orphan's thanksgiving

I couldn't afford to fly home, and most of my friends have left town. So I invited a couple of other stragglers-alone-in-the-city for an orphan's thanksgiving. In defiance of tradition (and in rueful acknowlegment that I'm better at cooking Indian vegetarian than roasting large chunks of meat) I made spicy chana with tamarind and a sort of desified butternut squash, roasted with ginger, cumin, coriander, and garam masala. As pointed out in the comments to this Mutiny thread--which has some lovely recipe links--there's something highly appropriate about subverting the traditional North American Thanksgiving dishes, which of course are themselves the result of conquest, colonization, and cross-fertilization.

But since I didn't feel like baking pies, I paid homage to family custom with my grandmother's cranberry-orange-walnut bread. This is a perennial Thanksgiving/Christmas feature in her house; once during the year I was living in Scotland she actually airmailed a loaf 5,000 miles to Edinburgh to keep me in seasonal cheer. It's one of my two favorite quickbreads (the other's a self-invented recipe for banana-coconut-cinnamon loaf dubbed 'thesis bread': in Oxford, I baked it for dissertating friends as their deadlines approached). This is a wonderfully easy recipe, and the tartness of the berries makes it more lively than most sweet, cake breads.


Rose Farm Cranberry Orange Walnut Bread

2 cups flour (white unbleached, or half white/half wheat)
1/4 cup wheat germ (optional, substitute 1/4 c flour otherwise)
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp soda
1/4 cup softened butter
1 tsp orange or lemon zest
3/4 cup strong orange juice
1 beaten egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup fresh cranberries
1/2 cup walnut pieces

Preheat oven to 350 F/180 C

Sift together dry ingredients in a bowl. Cut in butter, and mix in egg, juice, vanilla, zest. Stir in walnuts and cranberries. Pour into a lightly greased loaf pan. Bake for 50 minutes to an hour; until knife inserted in center comes out clean.

Remove the loaf from pan when halfway cooled. At this point it will have a slightly crunchy top crust that's nice, but hard to cut through (the bread is prone to crumbling, especially if you load it with extra berries as I'm wont to do). For a cakier and easily sliceable loaf, wrap it tightly in aluminium foil while it is still slightly warm, and leave it to cool. The steam from inside will soften the crust.