Category — Holidays

This is my Sittau, Alice Kayal

Like most families, we looked forward to the day AFTER Thanksgiving more than the feast itself. Part of that was because Sittau only cooked American once a year, so the meal wasn’t her best work. But the day after….the bird became her famous Syrian turkey stew. Please see the recipe below, adapted from my family’s cookbook A Taste of Syria — and check out my story about Thanksgiving turns us all into Americans.

Sittau’s Turkey Stew

Makes 4 servings

1 can (14.5 oz) stewed tomatoes, or peeled whole tomatoes, crushed

1 cup chicken stock

3 tablespoons fresh or bottled lemon juice

2 cups cooked turkey, cubed

1 teaspoon kosher salt

1/2 teaspoon allspice

1 10-oz package frozen peas

Heat tomatoes, broth and lemon juice in a heavy-bottomed pot over medium heat. Bring to a simmer, cover, and let cook 20 minutes.

Add the salt, allspice and turkey, and simmer five more minutes. Add the peas and simmer until heated through, about five minutes. Serve over rice.

Whether you’ve got a meatball fiend, an armchair traveler, a rock n’ roll groupie or a plain old celebrity chef stalker on your gift list, cookbook publishers have provided. Please check out my story for some ideas about what to get the cook on your list.

Sugar skulls for Mexico's Day of the Dead

Call me old-fashioned, but do we really have to start thinking about Halloween already? I mean, yes it’s October now, but I was finding candy corns and Hershey miniatures right next to my back-to-school supplies. Pretty soon, they’ll be sold with your Fourth of July firecrackers.

But at least the early warning gives you plenty of time to plan. Americans aren’t alone in their fascination with ghoulish confections. Chocolate coffins, sugary bread shaped like bones, and skulls of molded sugar are traditional fare for Mexico’s Day of the Dead, which comes right after Halloween. Sugar skulls are the most famous of the treats, made or purchased by every household and stacked into colorful mounds on street carts. In Britain, London-based baker Lily Jones, aka: Lily Vanilli, churns out cupcakes with coconut-jelly eyeballs and cakes modeled after human heads, saying that the merger of the sublime (the taste) and the grotesque (the design) is just part of being human.

“There’s a fascination with horror,” she told me in an interview last year. “It’s just imagination, something out of the ordinary. There’s a lot of beauty in it too, in the strange and the unusual.”

Recipes for her grotesque cupcakes are collected in her book “A Zombie Ate My Cupcake.”

But for a less ghoulish, more wholesome cupcake, try Martha Stewart, the never-fail go-to for spiffing up basic recipes. She’s got bats and spiders and brains like the rest of them, but somehow there is merely the suggestion of grossness – not an actual pool of fake blood that puts you off your treat. Her Wicked Witch cupcakes are about as far as I want to go.