Thanksgiving Recap--Napoleon

Napoleon is one of my favorite desserts that my grandmother used to make when she was younger. Napoleon, the dessert, refers to layers of puff pastry frosted with pastry cream. When done well, a Napoleon is light, moist and melts in your mouth, and my grandmother’s Napoleons did just that. When I learned that my grandparents were coming to Boston for Thanksgiving, I decided that it was my one-in-a-million chance to learn how to make Napoleon from the master herself.

When my grandparents came over to my apartment, my grandma and I set out to prepare the puff pastry dough. Under Grandma’s close watch I mixed water, eggs and flour, and rolled the butter into the dough folding it into envelopes. In the course of the day I repeated the rolling and folding process one more time. Grandma said that she sometimes rolled and folded the dough two more times, but she thought that the extra effort was unnecessary.

In the evening, after my grandparents left, I made a double portion of the pastry cream from the Boston Cream Pie recipe. Unfortunately, I accidentally overheated the mixture, and the cream cooled into a jingly solid. So the next evening I made another batch of the pastry cream, now using Grandma’s recipe.

Unfortunately I had to bake the puff pastry without Grandma’s supervision, and I might have kept it in the oven for too long. It was well after midnight, when I frosted the baked puff pastry sheets with the newly made pastry cream.

After spending the night out on the counter my Napoleon acquired the proper sweetness and flavor thanks to the pastry cream. Still the pastry was far from melt-in-your-mouth. In fact it was so hard, that breaking a piece off with just a fork was impossible. I tore into my piece with my teeth, while Nick, civilized as he is, used a knife.

Thanksgiving Recap--The Corn Bake Recipe Evolution

My family first tasted the corn bake dish while celebrating Thanksgiving with our family friends, the Polskys. The dish is simple to make, and the result is similar to super moist corn bread.

The Original Corn Bake Recipe
1 egg
½ cup (1 stick) butter
1 cup of sour cream
1 can of cream style corn
1 can of kernel corn drained
1 package of Jiffy corn muffin mix

Mix all the ingredients together (I find it easier to mix in the cans of corn and the muffin mix last). Pour into a greased 9 x 9 inch square dish, cover with foil, bake for about an hour at 325F. Then remove the foil, and bake for another 15-30 minutes till doneness at 375F.


The corn bake dish has been a part of every Thanksgiving dinner for almost two decades. However, this year I decided that it was time for a change--I no longer wanted to stock up on Jiffy muffin mix, and I was disappointed to learn that the corn is not vegetarian because Jiffy muffin mix contains lard.

I used this corn bread recipe—the quickest fastest simplest recipe ever for a decent corn bread—as a point of reference. I also studied the ingredients of the Jiff corn muffin mix, which essentially boiled down to flour, corn meal, baking soda, salt and sugar.

After the first attempt, I decreased the amount of corn meal, and switched to using maple syrup instead of sugar or honey. The second attempt was a success, and that is exactly what mom baked for our Thanksgiving dinner.

The New Corn Bake Recipe
1 cup wheat flour
¾ cups corn meal
1 ½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
1 egg beaten
¼ cup (½ stick) of butter, melted
1 cup plain yogurt (we used low-fat)
3 Tbsp maple syrup (honey can be substituted)
1 can of cream style corn
¼ cup corn (from a can or frozen and thawed; more can be added to taste)

Mix the wet ingredients. Then mix in the dry ingredients. Pour into a greased 9 x 9 inch square dish, cover with foil, bake for about an hour at 325F. Then remove the foil, and bake for another 15-30 minutes till doneness at 375F.

Thanksgiving Recap--The Stuffing Saga

Did you know that most surveys show that stuffing is most people’s favorite Thanksgiving dish. Stuffing, not turkey!

People in my family are not big stuffing eaters, and I knew that Nick and I would be pretty much the only people eating the stuffing. So the goal became to cook the stuffing to please Nick, and the way to please Nick with food is to make it the way Nick’s family made it. A brief conversation with Nick’s mom revealed that she uses a stuffing mix. This was not good enough, because I was determined to cook everything from scratch. The search for the perfect recipe continued.

Nick’s mom makes a relatively simple stuffing—bread cubes, seasoning from the mix (probably poultry seasoning), celery and onion sautéed in butter, lots of sage. So I had to eliminate any recipe that called for nuts, dried fruit, berries, sausage, mushrooms, or other similarly “exotic” ingredients. The remaining choices were slim. After eliminating Martha Stewart’s recipe that mysteriously required eggs, I was left with a New York Times stuffing recipe where the only ingredient not mentioned by Nick’s mom was vinegar.

I ran out of turkey broth and did not feel adventurous enough to add more water, so the result was a bit dry. However, the stuffing tasted quite good in the spots where I managed to pour enough broth, so the next attempt should be a lot more palatable.