VANILLA BEAN CRANBERRY SAUCE

This month marks my 9-year anniversary at my law firm.  Wow.

My first week on the job my boss asked me to finalize an appellate brief for filing, which required preparing a table of contents and index of authorities.  “You know how to do that, right?” he asked.  Of course I knew how to do that.  Sort of.  I mean, I could prepare the table of contents in chronological order, and prepare the index of authorities in alphabetical order (I did go to elementary school, after all).  But I had no clue how to do the dot dot dot thing, which looks like this:

The staff at the time (and I use the term “staff” loosely) were unhelpful, if not openly hostile.  The attorney sitting next door to me advised me that my life at the firm would be much better if I just learned how to do things myself.  Yikes.  (He was right.)  So I copied the dot dot dot thing from a brief my secretary at my prior job had prepared for me, and inserted it into the brief I was working on.  To this day, that is still how I do the dot dot dot thing — I just cut and paste from a prior brief.

And so every appellate brief I have written for the past 9 years has a little dot dot dot DNA from my old firm.  Kind of like sourdough starter.

Speaking of sourdough starter, were you one of the people that embraced bread baking as a pandemic hobby?  I am not.  My pandemic hobby was making vanilla extract, which became popular when the price of vanilla extract skyrocketed.  I discovered a co-op on Facebook that sells beautiful beans from various locations around the world for roughly $9-$10 per ounce (which is about 8 or 9 beans).

My first order of 4 ounces of Madagascar beans

Put the beans in alcohol — vodka is my booze of choice — and let them sit in a cool dark place for about a year or so (kind of like they did to me at my last job).  1 ounce of beans to 1 cup of alcohol for single fold, 2 ounces to 1 cup for double fold.  It’s easy to get carried away when the co-op offers beans from different countries, and there’s a fair amount of FOMO associated with the whole thing.

When the beans arrive, the first I thing I learned to do is inspect each one for “tattoos” — the pinpoint marks growers make on them to identify the beans in case of theft.  I can’t describe how exciting it is to find a tattoo!  It’s like a little love note from the grower.

Tattoo marks on unripe beans

Tattoos!

So what to do with my now lifetime supply of vanilla extract in the making?  Baking, obviously.  And vanilla sugar and vanilla salt.  And Vanilla Bean Cranberry Sauce, which is a favorite at the annual senior Thanksgiving luncheon hosted by my son’s former Boy Scout Troop — there’s never a drop left.  In the past, I’ve made it with sad, dry, shriveled up beans that come in a glass tube, but this year I’m making it with my gorgeous, plump, vodka-soaked beans — and it is good!  For a beautiful, delicious punch of color on your Thanksgiving plate, this cranberry sauce is a winner dot dot dot.

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VANILLA BEAN CRANBERRY SAUCE
Author: 
 
Ingredients
  • 1 vanilla bean
  • 1 cup sugar
  • ½ cup water
  • ½ cup orange juice
  • 12-ounce package fresh cranberries, rinsed and drained
Instructions
  1. With a sharp paring knife, split vanilla bean vertically. Scrape out seeds (also known as caviar) and set aside.
  2. Combine vanilla bean, sugar, water, and juice in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil over high heat. Add cranberries and vanilla bean seeds. Reduce heat and gently simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat. With the back of a spoon, smash some of the cranberries against the side of the pot. Cover and cool completely at room temperature. Discard vanilla bean and refrigerate until ready to serve.

Use the plumpest, reddest, firmest cranberries you can find

Simmering in their vanilla bath

This is no ordinary cranberry sauce!

Bonus joke:  Why did the cranberry sauce cross the road?  To get to the other sides.

BIG MAC SPECIAL SAUCE

Back in the summer of 2018, I treated myself to lunch from McDonald’s, and with my change, the cashier handed me this golden coin:

The Big Mac was 50 years old?  Had it really been 50 years of those two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun?  What’s even more incredible to me is that only 1 out of 5 millennials have tasted a Big Mac.  Silly millennials.

I worked at McDonald’s when I was in high school.  It was exciting to get a McDonald’s franchise in our town (prior to that it was Hardee’s or nothing), and I was thrilled to have my first real non-babysitting job.  That excitement did not last much beyond my first week of work.  The manager — his name was Harry or Henry — was a little twit of a man, not many years older than me, with a stupid little black mustache, who clearly favored other teen employees over me.

I liked my job, even though I was not one of the cool kids.  (Yes, there was a clique among the teens working at McDonald’s — because in case you haven’t figured it out yet, middle school is never really over).  I learned that food had to be thrown out after sitting around for 30 minutes, and we were never ever to talk to union organizers.  Some nights I worked the shake station, and I’d go home polka-dotted with milkshake splatters.  Sometimes I assembled sandwiches, squirting special sauce out of something that looked like a caulking gun.  The job I liked the least was keeping the dining area and rest rooms clean — which Harry/Henry seemed to delight in assigning to me, not being one of the cool kids. But no matter which station I worked, my dog was happy to greet/hump me when I got home with my $1.25 worth of food in hand — our meal allowance that we could take at the end of our shift.

One day, Harry/Henry called me into his closet of an office.  He sat there in his yellow short-sleeved shirt and brown polyester slacks in his vinyl-covered wheel-a-throne, and informed me that I was being fired because I wasn’t “a McDonald’s person.”  Although he didn’t elaborate, he assured me that they had other employees who, despite not being McDonald’s people, had gone on to successful careers at Jack in the Box.  (Come to think of it, that might have been what I was told when I was laid off from my first law job at the Manhattan law firm.)  Although it was humiliating at the time, it prepared me for many more “you’re not a [fill in the blank] person” conversations in the years ahead.

I tried to find out what happened to Harry/Henry, but not surprisingly, my Google search for “Harry or Henry who was a manager at McDonald’s on Long Island in the 70s,” was not fruitful.

I harbor no ill will towards McDonald’s.  In fact, I still love a Big Mac once in a while.  According to my research, in 1967, a man running a McDonald’s franchise named Jim Delligatti was frustrated.  His customers at his Pittsburgh franchise were primarily steel workers with big appetites, but all he had to offer them was a regular cheeseburger.  He experimented in the kitchen, and came up with what is now known as the Big Mac.  He placed a center bun, known as the “club bun” between the patties to stabilize the sandwich.  (Ironically, the first thing I do when I get a Big Mac is remove the center bun, stability be damned.)  But what really made the sandwich unique was the “special sauce” he created.  With Ray Kroc’s blessing, the Big Mac was introduced systemwide in 1968.  Today, Americans consume 550 million Big Macs a year.

I found a few copycat recipes for Special Sauce on the interwebs, but none of them sounded right, and were really little more than thousand island dressing.  Then I found this recipe for Special Sauce, which is purportedly from the McDonald’s Manager’s Handbook published in 1969 (which presumably also informs managers how to terminate employees that are “not McDonald’s people”), to be used in the event of an emergency if a store ran out of the pre-made sauce (gasp!).  More out of curiosity than anything else, I prepared a batch of the McDonald’s Manager’s Handbook Special Sauce.

The ingredients include a parade of horribles, things I would normally never have in my refrigerator — Miracle Whip, bottled French salad dressing, sweet pickle relish:

I tried ordering a Big Mac with the special sauce on the side so that I could do a side-by-side comparison, but the cashier would not oblige me.  (I think maybe my face is on a “not a McDonald’s person” poster hanging in the break room.) So I scraped off what I could, and here’s the side-by-side:

Copycat on the left, real stuff on the right

I’m not sure if the real stuff has that much more relish than the copycat, or if that is just what I was able to scrape off. And?  Yeah, it’s on point– a little more orange than the OG, perhaps, but the taste was pretty darn close.  Even if you’re not a McDonald’s person, this is still awesome sauce.

BIG MAC SPECIAL SAUCE
Author: 
Recipe type: Sauces and Condiments
 
Ingredients
  • ¼ cup Miracle Whip
  • ¼ cup mayonnaise
  • 3 tablespoons Wishbone French salad dressing
  • ½ tablespoon Heinz sweet pickle relish
  • 1½ tablespoons Heinz dill pickle relish
  • 1 teaspoon sugar
  • 1 teaspoon dried minced onion
  • 1 teaspoon white vinegar
  • 1 teaspoon ketchup
  • ⅛ teaspoon salt
Instructions
  1. In a medium microwave-safe container, mix all of the ingredients.
  2. Microwave on high power for 25 seconds, and stir well again.
  3. Cover and refrigerate at least 1 hour before serving. The sauce will keep covered in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.