When we visited my parents over Thanksgiving, my mother had cinnamon raisin bread on hand for the breakfast toast. Thursday morning (or was it Friday?) she snuggled in bed with the littles to read library books while my father trotted back and forth between kitchen and bed, bearing plates of cinnamon raisin toast. The children scarfed it as fast as he could make it.

I watched the toast-making marathon from my corner in the kitchen where I was curled up in the red chair sipping coffee and reading An Inconvenient Truth. After my younger son came running out to the kitchen with the empty plate yet again, I pointed out, “You know, Dad, you can say no to them.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said as he spread butter on yet another golden brown slice, taking care to keep his fingers out of the sticky, hot icing. “This is the last batch.”

Year after year, my mother makes enormous loaves of cinnamon raisin bread topped with a rich butter frosting for holiday breakfast toasting. Cinnamon raisin bread belongs to Christmas. I never make it any other time of year. It’d be like playing Christmas carols in May.

But despite my love of the bread, I almost never get around to making it. It could be because my December obsession with all things cookie allows so little time for other baking, or it could be because the cinnamon raisin bread is my mother’s specialty. She provides the traditions and I do the weird new stuff.

But this past weekend when my mother sent home a partial loaf and we polished it off in no time flat, I decided I wanted a big batch of that bread all for us-eses. If my kids liked it this much (and raisins in bread is something they’ve had to grow into), then now was the time to be baking—and icing, toasting, buttering, and eating—it, claiming the tradition for ourselves.

This bread makes excellent gifts (and one year I gave mini loaves to all the neighbors as Christmas gifts), but I’m always a little nervous that people won’t fix it proper. I worry they won’t heed the instructions written on the attached card and will eat it without the toasting and buttering and, if doing it up all the way, the cinnamoning and sugaring. And then they’ll never know the bread’s full glory and all will be for naught. With so many variables, maybe it’s not the most excellent gift after all?

Which is fine. I can make cashew brittle and crack and butter cookies for everyone else. The cinnamon raisin bread will belong to us. (And, in all honesty, the cookies will, too. But never mind that.)

Cinnamon Raisin Bread
Adapted from my mother who adapted it from The Mennonite Community Cookbook, or so says she.

Updated (QUICK) Method, February 23, 2022: Put the cooked, unpeeled potatoes in a blender along with all the cooking water and the butter and blend until smooth. Mix with sugar and salt, a half cup of coarse whole wheat and a couple cups of bread flour. Once cooled to lukewarm, add the yeast/water mix. Add the rest of the flour and spices and stir well. Knead briefly and then add in the raisins. Knead until smooth. Let rise until double. Shape into loaves. Rise. Bake.

1 medium potato, peeled and chopped in cubes
1 quart water
2 tablespoons butter
3 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons yeast
1 cup warm water
1 cup sugar
11-12 cups bread flour
1 pound raisins
2 teaspoons cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground cloves
vanilla frosting (see below)

Put the potato pieces and the quart of water in a saucepan. Simmer until the potatoes are fork-tender. Drain, reserving the liquid. Mash the potatoes with the butter and salt. Add the reserved liquid.

In a small bowl, stir together the yeast and 1 cup of warm water. Let rest for 10 minutes.

In a large bowl, stir together the potato-water mixture, 6 cups of flour, and the sugar. When the mixture has cooled to lukewarm, add the yeast. Stir until smooth. Cover with a towel and rest for about two hours.

Work in the spices and remaining flour (or as much as is needed to make a nice dough). Add the raisins. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead until smooth and satiny. Return the dough to the unwashed bread bowl and cover with a towel. Let rise until double. Shape into loaves (three large, four medium, or a bunch of mini-loaves) and place in greased pans. Let rise, covered, until doubled in size. Bake at 375 degrees for 40 minutes (for big loaves—if making smaller loaves, reduce the oven time accordingly). Cool completely.

To serve: spread the top with vanilla frosting. Slice, which can be tricky since it’s hard to hold onto the bread thanks to the frosting—persevere. Toast, making sure to put the bread in the toaster with the icing facing up. Thanks to the high sugar content, the bread toasts quickly, so watch it closely. Carefully remove from toaster. Butter, and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar.

To give as gifts: frost the bread and then slip it into the fridge, uncovered, for about 15-30 minutes so the frosting can harden up a bit. Then wrap the loaves in plastic wrap. Lay out several strips of plastic flat on the table (overlapping, in an x shape), set the loaf in the middle, and carefully pull up the corners until the whole loaf is encased in plastic. Tie a bright ribbon around the plastic. What you’ll end up with is a loaf of bread with a sprout of plastic on top. Confused? Here’s a picture (not of raisin bread).

To freeze: Bag up un-iced loaves of bread and freeze. Store the frosting in the fridge. To serve, thaw and frost.

Vanilla Frosting
1 stick butter
3½ cups confectioner’s sugar, sifted
1 teaspoon vanilla
half-and-half

Cream the butter. Beat in the sugar, a cup at a time. Add the vanilla. Beat in the half-and-half, starting with a couple tablespoons and adding a little at a time until it’s a spreadable consistency but still thick. Extra frosting can be stored in the fridge for a couple weeks or in the freezer indefinitely.

Part One: Preamble in a Tea Shop
The other night, over a pot of tea, I confided to a girlfriend that I’d never had sushi. Her eyes bugged. She gasped. Once the shock passed, she started fussing over me, acting like I was the most pitiful creature on the planet. We have GOT to fix this, she declared. I am going to take you out for sushi some night. Just you wait.

Part Two: In My House and Head
My older son recently read a whole magazine centered around sushi. (Perhaps this is how my girlfriend and I happened upon the topic of sushi?) My son loves tuna and salmon and shrimp, but he’d never had it raw, with seaweed. And my kids have been exceedingly anti anything Asian-tasting that comes out of my kitchen. (They don’t like soy sauce which kind of nixes everything.) But then my son read this magazine and he started doing weird things like collapsing in chairs and moaning, “I am craving sushi.”

And then I had the following three-part epiphany:

1. My sister-in-law is Japanese.
2. Our families would be gathering together in West Virginia for Thanksgiving.
3. I could ask my sister-in-law for a sushi-making lesson.

So I did, and she said, “Yes, and my brother is coming and he is a sushi chef.”

Well, okay then.

Part Three: The Feast
Friday was Sushi Day. (Could there be a more fitting, post-Thanksgiving meal than sushi, I ask you? I think not.)

Right after breakfast, the chefs got to work. My sister-in-law’s brother, Yasushi, headed up the crew, but his girlfriend, Yuki, and my sister-in-law worked alongside him all morning long. I took pictures, tasted everything, asked questions, and got in the way.

Guys, I did not know this before, but making sushi takes a lot of work. I should’ve been clued in, I suppose. In my son’s magazine, it said that high-end sushi chefs will take a whole year just to master the art of making sushi rice. That’s some crazy perfectionism, no?

It took Yasushi about half an hour to cook up three beaten eggs into a layered, scrambled egg roll. There were the shitake mushrooms to soak and simmer and slice. There was the shrimp to cook up, the avocado and cucumber to slice. There was the raw salmon, tuna, imitation crab (raw pollock) and fish roe to … just get out of the fridge because, well, raw. There was the miso soup with noodles-that-were-really-mushrooms (and that my entire mushroom-adverse family ate without knowing, ha!) and tofu. There were dried tuna flakes (for making the soup broth), and there was Japanese basil, wasabi, and pickled ginger (which I profoundly adore).

The kids helped roll the sushi. It made me cringe, watching them enthusiastically (er, carelessly) handle the perfectly prepped ingredients, and it speaks to the chefs’ tremendous generosity and grace that they just smiled and continued to encourage the kids to pitch in.

The meal was fabulous. There was family-style sushi (with shrimp and julienned scrambled eggs, and raw tuna rosettes), and unrolled (pressed) sushi with smoked salmon, and a small plate of “challenging” raw tuna (my sister-in-law’s wording) with seasonings and nothing else, and all manner of rolled sushi, and miso soup. It was fabulous. (Oh wait. I already used that word. Oh well, it bears repeating because it was. Fabulous, that is.)

Now. I’ll admit that I felt a little weird eating the straight-up raw fish. I tried to chew slow and savor the mild flavors and soft and creamy-tender textures, but the whole time I had to fight the impulse to chew and swallow as fast as possible. Because never before in my life have the words “savoring” and “raw meat” fit together. It was mind-over-body warfare. There was nothing unpleasant about the flavors, so it’ll just take a few tries to get over my niggling primal discomfort. (Girlfriend, I’m thinking I’m ready for some more practice, hint-hint.)

The younger kids weren’t crazy about the sushi (my sister-in-law says that even Japanese children aren’t that fond of it), but the older two plunged right in to the adventure. My older son says it was good, but not exactly what he expected (whatever that was).

So anyway. That was our Day-After-Thanksgiving Sushi Adventure. It was totally different, fascinating, delicious, and delightful. What a treat!

Part Four: The Epilogue
The chefs brought their own rice maker. They say that everyone has one in Japan, and furnished apartments even come with one. I’m kind of smitten by the graceful ease of rice-making that the sleek machine allows.

Part Five: Random, Non-Sushi-Related Postscript
And then the girls tried on dresses. One future prom-going guest wore my sister-in-law’s dress. My older daughter wore my wedding dress. And my younger daughter wore my class night dress.

Glam, they were.

Turkey and pie, family and friends, Japanese and American, music and candles and snow flurries, origami and finger strings, reading and visiting, walks and hunting, tea and coffee, and the baby. The baby sleeping, the baby eating, the baby smiling, the baby talking, the baby bathing, the baby changing, and baby doting. In a popularity contest between the turkey with its slew of mighty side dishes and the baby, the baby would win, hands down.

One note about Thanksgiving day and its food. I’ve come to the conclusion that my mother has devised best T-day eating schedule. It goes like this:

Casual cereal-and-toast breakfast.
Noon Thanksgiving feast. (Hold the desserts.)
Mid/late-afternoon massive bowl of fruit.
Suppertime dessert feast.
Bedtime snack of cheese and crackers if anyone’s still hungry.

I think it’s brilliant and plan to copy it for the rest of my life. (But, on the off-chance there’s something better out there, what’s your tradition T-day eating schedule?)