Do I like Thanksgiving? I think so. It’s sacrilege not to. But sometimes the traveling, the stuffing ourselves, the Christmas music (yes, each year it arrives on radios and in stores earlier and earlier), it makes me want to scour kayak.com for flights to the Maldives and get the heck out of dodge. Which yes I am doing in fact. Hoping for a Maldivian Christmas-New Year’s. Wanna come?

But between the damage brought on from Hurricane Sandy a couple of weeks ago—the effects of which are still very much a hard reality in neighborhoods throughout the New York City area—and the fighting in Israel and Gaza this past week, there is a sobering and somber undercurrent this Thanksgiving. I continue to be amazed by the efforts of Occupy Sandy.

Some of the things I do like about Thanksgiving, of course, are the good eats: the turkey, cornbread stuffing, cranberry-orange relish, seeing my siblings together under one roof (rare these days), and trying new recipes. It’s a time to reflect on all the riches in our lives. For me, relationships and health in particular.

Last year I wrote about a devil food’s cake I tried out that was not entirely a success but not bad either. This year I needed a dessert to balance out the pumpkin cheesecake my sister-in-law—also our host in Northampton, Mass.—was making. You kind of need something with apples on the Thanksgiving dessert table but I didn’t want to make the same ole apple pie so I stumbled upon this salted caramel apple tart via Smitten Kitchen.

You make it using store-bought puff pastry and I recommend Dufour pastry which is made with all butter and not much else (ok, a little flour). You may experience sticker shock as I did at the Whole Foods checkout yesterday ($11.99) but it’s entirely worth it in my opinion.

You can find the entire apple tart recipe here. I am getting lazy about retyping perfectly good, already published recipes. A big shout out to Deb Perelman, from whose blog I’m unabashedly cribbing these days.

Look how pretty those little cubes of butter look on the uncooked apples!

Making the salted caramel is pretty darn easy.

Looking forward to biting into this tomorrow. I’ll try and update the post to let you know how it is. I also want to post about the cranberry-orange relish I made this year but need to go catch the subway! So if you celebrate Thanksgiving I hope it’s a meaningful one for you. Peace out-