peppermint – Life In A Word

Earlier this week the first Christmas card arrived in the mail. For heaven’s sake it’s not even November 25th, people. Then we stopped by Chick-fil-A and my wife asked if they had their Peppermint Chip milkshake, which of course they did because it’s “Christmas season”. Finally, we’re seeing strings of colored lights and decorations on houses already. Am I losing the battle of the Thanksgiving season with a full week still to go? Maybe I need a different tack with my campaign.

Let’s talk about Thanksgiving dishes today. Are yours made of pottery, wood, metal, or glass? Oh, you thought I meant food. Well, yes, I do, but somehow we’ve stretched the definition of “any container used at the table” to also mean what’s in or on that container. So let’s talk about that. Have a favorite dish at Thanksgiving? Of course you do; everybody does. In fact, the better question is, if your Thanksgiving “dish” is a “favorite” then why don’t you serve it all year round?

Here are my three favorite Thanksgiving dishes for your consideration:

Stuffing. Nine out of ten Thanksgiving stuffing recipes never made it into the bird in the first place. Okay so I made that up, but I find it funny when a food that is “inside” by definition was never, ever inside. Whatever. Stuffing used to be that little pile of gently-spiced spongy material sitting benignly aside your helping of turkey. I’d ignore it or push it around a little but most of this autumn pillow fluff never made it onto my fork. Then I met my wife. You could hibernate for an entire holiday season on my wife’s stuffing recipe. It starts with ground sirloin and pork sausage and a whole lot of butter. It ends with a ton of seasonings and spices, including sage and something called “parsley” (more on that later). Forget the turkey… if a food ever deserved to be called “main course” it’s my wife’s stuffing recipe.

Cranberry sauce. Is there a more wasted food on earth than cranberry sauce? Seriously, this poor little enhancement sees the light of day only once a year, where it sits on your plate for the length of the meal before being scraped mercilessly into the kitchen trash. How many people really make the perfect Thanksgiving “bite” – a combo of turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce? Not many. I think cranberry sauce was created to brighten an otherwise autumn-colored “dish”. Chateaubriand has its Béarnaise sauce. Lamb has its mint jelly. Turkey seems to acknowledge cranberry sauce as a garnish at best: something ornamental instead of “food”.

Speaking of garnishes, can we all agree parsley is the perfect example of one? Yes, you’re adding color to the plate, but don’t you always wonder what you’re supposed to do with those little green trees? Just like the colorful toothpicks you sometimes find holding your sandwich together, parsley is the first thing you remove (at least cranberry sauce rides out the plate for the entire meal). Parsley is transported from wherever it invaded your plate (and what the heck is it doing in my wife’s stuffing, anyway?) to your bread plate, where it lays until its ultimate demise. The relevance of parsley to the Thanksgiving meal (and to any “dish” for that matter) remains a mystery. One I don’t have time for in this post.

Mince pie. We conclude my favorites with the most underappreciated, over-carb’d dessert of them all. Mincemeat pie really did include meat back when the Pilgrims were celebrating Thanksgiving with swans and seals, but eventually someone (who deserves a medal) thought to remove the meat and add a whole lot of sugar to the chopped dried fruit, distilled spirits, and Thanksgiving spices. The result is a pie that is scrumptious in some books (mine) and a veritable construction material in others (everyone else’s). Seriously, this stuff is a brick. It’s like pecan pie – or concrete – only ten times as dense. And don’t forget to soften the blow with a little brandied hard sauce on top. The spiked whipped cream is so good my wife skips the pie and has a dollop of the sauce instead. But if you ask me, she’s missing out on the real dessert.

Your Thanksgiving dinner will no doubt include a favorite “dish” or two this season (glass? metal?) which should also make you wonder why you don’t eat it more often. Is it because the Thanksgiving season is special, and you don’t want to dilute the magic by having your favorites year-round? Yes, I think that’s the reason. Thanksgiving deserves its own “dishes”… and it’s own season. So c’mon, get grateful already!

Some content sourced from the Delish article, “50 Traditional Dishes You Need For The Ultimate Thanksgiving Menu” (mince pie is conspicuously absent from the list). The parsley rant is a loving shout-out to my sister-in-law.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the Girl Scouts knocked on your front door instead of standing outside your local supermarket, selling their popular cookies. My wife would tease me because I never had the heart to turn down the cute little uniformed kids on my doorstep. But let the record show, I really do like Girl Scout cookies. And if I had the money to buy just one box, it’d be the Thin Mints every time.

I’ve been a mint fan as long as I can remember. I’m not talking about foods (yet) so much as the flavor itself. Peppermint, spearmint, wintergreen, or even a fresh sprig right out of the ground – they all speak to me with a sort of spicy vibe. I find a food so “tasteful” when it’s freshening your breath at the same time.

For a hot minute I thought the Girl Scout Thin Mints were gone for good. A recent headline teased the departure of a “cult-favorite” cookie flavor and I feared the Mints had run their course. Instead, it’s the lookalike “Raspberry Rally” calling it quits. No harm, no foul. As long as I can still buy the Thin Mints (and an occasional Caramel Delite) I’ll happily fork over the $5 (now $6) a box.

Had the Thin Mints really been gone for good, I needn’t look far to find other fresh-breath foods. Who doesn’t like a scoop of peppermint or mint chocolate-chip ice cream? A pack of Mentos? Listerine? Heck, I’ll even settle for that gritty peppermint paste the hygienist uses to polish your teeth.

Minty consumables really do run the gamut. You’ll find over fifty global brands of breath mints, including Altoids (my favorite), Breath Savers, Certs, Clorets, Ice Breakers, Tic Tac, and Velamints. But put all of these together and you still wouldn’t come close to the Starlight Mint population. The origin of Starlights is one of the world’s great mysteries. Brach’s Candy claims their invention, but if so then why do they call them “Star Brights”?

If Starlights are too dime-store for your taste perhaps you prefer the softer texture of a “butter mint”. Butters are often found, individually wrapped, in the lobbies of fine restaurants (gone are the days where you’d just spoon yourself a handful on the way out the door). I’ve always thought a butter mint is caught in a quandary, Does it identify more as “butter” or “mint”?

Speaking of a refined palate, minty liquors make for some mighty fine beverages. The first drink my wife and I ever shared was hot chocolate and peppermint schnapps from a thermos at our college’s movie night. A grasshopper (and my wife has a killer recipe for one) is a fresh-breath milkshake made with crème de menthe. And the Kentucky Derby’s mint julep is more bourbon than mint but you’ll always find fresh sprigs garnishing the top.

If not the Starlights, my first introduction to mint was probably packs of Life Savers. There used to be several mint flavors of “the candy with the hole in the middle” including Wint-O-Green, Stik-O-Pep, and Spear-O-Mint. But when the trendier Mentos and Tic-Tac came along, Life Savers headed for the rear-view mirror.

No mention of mint would be complete without a couple of failures (at least IMHO). In the 1970s the makers of Starburst came out with a short-lived minty version called Pacers. They never worked for me because I always expected those chewy little squares to be fruit-flavored. Nabisco’s Oreo, which blossomed into 85+ varieties from their black-and-white signature sandwich cookie, include ones with green mint filling. No, just no. Oreos are meant to be the vanilla originals. Food-color them orange for Halloween if you will but don’t change the taste.

[Side advertisement: The next time I fly overseas I’ll have to give Jet Blue’s Mint class a try. Their individual “apart-mint” cubicles allow you to lie flat, with lots of cushions, a TV, and plenty of storage space for your carry-on items. Fancy, huh? All that’s missing is a chocolate mint on your memory foam pillow before you drift off to sleep.]

Here’s a chicken-or-egg question. Which mint came first, the flavor itself or the stodgy industrial facility which manufactures coins? I always thought it’d be cool to work in a mint. You’re handling millions of dollars every day and if someone asked what you do for a living, you just say casually, “Oh, I make money.” And If it were up to me I’d give all those coins a sweet-smelling scent on their way out the door so they’d be “freshly-minted” two times over.

Our Christmas celebrations used to include a box of Frango Mints, the melt-in-your-mouth chocolates you could buy at Chicago’s Marshall Field’s. These days we go with Williams-Sonoma peppermint bark. Our tree will always welcome a peppermint candy cane or two. And if a Girl Scout should ever knock on my front door again, I’ll be happy to help her meet her quota, because the Thin Mints will always be a breath of fresh air.

Some content sourced from the CNN Business article, “The Girl Scouts are discontinuing a cult-favorite cookie”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Tag: peppermint

It’s Thanksgiving Season (#3)

Fresh-Breath Foods