Dear John,

It’s a oven-baking evening. I turned it on for dinner inspired by the book I’m reading. A character was making a tahini-yogurt dressing to go on roasted butternut squash and red onion and I realized we hadn’t had the roasted squash and onion from Jerusalem yet this season. And we had 2/3 of the last squash hanging out in the refrigerator. The oven stayed hot to roast chickpeas (I cooked a pound of beans yesterday just for this). And while the oven was on we might as well toast up the squash seeds. And let’s take advantage of a hot oven to cook up your next batch of granola.

The kitchen is warm. You’re up to your elbows in dishes. There are lots of nibbles. My heart is happy.

Meal Plans

• Fried rice with leek greens and Napa cabbage
• Roasted Brussels sprouts (not a meal. But let’s be honest about what I’m going to do with these.)
• Kale salad with pomegranate and blue cheese and apple slices
• Kale salad with roasted cranberries and cheddar and that last bit of roasted squash
• Carrot lentil soup? Or carrot sweet potato curry soup? We do still have sweet potato in the freezer…
• Dragon noodles with carrot and cabbage

Let’s talk cranberries

On Saturday, I made cranberry carrot steel cut oatmeal for breakfast. (Added maple syrup and apple cider for sweetness. Totally forgot spices beyond a dash of salt. It was delicious. Still working my way through the leftovers.) At lunch, we ate leftover squash stuffed with various things, including cranberries. For dinner, arugula salad with roasted beets and cranberries and pear-mustard dressing. Dessert, apple-cranberry crisp.

On the center of the table we have a half gallon jar filled with last week’s cabbage, the missing third of the squash that was tonight’s dinner, and more cranberries. I’m so curious how this sauerkraut will turn out. I see bubbles. Right now! They’re floating up as I type! Fermentation is weird and cool and I feel like a newbie in my fascination. (Do not think too hard about what we will do with this half gallon of cran-kin kraut. I have already decided that we should actually cook meat for one meal to pair with it. We may need to source “rye bread” for you for sandwiches. Erm….something something potatoes.)

My mom’s offered to freeze some (in anticipation of her cranberry relish next year?), but I’d rather use them now. An internet friend made cranberry salsa (they use less sugar than this recipe, maybe more cilantro). There’s this cheesecake that is all the more tempting because we did not have the cheesecakes of summer this year. And maybe we need some refrigerator pickles for the fanciest cheese plates in the coming year.

The less than perfect cranberries end up in the freezer stock bag with the apple cores. We already have a cranberry-apple chutney and cranberry-apple syrup (shhh…..the jelly didn’t set, next time do the plate test!) that can top pancakes and be mixed into drinks. Maybe we’ll manage a proper cranberry jam.

So while the fridge currently feels overtaken, this is the reminder to myself (and, I suppose to you) that we really are using a lot of cranberries right now. I have bought frozen cranberries explicitly for the purpose of smoothies before, so the fact that we already have some in our freezer is a good move. There’s only two weeks of fruit share left and then I’ll be missing all the cranberries quickly.

Love you,

Sarah

PS I know you can’t eat it, and it used dried cranberries instead of fresh, but I’m putting the cranberry-chocolate-walnut brickle on the cookie party list.