Normally, I would never consider something as prosaic as oatmeal for this feature. But here’s the thing, and with absolutely no underlying spirit of accusation, there are people (I mean, I don’t know them, but I have read about them) who are still feeling a lingering sort of heaviness in the gut-ish area coming off of Thanksgiving, and thus I have concluded that even if I did want to share that fantastic recipe for apple panackes with the toffee apple maple syrup that I tried last week, it might do nothing more for you than activate your gorge.
This, perhaps inevitably, raises the question of the grand outcome of our little sisterly Thanksgiving competition this year, the Great GratinOff (which if you say it fast enough, sounds foreign, thus adding a certain glamour to the whole affair, don’t you think?), and seeing as our esteemed auntie judge got squeamish somewhere amidst all the smack talk and seemed actually a bit nervous about declaring a winner (I don’t know why. Mystery of life), the answer to who won is: it depends on who you ask. Technically, more people served up Superchick’s gratin; but mine tasted better.
From of yore, our little culinary battle has been between store bought and homemade, from the can versus from my hands (the lone divergence being that year that she was supposed to make green bean casserole from a can and instead made a CAKE that looked like green bean casserole –cough, cough, cheater— thus upstaging my entirely from scratch and utterly fabulous concoction. We try not to dwell on that year). So it felt appropriate this year that she make boxed potatoes au gratin, Betty Crocker style, and I made a gorgonzola gnocchi gratin with a homemade challah breadcrumb topping, made with salted French butter, and a rosemary ginger cream sauce.
I leave it to you.
https://adventuresincooking.com/baked-pumpkin-cranberry-raspberry/
So. Tomorrow kicks off Advent, and there is a great deal of joy, work and play ahead of us. Rather than spend another paragraph trying to convince you to make your Sabbath breakfast something special tomorrow, I leave you with Spurgeon:
“Let us not wait for large opportunities or for a different kind of work, but just do the thing we ‘find to do’ day by day. We have no other time in which to live. The past is gone; the future has not arrived; we will never have any time but now. So do not wait until your experience has ripened into maturity before you attempt to serve God. Endeavor now to bring forth fruit. Serve God now… Do it promptly; do not fritter away your life in thinking of what you intend to do tomorrow as if that could repay today’s laziness. No one ever served God by doing things tomorrow. If we honor Christ and are blessed, it is by the things that we do today. Whatever you do for Christ, throw your whole soul into it. Do not give Christ a little halfhearted labor, done as a matter of course every now and then; but when you serve Him, do it with heart and soul and strength.”
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