This dish takes exactly three minutes to prepare, and another 10 or 15 minutes in the oven, and you don’t even have to think about it. Pre-heat the oven, prepare the cranberries, “slide in the pyrex,” as they say, and just turn the fucking oven off, go outside, have a cigarette.

Do not forget our other Holiday Recipes for Thanksgiving! Betty Ford’s Chocoholic Icebox Fantasy and Mamie Eisenhower’s Lesbian-Soviet Hockey Rink and Nancy Reagan’s Racial-Transcendence Monkey Bread!

There are many recipes you can find “on the Internet” for fresh cranberry sauce, but you don’t need to do that anymore. Just send this one to your xBox or whatever and be DONE, done with the search for the ideal cranberry relish recipe.

THE THINGS YOU NEED:

• When you’re at the store, get two sacks of fresh cranberries from the produce section. They are like, a pound each. This will be plenty for eight or so people. Did your relatives refuse to use any kind of birth control, producing a larger family of say, 16 people? Just double the recipe, meaning buy two of whatever, and use twice as much, in the recipe. And “double the recipe” does not mean set the oven to 700 degrees instead of 350. Jesus.
• If for some reason you don’t have some basic cane sugar and a decent bottle of bourbon at home, purchase these things in whatever respectable quantity, so next time (Friday morning) you’ll have this stuff handy.
• Oranges. Buy some of them.

NOW: Either right now or tomorrow or 30 minutes before carving time — IT DOES NOT MATTER — you wash the cranberries. (The thing that looks like a ’50s space helmet, it is called the colander, fill it with the cranberries and put it under the cold faucet).

Dump said berries in the Pyrex baking dish, like the one people might use for lasagna or baked manicotti. (This is a good time to remove whatever weird stuff the Stephen King characters who pick cranberries might’ve dropped in the bucket: loose teeth, etc.) Get the cheese grater and just grate on some sad-but-firm orange, right on the peel, so that the little bits of orange peel fall down upon the lonely berries. It is fine if some bigger chunks — like, half-inch-long shreds, but no bigger than that — fall down there, too. It adds “color” … orange color, in fact. Do this until you’re tired of doing it, at which point there’s probably about three teaspoons’ worth of orange “zest” in the pyrex, with the cranberries. Don’t pick it out and measure it or anything, just show some confidence. For once.

Cut open that poor orange you’ve just Gitmo’d, and squeeze the juice into your cranberry business. Do not drop the orange seeds in there, come on.

Now drizzle a couple-five shots of bourbon on the berries. And sprinkle about half a cup of granulated cane sugar over all that. (Generally, cranberry relish recipes call for some insane amount of sugar, like three cups. Do not ruin everything, okay? Using not-so-much sugar produces a tart but still sweet-enough relish that is to be served with savory dishes like turkey and dressing, right? If you want to put this on a peanut butter sandwich, by all means use fifteen cups of sugar and chase it with an “energy drink” or whatever. Let freedom reign.)

Cover the baking dish with foil and put it in the oven. Doesn’t really matter, whatever the oven is set to, which is going to be in the 300-425 range for your general Thanksgiving dishes crowding the oven. You also don’t need to be a dick and start yelling about how somebody needs to move the mac-and-cheese or the brussels sprouts under the broiler (and you SHOULD have simple cut-in-half olive-oil-brushed brussels sprouts under the broiler!) because you must get in your cranberry relish. Anytime is fine, and plus who will be impressed if you keep talking about it, beforehand? They might notice how easy it is to make, and then who are you? You are basically Lou Dobbs. So go outside and yell at a Mexican.

Come back inside, and please wash your hands if you were smoking out there, and see what is going on. Are people tense? It is probably time to open a bottle of wine, go ahead and pass around maybe a Petite Syrah, something that will go with maybe some pita chips or apple slices, whatever, try to get people to relax. It is okay to have “Irish Coffees,” too, because it’s daytime.

When the cranberry business is bubbly and the berries have this nice soft-but-firm kind of thing going on, take out the pyrex and let it cool somewhere out of the way. If there’s room in the fridge, you can just put the tray in there once it’s cool to the touch. But there’s no room, jesus just look at all the food in there, plus there are about a million beers for tomorrow, so just scrape it all into something pretty, some kind of thing you might put chutney in, or whatever (ask mom).

Serve and watch how people say, “OMG I only ever had it from a can,” etc.

And if you’re not cooking your Thanksgiving meal, there are quite a few places where you can go out to eat. Just be sure to make a reservation, last week.

• Art and Soul: At this southern food restaurant you can enjoy buttermilk biscuits, cornbread, turkey, maple-glazed ham, mashed potatoes, chicken/apple stuffing and pies of the apple, pecan, and pumpkin varieties. And you even get leftovers: everyone is sent home with a roast turkey sandwich with gravy and cranberry sauce on the side. YUM.  Cost is $55 per person.
• CommonWealth: Spend thanksgiving at a British Pub. Why not? They’re offering a three course meal, including turkey, roast beef, collard greens and two different kinds of stuffing. Best part: it’s also an excellent spot to watch the football games. Cost is $35 per person.
• Rasika: You can spend thanksgiving with Indians of a different sort! Rasika is offering its normal menu, but is also serving a special plate of pistachio-and-cranberry-stuffed turkey breast with saffron-and-cashew sauce, butternut-squash bharta, and chili Brussels sprouts for $16.

Or, if you’re too lazy to cook or even make a reservation, you can order in a complete Thanksgiving meal from Marvelous Market, Organic To Go, Zola Wine and Kitchen or just about any supermarket in the area. A best bet for pies is Dangerously Delicious Pies in the Atlas District.

What to do with the family until they leave and you get your life back:

• Theater: See George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker. The Pennsylvania ballet puts on what is considered to be the best production of this classic.
• Museums: The Smithsonian Museums will be open on Friday and it will be crowded! Other museum options include the Holidays on Display exhibit about the holidays and commercialism at the Museum of American History or “Oil,” photos by Edward Burtynsky at the Corcoran.
• Run: Before you indulge in pounds of turkey and stuffing and pie and more pie, you can participate in the Turkey Chase, a 10K race, a 2-mile walk/run in Bethesda or the DC Turkey Trot for Hunger, a 5K that raises money for So Others Might Eat.
• National Harbor: Head to the National Harbor for their Tree Lighting and Fireworks event. The evening includes the lighting of a 65-foot Christmas tree, a fireworks display, a light show, and singing from some people who won a reality show that no one ever watched.
• Give: This holiday season you, yes, even you, can do something good for the world. Food pantries are running low on food this year and here in DC you can donate food to Bread for the City, The Capital Area Food Bank, or Food and Friends. You could even be super nice and volunteer at any of these places to prepare or deliver food.

Happy Thanksgiving!

See?

The only possible conclusion is that the one on the left is a post-op Meghan McCain. Hey America, just try ignoring Meghan now that she’s actually Sarah Palin.

[Facebook via Andrew Sullivan]

Also, sad news from the Levi Johnston family empire: His drug-dealin’ momma is going to prison for three years! Where is Sarah Palin’s compassion for her … whatever snowbilly trash calls their teen-daughter-mom’s boyfriend’s drug-dealin’ mommas? [Mediaite]

Where doth the madame capture such elan vital for this seven-day’s iteration of “Declarations”? The motorcar, to be sure. The finest of motorcars, ever. She sitteth inside this motorcab and was taken down the Fifth Avenue of New York. As humans familiar with Peggington Noonan are privy to know, whenever Madame traveleth upon the Fifth Avenue of New York, she immediately understandeth everything about the current status of the United States of America. It is now wealthy. You must see this one building.

I felt it the other night, unexpectedly, in a way that reminded me of the anxieties of last year. I had been away from the city. I was in a cab going down Fifth Avenue. I hadn’t been there in months. I looked up and suddenly saw, looming in the darkness to my right, the white-gray marble and huge windows of the Bergdorf Goodman building—tall, stately, mansard-roofed. Its windows were covered, but some lights were on, and there seemed to be people inside. They were preparing its Christmas windows. Something about the sight of it caught me—proud Bergdorf’s, anchor of midtown commerce. It looked exactly as it looked 10 years ago, 20, only better. Because it’s there. New York has been so damaged by the crash, and last year at this time small shops, the ones with the smallest margin for error, were closing. And now I see more that are opening, and Bergdorf’s is preparing its Christmas windows. The sight of it came like an affirmation. We’re still here. I am so grateful.

Madame hath parodied her noble self, verily.

Peggington knoweth other humans. They too are grateful, for not Dying. This man: among the finest barristers in New Amsterdam. And his spawn, the dauphin. They are afforded leisure at times. During these times they trap Sea Monsters. I am so grateful.

What are you most thankful for in 2009? I asked an old friend, a brilliant lawyer who lives in a New York suburb. “I saw my 6-year-old son run a mile, and catch a bunch of fish,” he immediately replied. He saw his wife, a journalist, “dodge the firings” in her office. He still has a job, too. All of this sounds so common, so modest, and yet, he knows, it is everything. A child caught a fish, he ran, his father saw it. “Broadly,” he added, “I am grateful to America for its freedom, for its yeastiness and, at times, its noise. Dee Snider belting out ‘I Wanna Rock’ is so America.”

“Yeastiness.” Peggington must curtail this practice of inserting her words into her barrister’s correspondence. As for this Dee Snider fellow, she dareth not Google, but perchance she is a nice lady, and perhaps even a Mexican. (This one time, Peggy Noonan saw a Mexican.)

Peggington hath numerous other acquaintances from the Wall Streete, and they hath money again. They are grateful.

And this thing, this Robot, prospering:

And after that, after gratitude for friends and family, and for those who protect us, after that something small. I love TV, and the other day it occurred to me again that we are in the middle of a second golden age of television. I feel gratitude to the largely unheralded network executives and producers who gave it to us. The first golden age can be summed up with one name: “Playhouse 90.” It was the 1950s and ‘60, when TV was busy being born. The second can be summed up with the words “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men,” “The Wire,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “ER,” “24,” “The West Wing,” “Law and Order,” “30 Rock.” These are classics. Some nonstars at a network made them possible. Good for them.

Nay: Good for everyone. Good for Humans.

The finest of things, however, involveth the convergence of one Robot with another Robot. You view the program on the First Robot. You type on the Second Robot, about the program you hath viewed on the First Robot. It is the two-part activity of God, here on this Earth:

But there is a side benefit to televisions’s excellence, and that is the number of people who follow a show so closely, and love it so much, that after it’s aired they come together on long threads on Web sites and talk about what happened and what it means. People use their imaginations and unfocused creativity to add new layers of meaning and interpretation. “You know that was a reference to ‘Chinatown.’” “Did anyone notice what it meant when Peggy told Mr. Sterling ‘no’ when he asked for the coffee? A whole revolution captured in one word!”

Those threads are golden.

Those threads are America.

We’re still here.

I am so grateful.

Still Here After a Rough Year [WSJ]

Why? Because John Kerry’s adult daughter Alexandra Kerry — who, several years ago, once wore a see-thru dress so you could look at her boobs, in Europe — got stopped by the LA cops for some traffic violation at a quarter to one this morning.

Because she is a Democrat, Alexandra was out past midnight, and because she’s a crafty liberal, she reportedly refused the copper’s field DUI test. So by the time she got to the station, she was only .06, and you need .08 for DUI! (But not really, as you can still be prosecuted for driving drunkenly even if you’ve had like two margaritas all night. But still, LA doesn’t bother prosecuting if you’re under .08, unless you drove through a Farmer’s Market or something, or if you’re poor or Mexican or whatever.) [TMZ]