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Gear up for Thanksgiving

Is holiday cooking sneaking up on anyone else? I walked through the grocery store the other day and vaguely thought “Huh. There are a lot of cans of pumpkin and bags of marshmallows out …” and that was the most thought I gave it. Then, someone casually asked me “Hey, are you making the pumpkin cheesecake and sausage roll for Thursday?”

What?! What’s Thursday?

Oh, yeah.

And so it begins — the time of year when ordinary cooking skills just won’t do. Only the most difficult, family-secret recipes will suffice. (Yep, there’s a reason these only get broken out once or twice a year. My cream cheese budget alone gets higher than my cable bill for these couple of months.)

Fortunately for readers of the News and Sentinel, we bring you the best of the best recipes from your fellow home cooks each year with a few days to spare before Thanksgiving. If the dishes in our 63rd annual cookbook don’t make you want to try something new, then you’d better be sharing your secrets with the rest of us in next year’s contest.

Like a lot of people, I have more than one Thanksgiving dinner to attend each year. For one I will be expected to make the aforementioned dishes, and for the other I will need to either make or (ahem) purchase pre-made a “fruit pizza,” and make a turkey-cranberry wreath, the recipe for which I’ve been tweaking since attending a Pampered Chef party many years ago.

Yes, there is a turkey AND a turkey-cranberry wreath … and then the leftovers from the turkey are used to make another wreath that gets used for lunches for the next week — it’s all carefully thought out by my father.

It can seem a little silly, these food-based traditions and expectations placed on us. But there is something comforting about both knowing, as a cook, that you can bring to the table something your friends and family look forward to each year; and as a guest, having those familiar dishes (some of which have been passed down from those who are no longer sitting at the table) that are special to us as much because of who we remember cooking them as how good they taste.

There’s also something comforting about knowing your aunt won’t try to boot you out of the house this year for forgetting the fruit pizza.

So if you haven’t already started gathering the ingredients and making the list of required recipes, consider this your notice to get started. Some of what needs to get done has to start tomorrow, for the more complicated dishes. And, for me, anyway, it is also time for the annual finding-of-the-kitchen-gadgets, as I hunt down those rarely used pieces like the fat separator for the gravy that is probably nestled in bubble wrap at the bottom of the same closet that holds the mini-cup cake tins and pineapple corer/slicer.

Good luck friends, it’s the most wonderful time of the year in the kitchen, too!

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Congratulations to all those honored during last week’s Chamber of Commerce of the Mid-Ohio Valley annual banquet. The gathering is always a chance to reconnect with friends and business associates while enjoying a fun evening of good food and celebrating the spirit of entrepreneurship and teamwork that helps so many businesses thrive.

Christina Myer is executive editor of The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. She can be reached via e-mail at cmyer@newsandsentinel.com

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