Cranberry Sauce Flotilla

Cranberry Sauce Flotilla is a song by Dog On Fleas that I sing whenever I'm around cranberries.

What I really want to talk about is how I make cranberry sauce. If I say so myself, this recipe is yum, and I made it up myself. Don't know why I made it rhyme, though.

Cranberry Sauce a la Red Eft

8 oz or so of cranberries
1/4 c or so maple syrup (grade b!)
apple or apricot juice
2 tbsp or so agar agar or kanten flakies

Put those crans
in a saucepan.
Cover with water, bring them to simmer.
Start to look forward to an excellent dinner.
Let them cook until they look soft and stuff.
Add some juice. Not too much. Do this part off the cuff.
Maple syrup at this point will make it sweeter.
Just stir some in, you don't need a beater.
Add agar agar or kanten to make it firm up.
Pour into a bowl, or for each diner, a cup.
Refrigerate. Let it set a spell.
This will allow your sauce to gel.

Eat while singing Cranberry Sauce Flotilla. Good on toast, with yogurt, or mixed with rice and bright orange squash like kabocha or butternut.

Out of My Way Or I'll Eat You!

The Sinterklass Revels (scroll down for my first post about this) got underway this weekend, and I roared with great joy as the dragon pitted against St. George.



Bellow, growl, threaten to eat everyone around you! It's therapeutic. I recommended it to my sister in California. She emailed back, "I wish I could roar but houses here are so close together that even my unattached next door neighbors would hear me!"

So inhibited are we from unleashing the dragon that we can't even do it in the privacy of our own homes.

A few years ago I took Alan Arkin's excellent improv workshop at the Omega Institute, and on the last day the students designed our own improvs. I was drafted by a woman (who typically worked as a clown in her home city) to be in her improv. I would sit in the dark by a campfire, and she, a monster, would crash through the woods, grab me, carry me off. It was great fun screaming, but my pleasure was nothing like hers. Afterwards, she told me with tears in her eyes how profoundly it had benefited her to be the monster.

Now I know what she meant. Be the monster!

After St. George slays me, I am revived by The Fool and transform back into myself, but different, lighter. More Sinterklaas pageantry this Saturday, December 6, 2008 in Rhinebeck, New York.