When life hands you leftover Thanksgiving cranberries, there are some good options.

Dave Faries here, guessing that cranberries are the last of the Thanksgiving leftovers to be finished off—at least for most people.

While working on this week’s cover story, I came across a bit of data claiming that the holiday accounts for 20 percent of the cranberries consumed by Americans annually. It’s a figure that seems low until you factor in the bottles of juices on grocery shelves. There is cran-apple, cran-grape, cran-raspberry, cran-orange and more. Here and there you find bottles of just cranberry, with no added sweetener—good for you, but face-puckeringly intense.

Cranberries and what to do with them is the subject of the cover story. Because the print edition of the Weekly comes out on Thursday, we debated which direction to go with the story. 

It’s too late to run a Thanksgiving-related piece, since many people will pick up the Weekly on one of the following days (which have been given their own distinct identities: Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday; somehow Sunday missed out on the naming rights). Because many people are on vacation or are in a festive mood, Thanksgiving may not be the best time for a dense, investigative news story on the cover. Yet a four-day weekend might just give readers an opportunity to dive into such a piece. Then again, with the aforementioned shopping days…

You get the picture.

Holidays tend to draw out the obvious, and there are good reasons for this. Stories about sparkling wine as New Year’s Eve approaches may seem cliche, for example, but people are actually looking for tips. Such stories are both expected, but serve a purpose for many readers.

That’s where we were a couple of months ago when mapping out the cover story calendar. The conversation turned to Thanksgiving leftovers and it occurred to us that a fun story about leftovers might work. Turkey sandwiches? A bit too obvious. But what about cranberries? They are native to North America and thanks to their health benefits, have become more popular. Still, they are underappreciated as a non-holiday ingredient. What if we approached some chefs with recipe ideas?

Such was the thought process leading up to this week’s cover story. We present five recipes from local chefs using cranberries. The one for a quail entree from Oystertown in Monterey is the most involved—and may require a four-day weekend to achieve—but it reads like a fantastic dish, as do the others.

We hope that one or more of their ideas prove useful to you.