Last-Minute Thanksgiving Upgrades

With less than 36-hours until the feast hits the table, I'm sure we all have too much to do and not enough time in which to do it, so today's is a post with a purpose: Fast, easy, small little things you can do to elevate some of your Thanksgiving Day standards - mashed potatoes, green beans, glazed carrots, cranberry sauce, stuffing - from the delicious but possibly tired to a more lively yet still traditional level.

My Daughter’s Love Soup

Respect for ingredients. Appreciation of taste. Legalized child labor. I can think of any number of reasons to engage your kids in the kitchen, but chief amongst them must surely be the joy of creating the food itself, of working side by side with your littles, of watching small hands learn to cut, whisk, and measure.

Corn Salsa Even My Kids Will Eat (Recipe)

Like the 49ers staring at a 4th-and-20, last Friday's post ended with a whimper, a don't think/just-punt sort of moment, as my employer's requirement for some actual work and the post's rapidly escalating word count dictated a hasty retreat from a recipe that I had the poor form to advertise and picture, but not to supply. So, think of today as a reprieve from the instant-replay booth - not exactly lucky, but fortuitous nevertheless.

Corn Salsa Even My Kids Will Eat

Coaching basketball at the professional level, managing a United Nations peace-keeping mission, and getting kids to eat something for the first time - a category generally construed to mean anything with so much as a twig of the family tree in the Vegetable Kingdom, but often including everything not already vetted and approved via previous personal experience (a logical circularity seemingly lost on my own children) - all depend as much on the application of politics as of force: