Good morning, welcome to this symmetrical Tuesday – a lot of 2s in today’s date.
Since it is Thanksgiving week, I thought we might as well continue with the holiday theme, despite my overall bah-humbug mentality. We are t-minus three days from the mega meal. (I’ve been counting day-of as one, since so much cooking actually takes place on that day…is this the wrong approach? Shows you how much I know about meal prep).
So, assuming we are indeed three days out, today is, according to a number of online planners, the day to pick up your alcoholic beverages (assuming you have pre-ordered them, because the stores are a veritable frantic free-for-all these days and good luck finding exactly what you’re looking for this close to T-Day), refrigerate and pre-make your stock, your pumpkin pie filling, your stuffing, and – the coup de grace, if you’re doing it from scratch – your cranberry sauce.
Here’s the part where I reiterate my love of canned cranberry sauce. According to Ocean Spray, the nation’s largest producer of cranberry sauce, of the 86.4 million cans it sells a year, 72 million are sold between September and the end of December, which is a crapton of perfectly log-shaped jellied cranberry product. Only about five percent of the total cranberry crop is sold fresh.
There’s a long history of serving cranberry sauce at holiday tables in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. The flavor profile depends on where you’re eating, with the U.S. (given our infamous national sweet tooth) generally preferring a sweeter version, while the European take tends to be a bit more on the sour side.
Cranberries have a distinctly American provenance, as they are the one of the few commercially grown fruits that are native to this country. Indigenous people were known to eat the berries, boiling them with water and potentially something sweet to take their edge off, and also use them to dye cloth.
The sugared version didn’t became widely popular until the 19th century, but a recipe for cranberry sauce does appear in the 1796 edition of The Art of Cookery by Amelia Simmons – the first known cookbook authored by an American. (She also suggested that you could eat your roasted turkey with pickled mangoes, which really sounds pretty good).
Ocean Spray changed the cranberry game in the 1930s by introducing the so-called “wet harvest,” (cue the iconic image of a farmer in waders in a cranberry bog). This made it a lot easier to pick the cranberries en masse, because instead of having to laboriously pluck them from the vine, you simply flood the bog, wait for them to float to the top of the water, and then scoop them up.
Ocean Spray now has two products – jellied cranberry sauce, and whole berry cranberry sauce. Each can contains about 200 berries. The man responsible for figuring out how to pack all that tangy deliciousness into a can was a guy named Marcus L. Urann, who left his legal career to buy a cranberry bog. His iconic cranberry log became widely available in 1941.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
There are some funky cranberry recipes out there, the most notable of which might be NPR reporter Susan Stamberg’s mother’s concoction known as cranberry relish, which calls for sour cream, onions, and horseradish all blended together to a shocking Pepto Bismol pink mush. Sounds crazy? Maybe. But there’s a whole day dedicated to cranberry relish, and it happens to be today.
Who knew?
If you really want to go down the rabbit hole regarding all the potential ways to make cranberry sauce, click here.
We’re on a bit of a warming trend, with temperatures heading up into the 40s. We’ll have partly cloudy skies for the foreseeable future, with no rain expected until Black Friday, which might dampen shopping enthusiasm a hair. We’ll see.
In the headlines…
Authorities are probing how the alleged gunman in the deadly shooting at an LGBT nightclub in Colorado Springs over the weekend was able to obtain the firearm used in the attack given the man’s troubled history.
The deadly mass shooting has shaken gay communities across the country. That sense of unease has been acutely felt in New York, one of the country’s gay cultural centers and the site of the 1969 Stonewall Inn uprising.
Cops are investigating a recent spate of brick attacks targeting a Midtown gay bar as a hate crime, the NYPD said.
Richard Fierro, an Army veteran, said he “went into combat mode” when a gunman opened fire Saturday night inside an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colo., killing five. He confronted the gunman and subdued him until police arrived.
The death toll could have been much higher, officials said, if patrons of the bar had not stopped the gunman.
The victims included caring bartenders who wanted to make people feel at home, and patrons of a club that offered more than a fun night out.
President Joe Biden pardoned two turkeys, Chocolate and Chip, as he discharged the presidential duty of the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardon.
“The votes are in, they’ve been counted and verified, no ballot stuffing, no fowl play. The only red wave this season is going to be if German Shepherd Commander knocks over the cranberry sauce,” Biden told an audience on the White House South Lawn.
Energized by the White House’s actions on key priorities such as climate, student debt and marijuana, progressives are openly rooting for Ron Klain to stay on as Biden’s top aide.
With Republicans on track to assume control of the House next year, progressive groups that have been bracing for that prospect for months are rolling out a coordinated campaign to counter the new majority as soon it takes charge in January.
Nuclear energy in California got a jolt of financial support from the Biden administration as the US Department of Energy awarded a $1.1 billion grant to Pacific Gas & Electric to help extend the life of its Diablo Canyon Power Plant on the central California coast.
The GOP takeover of the House will give Republicans the power to block efforts by Democrats to approve new regulations or taxes on the fossil-fuel industry, private-equity funds, tobacco makers and drug manufacturers.
Manhattan prosecutors rested their case in the tax fraud trial of Donald Trump’s family business without calling a witness they had previously planned to question, an indication of confidence after the company’s longtime chief financial officer testified last week.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office has moved to jump-start its criminal investigation into Trump, according to people with knowledge of the matter, seeking to breathe new life into an inquiry that once seemed to have reached a dead end.
Republican Rep. David Valadao is projected to win in California’s 22nd congressional district, keeping his political life alive for another term despite voting to impeach Trump following the Capitol riot.
Elon Musk extended his job-cutting at Twitter Inc., laying off some employees in sales after they had signed on to the billionaire’s vision for the social-media platform, people familiar with the matter said.
Firing people. Talking of bankruptcy. Telling workers to be “hard core.” Musk has repeatedly used those tactics at many of his companies.
U.S. stocks fell as investors worried about a rise in Covid-19 infections overseas and the state of the economy at home heading into the key holiday season.
The brains of some COVID sufferers were changed by the disease, a new study utilizing specialized MRI machines has uncovered.
The affected brain regions are linked with issues commonly reported in long-COVID patients, such as fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, and other cognitive problems, the researchers said.
Novavax said it had delivered a written notice to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, terminating with immediate effect an agreement for the sale of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine to low- and middle-income countries.
The eagle-eye focus on Covid has shifted how researchers — and the public — think about the seasonal flu.
Biden is sending federal aid to Western New York to help state and local authorities clean up from the massive storm that dumped more than 6 feet of snow in western and northern New York and is blamed for three deaths, the White House announced.
Hochul is gearing up for a full four-year term at the helm and will soon set an agenda that will serve as a blueprint for New York’s post-pandemic future.
New York awarded its first recreational weed dispensary licenses, a milestone in a lengthy process during which a burgeoning gray market of pot sales has cropped up across New York City.
Twenty-eight licensees went to companies owned by people with past marijuana convictions or their family members. Another eight licenses went to nonprofit organizations that serve people who were formerly incarcerated.
While New York is already flush with illicit vendors, officials have promised the first licensed dispensaries will open before the end of 2022, less than six weeks away.
The Office of Cannabis Management, which develops regulations under the control board’s supervision, said most of the licenses went to people in New York City and on Long Island.
Hundreds of thousands of pounds of weed — worth hundreds of millions of dollars — is ready to be sold at dispensaries. There’s one hitch: Instead of being shipped to retail stores, the weed is just piling up.
A total of 150 licenses will eventually be made available, but earlier this month a federal judge issued an injunction temporarily blocking license approval in some parts of the state.
New Yorkers who actually ride the subway supported Hochul by a wider margin than her overall 69.5 to 30.3 city victory over Republican Lee Zeldin in the Nov. 8 election.
Hochul raised a record-shattering $60 million-plus to win election to a full term as governor in a surprisingly close race against Zeldin, a top finance campaign chief boasted in a note to supporters.
A renewed effort to expand New York’s bottle deposit law for the first time in years is taking shape in Albany.
In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Returnable Container Act, more than 300 groups released a letter to Hochul calling on her to modernize it.
As speculation continues around the future of state Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs, two new names have entered the conversation around who may replace him: state Sen. Jessica Ramos and Rep. Adriano Espaillat.
Hochul has signed legislation that allows college athletes to make money like they’re already in the pros.
Mark Walczyk, a North Country Republican who is currently in the state Assembly and was elected to a state Senate seat this month, is urging Amazon to create a “Made in the U.S.A” filter on its website ahead of Cyber Monday.
Democrats say they might block Republican Lester Chang from taking office next January, unless he can prove that he met residency requirements ahead of his shocking win earlier this month over longtime Assemblyman Peter Abbate, Jr.
A one-year window opens Thursday that will allow individuals who were sexually abused as adults to file previously time-barred claims against their alleged abusers, regardless of how many years have passed since the crime occurred.
Advocates for the victims and survivors of sexual abuse have launched a campaign to highlight the rapidly approaching one-year lookback window for filing a lawsuit, with a video and a photo campaign in Times Square.
Outgoing Manhattan Rep. Carolyn Maloney is facing a potential House ethics investigation for allegedly soliciting a ticket to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual gala after she fell off the invite list in 2016.
In a deadpan 15-page report the Office of Congressional Ethics said it had found “substantial reason to believe that Maloney may have solicited or accepted impermissible gifts associated with her attendance at the Met Gala.”
The OCE report included an April 2, 2016 email from former Museum President Emily Rafferty to Met executives in which she said Maloney was “unhappy to say the least that she is not receiving an invitation to the Party of the Year.”
A report tracking violence at the Rikers Island jail complex in New York City will be hidden from the public, preventing people from viewing documents with statistics about assaults on staff, and incidents involving force against detainees, a federal judge ordered.
In a bid to curb spending, Mayor Eric Adams’ Office of Management Budget intends to cut some positions that were vacant as of late October by 50%.
The order, which marks Adams’ third belt-tightening initiative since taking office, was spelled out in a letter sent by his budget director, Jacques Jiha, to the commissioners of all city agencies.
A career 911 dispatcher and longtime friend of Adams who rented a room to Adams in her Crown Heights apartment for four years now has one of the highest-paid jobs in city government, records show.
It was a series of tweets that sent the NYPD and FBI on the trail of two Nazis looking to shoot up a synagogue, and it’s Twitter and other social media that Adams pointed to as having to clean up their acts after the arrest of the suspects.
The city is offering a chance to own a piece of mayoral history – as it is auctioning off a bevy of presents that were given to former mayors.
City Councilwoman Julie Won threw her support behind a massive rezoning plan for her western Queens district, all but sealing the deal on the $2 billion project after months of negotiations over how many affordable housing units should be in the proposal.
As traditional public schools in the nation’s largest system endure a perilous period of student loss and funding shortfalls, New York City’s charter schools are on an upward trajectory.
A 22-year-old man was arrested in Virginia in connection with a killing on Friday of three relatives inside their home in the Springfield Gardens neighborhood in Queens.
An early morning fire destroyed seven buses and trailers for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade at a lot in New Jersey.
A state Supreme Court justice has ordered the Archdiocese of New York to turn over roughly 1,400 pages of internal records related to its investigations of Howard J. Hubbard.
SUNY Polytechnic Institute is saying goodbye to the third person tapped to temporarily lead the college after its founding president resigned and was convicted on federal charges.
Vermont’s Rutland County Sheriff said that the deputy who was allegedly involved in a Sunday morning shootout on Broadway and was subsequently shot by city police is on unpaid administrative leave until the investigation is complete.
The Pier 1 building is gone and the region’s first Chick-fil-A restaurant will soon rise on the now-cleared land along Route 146 in Clifton Park.
The Hudson Valley Community College student who was stabbed earlier this month in a college parking lot has suffered potentially permanent injuries in the attack.
Two college students driving home for the Thanksgiving break were killed in a head-on collision late Friday, a crash that also injured two others.
Kicker: A 67-pound goldfish exists.
