place them with your fingers. Bake the apple slices for about 12 minutes, you want them to cook and maybe even sizzle a little.

Meanwhile, coat the fish filets with 3 Tbs butter. When the first layer of apples are done, take out the hot pan, and carefully create a layer of fish on top of the apple slices, overlapping the filets if they are thin. Sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper. Cover this with a single layer of apple slices, which should use most of the rest. Season with a little more salt and pepper. Pop this back in the oven for 10 minutes.

After 10 minutes, sprinkle the top of the casserole with the sliced almonds, covering about 40% of the apples. Push back in the oven and cook for another 10 minutes. If your oven has a convection function, use it for this portion of the cooking. Remove from the oven and sprinkle with parsley. Serve hot, and do not reheat. Serves 4 to 6.

Warning: do not make this dish, or anything, with the fish sold as "arrowtooth flounder". While legitimately a flounder, the arrowtooth has an enzyme which causes its flesh to disintegrate when cooked. This is also an important lesson in having backup fish in the freezer whenever you make recipes with a strange fish.

If you follow this blog, you know that we don't do "traditional" Thanksgiving food. It helps that everyone in my family has always hated turkey. Since it seems like America has become a vassal of Russia, this year we decided to do a Russian/Polish dinner.

So, I bought some cookbooks and checked another out from the library. Mamushka covers Ukraine, Eastern Russia, and some of the former Soviet states. Please To The Table is pan-Russian, from East to West and including many of the "stans". The Russian Heritage Cookbook covers old-school Russian-American dishes. Finally, Polska is a Polish cookbook which will change your perspective on Polish cooking. Besides, how can you not love a Polish cookbook written by a woman named "Zuza Zak"? After a weekend of reading, I was ready to go.

Of course, any festive Russian or Polish meal needs to start with zakuski and vodka. We went out to Great Harvest to get a big loaf of pumpernickel rye, heated it up, and then cut it into little toasts. Then I served toasts with three different toppings:

Russian egg salad and Riga sprats (per Russian Heritage)

Beet butter (from Polska) and boiled eggs

Tangy twaróg cheese and diced radishes (also Polska)

I had plans to also do caviar toasts, but couldn't pick up caviar in Portland in time.

We ate our zakuski with two vodkas, one a bottle I picked up in Moscow, and another a bottle I found in my in-law's cabinet, which dates back to 1970's Los Angeles. The Moscow vodka is really good, the "Kamchakta" a lot less so.

Since we were having vodka, we also had to have the easiest and most essential Moscow vodka bar snack: salt pickes. Here's a non-traditional, but quick and easy, recipe for those:

Quick Salt Pickles

• 5-8 "gherkin" sized cucumbers, about 12 oz
• 1-2 tbs kosher salt

Quarter the cucumbers lenghtwise, and put them in a single layer on a tray, skin side down. Sprinkle wtih salt, making sure to dust each slice. Then leave to "pickle" for at least one hour and preferably 3-4 hours. Serve with vodka.

According to my Russian friend Ilya Kosmodemiansky, the real recipe for salt pickles is more complex and takes longer. See the bottom of the post for a complete recipe

I'll also share my adaptation of this zakuski from Polska:

Bread with Twaróg and Radishes

• 4-6 slices rye or pumpernickel bread
• 1 cup twaróg cheese (see below)
• 1 Tbs sour cream
• 1 Tbs yogurt
• 6-8 salad radishes, diced 1/4", about 2/3 cup
• 2 Tbs minced chives

Mash together the cheese, sour cream, and yogurt. Spread this over the bread slices. Sprinkle with the diced radishes and the chives.

Twaróg is Polish or Russian farmer cheese, available at Eastern European groceries. It can range from dry to creamy; use additional sour cream if you have the dry kind. If you can't get it, then combine 1/2 cup ricotta with 1/2 cup small curd cottage cheese.

On to the main course next ...

Traditional Salt Pickles

This recipe courtesy of my Russian friend Ilya Kosmodemiansky

Take small to mid-size cucumbers, not soft, skin should look like the picture above ... it is better for ion penetration. Cut off the ends and put cucumbers into cold water for half an hour or so.

Brine up to my standards should be 7-10% NaCl solution (2-3tbs of salt per 1l of water, depends on salt). Russian way of pickling cucumbers is all about crunchiness, so avoid iodized purified salt (iodine and high concentration of Na+ destroys cell wall, no crunchiness), experiment with salt, which contains additions of Ca and Mg; both can stabilize cell walls. I even experimented with adding small amount of medicinal CaCl2 solution, works good. Heat your brine practically to boiling point, let it cool down to about 30-35C.

Meanwhile, put cucumbers into a pan or a pot - fit them standing, very tight (the idea is to not let them float when brine added). In between of cucumbers, put spices, pour the brine, put a lid on. In a day or two it would be so called "lightly salted" cucumbers: still bright green, but salty, after several days they turn to be "cask salted". I like both, some people prefer one or another kind.

As for spices, defaults are: dill (with flowers and seeds), black or white pepper (whole), and garlic (whole, not crushed), a bit of mustard grains. Good additions are cloves and fresh blackcurrant leaves. There are no single opinion, to add red hot pepper (fresh, whole one) or not. It is good for taste of cucumbers to add one, but not so good for one another important role of this brine in Russian culture: it is an ideal hangover isotonic.

Second Course

(continued from Part I)

The main choice I had to make for the second course was tagine vs. couscous. While I quite enjoy a good couscous — and let's face it, a major holiday is the only time I'll ever make couscous from scratch — I really wanted to try some bread recipes, so bread and tagine it was. Particularly, I wanted to try some of the semolina breads from Paula Wolfert's The Food of Morocco.

Pictured above is the "tagine bread" from her cookbook. I'm not sure it quite worked out; the bread was a bit denser and harder than I was expecting. Wolfert said that the reader could substitute coarse-ground (pasta grade) semolina for the fine semolina flour Moroccans use in the recipe, but I think maybe that didn't actually work.

The tagine itself, namely the "fish tagine with creamy onion charmoula", worked a lot better. In order to bring in another very old Thanksgiving tradition, I added mussels to it, and swapped out winter squash (butternut) for the summer squash in the recipe.

As a lighter side, I included "beet salad with cinnamon", again from Wolfert. This was another must-keep, as the cinnamon dressing just accented the beets without taking away from their essential flavor. It's displayed here in another one of my bowls from that nesting set.

Dessert

For dessert, we ranged a bit further afield and my sweetie made "Om Ali" a filo "bread pudding" from a Nigella Lawson recipe. But hey, Egypt is in North Africa too, right? Kinda?

Anyway, to Thanksgiving it up, she swapped the apricots and raisins normally in the recipe with dried cranberries. This was brilliant, more like a rich, light noodle kugel than a pudding made with filo.

So another successful Thanksgiving with no turkey ... and that's something to be truly thankful for! I know the turkeys are.

One thing that's saved our holidays is that my in-laws don't like turkey either. I suspect a lot of Americans don't really like turkey whether they eat it or not; after all, why would people be deep-frying it if turkey actually tasted good? Anyway, eight or nine years ago we started on our theme of doing something different and ethnic for each Thanksgiving, including Austrian, New Orleans, Mexican, Turkish, and Italian foods.

This year's theme was Moroccan. Just to make things interesting, I decided to try to render as many of the traditional Thanksgiving foods as possible, in North African form. Except, of course, the turkey.

First Course

To make things even more perfect, we even had plates and other dinnerware from Tunisia.

First we started with an old Thanksgiving tradition: olives. In this case, salt-cured olives marinated in spices (rosemary, garlic, cumin and fresh bay leaves) and olive oil.

Standing in for the butter rolls or Pillsbury croissants, we have rgayif, a layered "pastry" made by the Berbers, from Jeff Koehler's Morocco. First step was rolling out the dough on an oiled mat to transparently thin; this was easier than it sounds. However, Koehler's recipe was faulty in that these really need finishing in the oven. Although my sweetie said I got them right based on her experience, I don't feel like the effort was really worth it; they were more chewy than flaky.

As our mashed potatoes replacement, I had intended Doights De Fatma, or "Fatima's Fingers", based on a recipe from Kitty Morse's North Africa: The Vegetarian Table. These are basically tubular pastry filled with cheesy mashed potatoes, and they seemed perfect. However, 2/3 of them exploded in the oven. I think this was my fault for refrigerating them overnight; it left too much time for the wrappers to get soggy.

No Thanksgiving plate could be complete without cranberry sauce, here replaced by cranberry harissa, here served in a handpainted bowl from Algeria. This was my own invention, loosely based on the harissa recipe from Kitty Morse. This was a success; the cranberries made the harissa just a bit different without making it overwhemlingly cranberry. I'll make this again.

Roasted carrots are also a TY Day thing, and are here represented by carrot, cumin and feta "salad" from Ghillie Basan's Moroccan. This is another recipe I'll make again just because it's so dead simple: you roast carrots in the oven with olive oil and cumin, and then puree them with a little feta. Here the salad is displayed in one of my own bowls, part of a nested set I gave my mother-in-law.

Then we took a long break to get our appetites back, before starting on the second course.

Every year we pick a new cuisine for TY Day, and this year it's Moroccan/North African. Since I don't have lots of experience with Moroccan food, that means time to hit the cookbooks! I used two I owned already and two I borrowed from the SFPL.

Moroccan by Ghillie Basan: this is a general Moroccan cookbook, with a general assortment of recipes from the standards of Moroccan food, so a few appetizers, a couple of kind of couscous, and a half-dozen tagine. The recipes are well-written and easy to follow, though, and the couple of things I've prepared from here have been good. For TY Day, I made the "carrot salad with feta" out of here, which is really more of a roasted carrot hummus. Recommended for anyone who is looking for a slim general Moroccan cookbook.

Morocco by Jeff Koehler: a much more substantial general Moroccan cookbook, with a good representation of all kinds of foods, especially tagine and side dishes. Has a moderate number of seafood dishes as well, something Ghillie Basan lacks. Spectacular photography by the author, including photos of most of the dishes, which are really helpful if you've never made them before. In comparison to Wolfert, though, Koehler's instuctions can be somewhat vague ("coin-sized pieces"). Recommended as an all-around Moroccan cookbook.

The Vegetarian Table: North Africa by Kitty Morse: despite her name, Ms. Morse is a serious North African cook, having lived in Morocco for several years. This slim cookbook gives vegetarian dishes and remakes of dishes from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. If you're a vegetarian, this is the Moroccan cookbook for you; otherwise, you might choose one of the others. Since Morse seems to be very fond of pastries, I'm making the Fatima's Fingers from her cookbook.

The Food of Morocco by Paula Wolfert: her first cookbook was Moroccan food, and Wolfert finally returns there with this omnibus. If you want one massive cookbook which covers almost all of Moroccan food for you — including very detailed instructions for tagine and couscous — and don't care how much bookshelf space it takes, this is it. Also has extensive chapters on breads and seafood, something most Moroccan cookbooks lack. I'm making "tagine bread" and "fish tagine with creamy onion charmoula" from this cookbook.

So, four cookbooks, all recommended depending on what you're looking for.

This may be a little late, but if you're looking for more interesting side dishes/condiments for TY Day tommorrow: this is definitely not Betty Crocker's cranberry sauce. It's spicy, savory and tart. I'm making it to go with the Moroccan theme for our Thanksgiving meal.

Cranberry Harissa

• 3-4 whole dried guajillo or New Mexico peppers
• 1 large red bell pepper, sliced, about 1 1/2 cups
• 1 cup fresh cranberries
• 4-6 cloves peeled garlic
• 2 tsp whole caraway seeds
• 1 tsp whole cumin seeds
• salt
• olive oil

Slice each dried pepper into 4-6 pieces and discard the stem and most of the seeds. Soak in about 1 cup of hot water for 15-20 minutes. When the peppers are done soaking, you'll drain them but save the soaking water.

In a small saucepan, toast the cumin and caraway seeds until fragrant, around 3-4 minutes on medium heat. Set aside. You can skip the toasting if you're in a hurry.

Stem, seed and roughly chop the bell pepper.

Put garlic, seeds, both kinds of peppers, cranberries, and 1 tsp salt into a food grinder, Vitamix or food processor. Add 1/2 cup of the pepper soaking liquid. Puree, adding more soaking water if necessary to get the harissa to grind up.

Pour the puree into the saucepan. Taste and add salt if required. Cook over low heat until brick-red and reduced by 1/3 to 1/2, 30 to 40 minutes.

Cool. Put in jars for keeping, or bowls for serving, covered with a thin layer of olive oil. Makes 1.5 to 2 cups.