Thanksgiving recipes

If I want to jazz up a packaged stuffing mix, I brown sausage (bulk pork sausage like Jimmy Dean's or Bob Evans -- about a half pound per box of stuffing mix*) with chopped yellow onions and celery (about a quarter cup each but exact amounts aren't crucial), and stir that in. It doesn't matter that much whether you add it with the water or after if the sausage mix is hot. If you've cooked the sausage ahead of time and refrigerated it, you want to put it in with the hot water. If I'm not cooking it for my extended family, which tends to resists changes to recipes, I might add dried fruit and/or chopped nuts, but the sausage, onion, and celery is what makes it taste like homemade.

*The sausage generally comes in a one-pound roll, so in reality I brown it all of the sausage with a half cup or so each of onion and celery, and freeze half of it for the next time I make stuffing.

My aunt asks me every year for my cranberry sauce recipe.

Every year I tell her it's the one on the bag of cranberries.

Boil a cup of water, dissolve a cup of sugar in it, stir in a bag of fresh cranberries, and simmer until the cranberries have burst. You can smash any stragglers with a fork. Refrigerate at least a few hours, preferably overnight. You can swap orange juice for water or replace some of the sugar with another sweetener (I have good results with 1/4 Splenda and 3/4 sugar).

That's all.

I think my aunt believes I'm keeping some big secret.