Special Programming This Week

Best wishes from all of us at VPR for your Thanksgiving Holiday. We're grateful to everyone in the VPR community - our listeners, friends, business partners and volunteers - for helping us bring you great public radio every day.

VPR and VPR Classical have some special programming to listen to while you're shopping, chopping, washing dishes and relaxing:

VPR:

Wednesday at Noon: Counting Vermont, a VPR Documentary examining the meaning of the 2010 Census. Counting Vermont is made possible by The VPR Journalism Fund. (Vermont Edition returns Friday at noon)

7pm: The Moth Radio Hour. A special broadcast of "true stories told live with no notes."

Thursday 11am -1pm: Turkey Confidential with Lynne Rosetta Casper, a two hour live call-in program. Lynne offers solutions for your Thanksgiving dilemmas, along with recipes and great conversation. Call (800) 537-5252.

7pm: The Hidden World of Girls, hosted by Tina Fey. The first in a two part series about girls around the world and the women they become. Listen Friday at 7 for hour 2.

Friday at 7pm: The Hidden World of Girls, Hour 2.

VPR Classical:
Thursday at noon: Thanksgiving with Cantus. Join one of America's best male vocal ensembles for an hour of singing and story telling about gratitude.

8pm-10pm: Giving Thanks with John Birge, a Celebration of Fall, Food and Gratitude. John Birge is joined this year by authors Nora Ephron and Roy Blount, Jr. Hear the premiere of "Table Grace", Matthew Brown's choral setting of a grace by Garrison Keillor, sung by VocalEssence.

Bring VPR To The Table This Thankgiving!

We hope you’ll invite VPR to your table to celebrate Thanksgiving. After all, we’re just like family…except we won’t take the last slice of pumpkin pie or overindulge on the wine and make inappropriate comments. Heck, we’ll even help with the cooking!

Listen Thursday from 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. for Turkey Confidential from The Splendid Table. Lynne Rossetto Kasper will be available to answer your cooking questions live. Quickly becoming a Thanksgiving morning tradition, past shows have included everything from a cross-country trucker cooking his Thanksgiving dinner on the manifold to a panicked first-time cook who didn't realize a turkey needs to be thawed. Lynne will be joined by renowned chef and food advocate Jamie Oliver; restaurateur and PBS host José Andrés, wine entrepreneur Joshua Wesson, and restaurant guides Jane and Michael Stern. Call with your questions at 1-800-537-5252 or learn more here.

Check out the rest of our Thanksgiving program lineup below, and you’ll find our full holiday schedule online here. From all of us at VPR, we wish you a warm, safe, and enjoyable holiday!

Thursday, November 26: Giving Thanks With John Birge

7-8 p.m. on VPR; 8-10 p.m. on VPR Classical

Host John Birge creates a thoughtful, contemporary reflection on the meaning of the holiday. This year, he’s joined by author Deepak Chopra, who reflects on gratitude in India, his pilgrimage to America, and shares poems of thanks by Rumi. The program also features food writer Nigella Lawson on the tradition of feasting, and brings along suggestions for turkey leftovers.

The program also features classical music, including Simple Gifts from Yo-Yo Ma, a hymn of Thanksgiving from Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, the autumnal lyricism of Mark O'Connor's American Seasons, and a cornucopia of Bach.

Friday, November 27: Best of the Best

Noon (Hour 1) and 7 p.m. (Hour 2) on VPR

Best of the Best showcases the winning entries of the 10th annual Third Coast Audio Festival. This is the place to hear the most accomplished producers and best emerging talent from around the world, artists who are shaping the future of public radio.

(The photo above is courtesy of Flickr).

Non-Traditional - Or Is It?

Not everyone loves the turkey, stuffing, cranberry jellies and slivered almond green bean casseroles that typify the culinary fare of Thanksgiving. In the diverse spirit of this country's cross-continental, multicutural heritage - one could ask how representative those dishes are of America, anyway?

In my house, we've moved away from turkey for the holiday meal. For many years now I've enjoyed taking the extra time the day offers to leisurely prepare a special meal of some particular ethnicity. It purely comes down to food preference rather than philosophy. Indian cuisine (that's South Asian Indian, not Native American) for its wide range of flavors, spice intensity, and cool/hot sensations has proven to be the favorite. With the hours of preparation and careful cooking it requires, we can usually plan on the holiday meal to be ready in the early evening. The result MORE than makes the anticipation worthwhile!

By around 6pm or so, my much-loved marble mortar and pestle (stained green from the jalapeno mint chutney) is resting on the counter, its work done at last for the day - and the numerous little bowls (I use my Chinese condiment dishes) that hold everything from chopped coriander, hand-ground cumin and cloves and turmeric and cardamom seeds are all emptied out, these ingredients having found a home aromatically simmering away in everything from Chicken Tikka Masala to spicy cauliflower (Phool Gobi aur Aloo Ki Bhaji) and handmade flatbreads (Naan).

Also non-traditional is the source of the many interesting, colorful dishes at my Thanksgiving banquet. My secret is not in time-tested recipes that have been handed down from (Scandinavian!) relatives - it's a dog-eared, broken-binding book I stumbled upon many years ago at a secondhand bookstore in Denver. As reliably as any family member, the stories it tells and secrets it has shared over the years now make Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cooking another welcome and familiar guest at our annual Thanksgiving dinner table.

Each family has its own reasons for making the food it does during the holidays. The important thing is to do what you do for a reason, and enjoy the results - whatever they are - together.

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at VPR! Whether it's turkey or from Turkey, may you enjoy a beautiful meal with enough to share with friends and loved ones, and maybe even have a little left over to enjoy again (and again) over the weekend.

Me? I'm waiting (not very patiently) for that second helping of honeyed pistachios and Gujerati cabbage/carrot salad with toasted black mustard seeds. You'll find the recipe for Sambhara here, as part of our VPR Cooks series. Enjoy!