"corn pudding" news and stories

There are few holiday dishes so polarizing as green bean casserole. If it was part of your usual Yuletide feast growing up, the stuff is sacrosanct and utterly essential to holiday joy. The bulk of it -- the french-cut green beans, cream of mushroom soup and French-fried onion strings -- must come blopping and clattering from cans and be baked in a casserole until it resembles a roiling green bog topped with a dry moss of frizzled onion straws. There are always seconds, and there's hardly ever any left over for a midnight refrigerator picnic.

If you didn't grow up with it skulking on the holiday table, good gravy, does that stuff look ten-foot-pole nasty.

I have been contributing to Thanksgiving dinners since I was a child, doing everything from polishing the silver to serving the cocktails to making all the side dishes to inventing new deserts. However, this year will be the first that I'll be hosting and, admittedly, the thought fills me with dread.

I've thrown many a party and cooked many a feast in my time but the idea of making a whole turkey in a temperamental oven is, simply, frightening. Thus far, I've dealt with my problem in my usual way--avoiding it by becoming absorbed in everything that surrounds it. In this case, the side dishes. By dint of my location (Las Vegas) and the thrift shop acquisition of a pertinent Sunset cookbook, we are having a southwestern Thanksgiving this year.

On the menu: sweet potatoes with tequila and lime, garlic green beans with Manchego, corn pudding (I'll be adding some chiles and perhaps sprinkle some cheddar cheese on top), mashed potatoes, cranberry salsa, cornbread chorizo stuffing, roasted poblano gravy and, of course, that blasted turkey. The thought of it stops me cold so I can't even plan desert, although I am thinking about pumpkin cheesecake or sweet potato cupcakes with dulce de leche pecan frosting. Although I could just say the heck with the whole thing and go over to Freed's Bakery and order a Thanksgiving dinner cake.