The Cranberry Sauce Situation

November twenty-seventh. For the record, cranberry sauce has four ingredients. Four. Cranberries, sugar, water, orange zest if you're feeling ambitious, which I was not. I had three. There is no universe in which this should have gone wrong.

What happened was this: I put it on the stove at a reasonable hour, got distracted by the fact that I'd been meaning to wipe down the open shelving for approximately six weeks and Thanksgiving morning felt like the right time to address that, and came back to a saucepan that had decided to become something else entirely. Not jam. Not sauce. Something geological. The smoke detector, which I have lived with for two years and which has never once had an opinion about anything I've cooked, chose this morning to become extremely communicative. I stood on my tiptoes and waved a dish towel at it for what felt like four minutes but was probably forty-five seconds, which is still forty-five more seconds than I expected to spend doing that today.

Exhibit A. The cranberry sauce did not survive.

The apartment smells fine now. I opened the window over the sink, the one that looks out over the collapsed bowl and the two photographs, and the November air did its job quickly. I made a second batch. The second batch took eleven minutes and required no towel intervention whatsoever. It is sitting in a bowl in the refrigerator and it looks exactly like cranberry sauce is supposed to look and I am choosing to count the whole morning as a success with an asterisk.

The towel-waving stage of the operation.

Happy Thanksgiving, if you're observing. I hope your smoke detector stayed quiet. The bar is on the floor and I still nearly didn't clear it, but here we are.