I don’t know about you, but I am ready to curl up into a little ball, and burrow into a nest of protective blankets on the sofa for the next couple of weeks. The new year is not going according to plan. I feel like retreating, and keeping warm and safe in my cozy lair. It’s hard to stir myself enough to cook dinner. That is a self-indulgent fantasy that won’t come true anytime soon. There are deadlines to meet, a dog to walk, and a couple of growling tummies every night that cannot be ignored by magical thinking. Instead, I will compromise with some easy loaded and stuffed-to-the-gills, hot, baked potatoes. And by turning off the talking heads and going to bed early with my stack of Christmas gift books. (A New Year’s Resolution I made was to read more. I hope it was one of yours, too!)

One of my culinary pursuits is perfecting potato delivery systems. I aspire to making the perfect French fry, which has been a decade-long quest. I have decided that I am terrible at making fries from scratch. However I slice or dice the potatoes, I never seem to fry the frites of my dreams. I compromise by frying up frozen, store-bought shoestring potatoes. And in these stress-y days, that is OK. Store-bought are reliably crisp, tender-on-the-inside and importantly, hot.

Baking potatoes at home is much easier. Baked potatoes do not need searing hot peanut oil (or canola, grapeseed, corn, vegetable, olive or peanut oils) with an expensive immersive deep fat fryer, with a sensitive (and accurate) thermometer. Nope. Baked potatoes just need an oven. I can do that.

For a plain Jane baked potato I use a russet potato that weighs about 10 or 11 ounces. (I only know that because I weighed the two I have in the kitchen just now.) I think you know your potato preferences, so find one of a pleasing heft, and proceed.

I pierce the potato skin with a cooking fork a few times, wrap the potato in a paper towel, and pop it into the microwave for 3 minutes on high. (You can skip this step if you are opposed to microwaves. Some people have higher standards.) Then I place the steaming potato on the rack in the oven, which has been preheated to 400°F. After about 45 minutes, I poke the potato with the cooking fork and see if it tender. When it is done, we proceed.

Now comes the fun. Just adding butter, salt and pepper is for purists. For the more adventurous, you can dabble with twice-baking the potato, which has been our latest go-to variation. Since we aren’t venturing out into the COVID world much these days, we have been trying to re-create our favorite (or aspirational) restaurant meals at home. Lately, when we are playing Let’s Go to Smith & Wollensky, we add twice baked potatoes to our homemade à la carte menu. “Jumbo Twice Baked Potato: aged cheddar, apple smoked bacon, scallions, sour cream – $12.” (https://www.smithandwollensky.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Dinner_Fall_Miami2020.pdf) (One upside to the pandemic is that we are saving a lot of money. Imagine if we flew to Miami to eat at Smith & Wollensky! Airfare, plus hotel, plus Uber, plus $12 for one potato. Money saved! I love being frugal.)

This recipe is for a large party of potato eaters, which we are not. But you can do the math yourself and use what you need: https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/overstuffed-twice-baked-potatoes

Here is a sightly more simplified version: https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/cheesy-stuffed-baked-potatoes/

And for those nights when you do not feel like pretending to go to a pricy steakhouse, when you are curled up on the sofa, wrapped in your toasty blankets and ennui, you can add a variety of goodies to a potato as a special home-styled comforting treat for yourself. Luke the wonder dog wishes you will drop some bacon chunks in his direction, but he is always hopeful of little, everyday miracles, isn’t he?

Toppings
• Rummage through the fridge and look for leftover bacon, taco meat, chili, Sloppy Joe meat, barbecue, diced ham or chicken, shredded beef, smoked salmon, shrimp, pepperoni, crumbled sausage
• Cheeses: Cheddar, gorgonzola, Colby, feta, mozzarella, gruyere, Monterey Jack, Swiss
• Greek yogurt, sour cream, hummus, guacamole
• Broccoli, chives, green onion, green pepper, mushrooms, corn, tomatoes, olives, capers, jalapeño slices, caramelized onions, leeks
• Fried egg and Sriracha
• Old Bay, steak sauce, barbecue sauce, pesto, honey mustard

Let’s enjoy our daily comforts, as we venture out into the cold new year. Stay warm. Curl up with a good book. Spring is in its way.

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
― James Baldwin

2020 was complicated. Let’s ratchet down a notch and revel in simplicity while we try to adjust to our new year’s resolutions. Let’s roast a chicken. We can pretend to multi-task by reading a book, and enjoying a warm cup of tea. Winter is going to kick in soon. It’s time to burrow in.

Winter brings out the primal cook in me. It seems basic wisdom to turn on the oven, and bake, and roast, and generate a little more heat. (Remind me of this urge when I am whinging on about how tired I am of the long, torpid summertime heat…)

I would love to have a large, cozy kitchen, with a faded chintz slipcovered armchair and a lazy lap-sitting cat who would inspire me to write humorous tales about our happy little suburban lives. Instead, I am sure my kitchen looks much like yours, with ephemeral postcards, photos and receipts held up by magnets on the fridge, a Sunday book section still begging to be read, a drift of bills and papers I mean to get to soon, coffee cups in the sink and the dog toys scattered where we least expect to find them, particularly when we are barefoot and it is dark. Dog toys have replaced the bane that was Legos.

I may not have the trappings of an orderly dream kitchen, but I can close my eyes and dreamily drift along, buoyed by the aroma of roasted chicken wafting through the house. I can enjoy the illusion of a well-ordered life when I follow this easy peasy recipe for roasted chicken from our friends at Food52. Not only does it warm the house, and the cockles of my jaded heart, but it also provides two meals for us, and a couple of little snackums for the dog and that wretched complaining cat.

The Best Roasted Chicken

http://food52.com/recipes/24217-the-best-roast-chicken-with-garlic-and-herb-pan-sauce

I also appreciated that except for having to procure the chicken, everything else was in the cabinet (or fridge) at home. I hate finding out suddenly, halfway through a recipe, that shallots are a key ingredient – because I never buy shallots. Or saffron.

Honestly. I wouldn’t pull an odious trick like that on you, Gentle Reader. Because you, like me, can find the basics in your kitchen: garlic, salt and pepper, and wine. (Truth: I did have to use dried thyme, because the thyme and rosemary plants have been long-neglected in the outdoor container garden. I think they have freeze dried. Even the basil plants are looking a little long-in-the-tooth. But we always have wine…)

It was a little unnerving setting the temperature so high (480°F!), I must say. But that heat incinerated the two slices of pepperoni that slipped off the pizza a couple of weeks ago; ones that I hadn’t gotten around to cleaning off the floor of the oven yet. Thanks, Food52 for the deelish recipe!
Here is a roasted chicken recipe from Bon Appétit magazine. It sounds divine, but I worry I would forget to change the cooking temperature midway through. I tend to drift away and read, and unless I set the scary, heart-attack-inducing timer, I might forget…

http://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/roast-chicken-with-rosemary-lemon-and-honey

And finally, here is a Herb-and-Lemon Roasted Chicken recipe, originally from Food & Wine magazine, dissected by the guys at The Bitten Word. They are generally hilarious, and yet are so sensible! This recipe called for herb butter to be placed under the chicken skin, and then for one to flip the bird halfway through the cooking process. They were outraged! And there I was being peevish about remembering to change a temperature! Maybe that’s where the cat gets her howling and complaining ways?

http://www.thebittenword.com/thebittenword/2008/04/herb-and-lemon.html#more

“On the nights I stuffed myself full of myths, I dreamed of college, of being pumped full of all the old knowledge until I knew everything there was to know, all the past cultures picked clean like delicious roasted chicken.”
― Lauren Groff

Winter is almost upon us, and though we are well-entrenched in our little bunker because of COVID19 preventative measures, we are yearning to cocoon even more. It’s the holidays, and the cold weather, and the early dark nights that turn us toward candles, twinkly lights and the warm kitchen. We will be doing some holiday baking this weekend, but first we need some nourishing and reassuring hot food.

The Scandinavians have a healthy approach to winter – they embrace the cold weather and make things bright and colorful – defying the gloom of early nightfall. I like to think about bright red wooden Swedish horses, and filling-destroying Swedish fish candy. Swedish comfort food – husmanskost – is hot and hearty. Pour yourself a cup of glogg and warm yourself by your virtual fire. https://www.thespruceeats.com/traditional-glogg-recipe-3510987

Yes, mournful, soul-searching Inspector Kurt Wallander was depressed, and had to solve multiple murders in the beautiful, but austere, Swedish countryside. He might have been less gloomy had he tasted our variation on Svenska Kottbullar, Swedish Meatballs instead of pizza at Bröderna M. I like to think that our meatballs are tastier than IKEA’s, but I haven’t been to an IKEA for a long time. Until the pandemic subsides, and we are free to roam around again, homemade will have to do. https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/216564/swedish-meatballs-svenska-kottbullar/

A friend of mine used to make several crockpots-ful for her annual Christmas soirée. I hope she knows how to scale back production this year, otherwise she will be eating them all winter long – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Swedish meatballs are slightly more elegant than meatloaf. The American humorist Jean Shepherd waxed poetical about his mother’s meatloaf, she of “rump-sprung chenille bathrobe” ignominy. I used to listen to Shepherd on the radio as he spun his tales growing up in Depression-era Indiana. Shepherd achieved fame with his A Christmas Story, this is the appropriate season to serve up some childhood meatloaf. I have found that you can never improve on your own mother’s recipe. No one else ever makes it taste like home, and memories, however slightly the actual ingredients deviate from house to house. Perhaps you would like to try Ralphie’s Mother’s Braised Red Cabbage, useful as a pungent palate cleanser for my cloying nostalgia:

1 medium-size red cabbage, thinly sliced
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
4 bacon slices, diced
1 large onion, thinly sliced
2 apples, peeled and diced
3/4 cup red wine
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon minced garlic

* Toss together cabbage, red wine vinegar, salt and pepper in a large bowl.

* Cook bacon in a large Dutch oven over medium high flame for 10 minutes or until just crisp.

* Add onion to bacon and sauté another 5 minutes or until tender.
* Stir in cabbage mixture, apples, red wine, sugar and garlic to onion and bacon mixture in the pot. Cover and reduce heat to medium and simmer 30 to 35 minutes, adding a splash of water, if necessary.
* Makes 6 servings.
– – Recipe courtesy of Warner Bros. Studios

Meatloaf scene from The Christmas Story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0dUmykdtJA

https://www.nwitimes.com/lifestyles/columnists/philip-potempa/anyone-have-goldblatts-cheesecake-recipe/article_2e9c5c85-ba6f-5992-96e4-439becea1972.html

Which is a natural segue to Shepherd’s Pie! It’s warm, steamy, and topped with irresistible mashed potatoes. It uses up leftovers! It makes you eat vegetables! It is loaded with calories that you will effortlessly burn off while shoveling your neighbor’s walk, because it’s the right thing to do. (Not being huge lamb fans we make this with ground beef. Heresy, I know.) https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/member/views/gordon-ramsay-s-shepherd-pie-50161080
Warm yourselves. Merry Christmas from the Spy Test Kitchen!

The Holiday Yule Log: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGNXVhMLw8o&index=8&list=PLtHXFR1uXA7rG4k3RoZP0c96AfSX4avxJ

“If I could work my will every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”
Ebenezer Scrooge

I’ll be home for Christmas. And Hanukkah. And New Year’s Eve. And probably Valentine’s Day, my birthday and Easter. And it is looking increasingly like the Fourth of July will again be spent in the back yard. Maybe I will splash out for a wading pool next summer.

Those of us who are lucky enough to have a good internet connection can keep in touch with loved ones this holiday season. I am attending a Zoom cocktail party next week, which is thrilling. I need to find an appropriate party hat and devise a distinctive holiday cocktail – though I will probably just fall back on my favorite French 75. Bubbly is always festive, and it is such a treat.

Zoom meetings have become de rigueur and possibly passé; we are a jaded lot nowadays, nothing impresses us anymore. I think of Zoom as a thrilling novelty that the Jetsons promised us our future lives would enjoy. No, I do not have a robot housemaid, or a flying car, but it does my heart good to see a college chum on screen. Once we learn to take turns, and stop talking over each other it is practically like old times. The quality of our drinks has improved – we aren’t drinking Paul Masson wine or Old Milwaukee any more. For which our livers thank us. It’s nice to think that out there in the darkness we still have our tribe.

One element of real life that Zoom calls lack is a sense of smell. Not that college years smelled wonderful – I can remember distinctly the acrid, greasy, onion-y smell of cheesesteak subs wafting in the dorm – a sure sign of a hangover cure being implemented. And those group bathrooms were rather odoriferous. And the Brussels sprouts in the dining hall! Perhaps college is not the best metaphor for comforting vestiges of the past. Though, not all Zoom calls are made to college chums. Some are to children, and siblings, and parents. And I associate the holidays with the smells of cooking and baking, and fresh, fragrant Christmas greens, and spices we keep in a pot boiling away all day long.

I baked some gingersnaps the other night. The act of baking was a vehicle to Christmases past. The essences of ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg floated around the kitchen and made me feel connected to earlier times. It was good to work with my hands and make a bit of a mess. It has been such a crazy year, as we all continue to mutter every single day.

It has been a weird year. I’d like to go home. I’d like to be someplace cosy and reassuring. Where I can have a nice warm gingersnap, or some latkes by candlelight. And here we all still are. Take good care of each other. Bake some cookies. Grate some potatoes. Call someone just to say hello.

Let’s dive into the foods that celebrate Hanukkah, and the miracle of the Festival of Lights. Light your candles and remember how the lamp oil for one night became enough oil for eight nights. And then get ready for latkes.

https://toriavey.com/toris-kitchen/crispy-panko-potato-latkes/

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Potato-Latkes-104406

I always thought this was my mother’s recipe for Gingersnaps, but I recently unearthed a ruled recipe card, scrawled in her handwriting, that clearly identifies it as my aunt’s recipe. Who knew? Here for your holiday enjoyment is Regina Foley Noto’s GINGERSNAP Recipe:

Makes approximately 3 dozen cookies
Pre-heat the oven to 350°F

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon ground ginger
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt

Sift together the dry ingredients above. This is crucial – follow the steps here.

Add the dry ingredients to:
3/4 cup softened butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1/4 cup molasses

Mix thoroughly. Roll mixture into small balls and then roll the balls in a bowl of granulated sugar. Flatten the balls onto parchment paper-lined cookie sheets with a small glass. Bake for 12-15 minutes. Cool on racks. They are quite delicious with a nice cold glass of milk.

Our friends at Food52 have more imagination – and I trust a larger budget than I do. I get by with a small saucepan, filled with water, cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg. It is aromatic and seasonal. They are fancier: https://food52.com/blog/14741-what-to-simmer-for-a-fresh-seasonal-smelling-home

“To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense. “
-John Irving

I was led astray by some bright shiny ideas. ’Tis the season, I know, but my focus wavered, and I was beguiled and bewitched by a fantastic notion that I could bake something fancy and pretty. I should have learned my lesson with flourless chocolate cake – it rises like a soufflé and then collapses on itself like a black hole, and yet it is delicious. I should have learned from years of baking brownies that dark brown confections are perfectly fine dug out of a pan, accompanied by a glass of milk, and one should not ask for the moon.

But it is coming on Christmas, and one day as I flipped idly through a King Arthur’s flour catalogue, the envy genie tempted me with a glamorous, silvered and multi-rooflined vision of a gingerbread Bundt cake loaf pan. Oh, the peaks, the gables, and the mullioned windows! The cunning little trees and the shingled roof! The chimney down which our favorite fat man could climb! I was smitten.

You have to understand that every year a friend shares photos of her traditional Yule log cake. It is perfect in every way. She creates frosting that mimics tree bark, you can see age rings on the cut tree, with its chopped branches, drifts of fallen snow, and magnificent marzipan holly leaves and berries. It is wholly beautiful. I yearn for her sugar skills.

I tried going by the traditional gingerbread house route for years when my children were growing up. I probably scarred them for life. First we baked sheets of sturdy gingerbread, and using paper patterns, would trim out the various construction elements. Then we would pipe bowls of royal icing to cement walls to roofs, and doors onto walls, and carefully mount wobbly chimneys. Then the royal icing would start to slip. (Have I mentioned this is when we lived in Florida? Florida is not a kind place. Especially when it is hot and humid. Which is practically all year long. Things tend to ooze and slide, or not gel.) Once the royal icing gave way we tried toothpicks for supports. And then popsicle sticks. And then hot glue. I kid you not. Eventually we got one inedible gingerbread house to stand upright and look decent.

Martha makes all this look easy, I wretchedly complain to anyone who will listen. Martha has staff. Luckily children aren’t too judgmental. They had fun messing around in the kitchen, sampling all the decorations. There are few disasters that gumdrops, pretzels, peppermint sticks. Necco wafers and licking bowls clean of batter and icing can’t cure. Still, it might be nice now to pause and reflect on the countless years we rolled out lovely, photo-worthy gingerbread houses that could stand proudly beside someone else’s annually beauteous Yule log cake. Sigh. These are the things of dreams.

I was proud that we never succumbed to gingerbread house kits – those pre-fab, pre-baked gingerbread walls and roofs that you can find sold in boxes in the grocery store. One year we tried substituting graham crackers for gingerbread, and all we got were tiny little school-milk-carton-sized houses that looked pathetic. Which was why the gleaming silver gingerbread house Bundt cake pan looked so appealing. How hard could it be to mix up some batter, pour it into a Bundt pan, bake it and then triumphantly pull the pan off of a perfect gingerbread house? It was devilishly hard.

It might have helped if I hadn’t followed the fanciest damn recipe for gingerbread. Food52, we might be parting ways after all these years together. This recipe, which called for all manner of fancy ingredients, was delicious. I tasted some as I dumped it into the trash can. It was moist and spicy and redolent of a household where the baking is done to perfection, and even though their seasonal speciality might be Yule Log cakes, they can whip up a perfect gingerbread house without breaking a sweat, anytime they want.

The Gingeriest Gingerbread:https://food52.com/recipes/78431-the-gingeriest-gingerbread . The first item on the list of ingredients should have given me an inkling of the imminent disaster: 1 cup strong ginger beer. I was lucky that my grocery store (the fancy grocery store, not my everyday shopping haunt) had 2 kinds of ginger beer: 1 with 4 tiny bottles cost $4.99. The other, also with 4 tiny bottles, cost $10.99. I guess the recipe failed because I opted for the less expensive brand.

Farther down the ingredient list were 2 tablespoons Microplaned peeled fresh ginger. This is a hideously huge amount of ginger to grate. The microplane also did a number on my fingerprints. Oh, and then I had to go back to the store for a lime, because I needed to zest it. More Microplaning, more finger erosion.

After boiling the ginger beer and molasses, stirring in the fizzing agent of baking soda, I buttered and floured my adorable Bundt cake pan, and then followed all the instructions with rigor and due diligence. I tempered the eggs. I whisked until smooth. Then I baked for an hour and 10 minutes. The long skewer I inserted into the gingerbread came out sticky and raw. And so I baked, and baked, and baked.

Finally, it seemed as if the gingerbread was done. I cooled it for a while, and finally turned it over onto a baking rack. And nothing came out. I cooled it longer. I tried shaking. I tried running a sharp knife around the edges. Google suggested that reluctant Bundt cakes might be coaxed from their shells after a period in the freezer. Might I suggest that this time, this once, that Google was wrong?

I scraped the goo out of the Bundt cake pan, and scuppered my dreams of a perfect Christmas gingerbread house. The next time we went to the grocery store, not the fancy one, Mr. Friday pulled a box of Betty Crocker gingerbread mix off the shelf, and discretely tucked it in with the week’s shopping. That night I used our perfectly serviceable dull aluminum, 9-inch brownie pan, lined it with a sheet of parchment paper, and mixed up a bowl of gingerbread. We won’t have a gingerbread house this year, yet again, but we did have a nice dessert, topped with a heavenly cloud of whipped cream. Ho-ho-ho.

Simple is better.

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

― William Shakespeare

Thanksgiving plans across the country are being suspended and cancelled this year – our year of COVID-19, panic, existential dread, and group anxiety. Everyone’s expectations for relief and some reassuring holiday cheer have been dashed. And political divide within some families is driving the wedge further. How can we have a hopeful Thanksgiving?

Let’s try to cheer up and count those blessings we overlook every day. Luke the wonder dog and I went for our morning walk today. We go for the same walk five mornings a week. Today wasn’t much different from yesterday or the day before. But it was wintery cold for the first time today. There was frost on the grass. And I wore a hat and gloves and a nice warm coat. It was so unlike the walk we would have taken if we still lived in Florida. It is a joy to be wearing turtlenecks and sweaters again. For this I am grateful.

Our daily walks might seem to be a monotonous routine, but recently we trained a fellow quotidian walker to keep some dog biscuits in her pocket, to share with Luke, and he is overjoyed to see the old lady every day. His ears perk up and he strains eagerly to meet her on the path, where she kindly gives him a tiny dog treat – the size of a Flintstone vitamin. And then she pats his head, and tells him what a good boy he is. We all socialize for a moment and then go our own ways. We have made a tenuous connection, and the three of us are a little bit happier. Thank you.

Every couple of days I leave Luke penned up in the kitchen, with Alexa playing NPR, and a red rubber Kong toy stuffed with peanut butter, while I make a quick trip to the grocery store. After I finish writing this piece I will be buzzing out, mask in hand, with some reusable, locally-sourced bags, to pick up some wine for dinner, and a copy of the New York Times. While shopping I will make eye contact with a few of the other shoppers as we bob and weave and struggle to remember to keep our social distance. You have to smile with extra crinkling efforts these days, so people can tell you are smiling. Everyone seems to be trying harder. This is good.

Depending on the size of your pandemic pod, you might not be having much of a Thanksgiving feast. But you are always going to have a sinkful of dishes. No matter how much cleaning you do as you go along, there will be greasy pots, fragile glasses, gritty mixing bowls, slippery silverware and sticky beaters. For that we should be truly grateful.

I read somewhere today that Nigella Lawson, who is English, thought we should just have vanilla ice cream with a cranberry syrup on Thanksgiving. Sure. That’s just what we need to be doing – scrimping on dessert. I don’t think so, Nigella. (I mean, she butters her toast twice, for heaven’s sake!) Luke and I don’t walk five miles a day to have a measly bowl of ice cream for Thanksgiving dessert. On Thanksgiving we will be indulging in our favorite flourless chocolate cake. With whipped cream, thank you very much. Well, Mr. Friday and I will be. We’ll give Luke the treat of a peanut butter-stuffed Kong, but we’ll stay in the kitchen with him as we listen to NPR together. I can’t wait to hear Susan Stamberg’s annual recitation her mother-in-law’s recipe for orange cranberry relish. It is our Thanksgiving ritual. And then we will sidle over to the Group W bench for 18 minutes of song with Arlo Guthrie. And then maybe we’ll take a walk. Happy Thanksgiving!

Nigella’s recipe: https://www.nigella.com/recipes/ice-cream-with-cranberry-syrup

Susan Stamberg: https://www.npr.org/2006/11/23/4176014/mama-stambergs-cranberry-relish-recipe

The Spy’s Flourless Chocolate Cake: https://chestertownspy.org/2012/02/09/food-friday-for-love-and-chocolate/

Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant Massacree: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/brief-history-alices-restaurant-180967276/

“Those who are not grateful soon begin to complain of everything.”
― Thomas Merton

At Thanksgiving we have to open ourselves up to new traditions and tastes, while being grateful. As we gather together, whether it is via Zoom or FaceTime, or if we are lucky enough to have a little family unit pod to call our own, or if we are stalwart singletons gamely firing up the oven for a modest roast chicken, we will all be considering the all-important side dishes.

My favorite dinner is a roasted chicken breast, with salt and pepper and some chopped onions nestled on top of the skin. And I like a side dish of rice and butter. It is the most comforting meal to me because it is what my mother prepared for my family birthday celebrations. With a little green salad, with a splash of a simple oil and vinegar homemade dressing. Modest and simple, and easy to put together.

Turkey isn’t all that different from chicken, except there is more of it, and it requires more ritual, ceremony, and expense. And people have so many opinions about how to cook it: brine it, roast it, deep fry it, inject it, wedge compound butter under the skin, coat with strips of bacon, smoke it, and spatchcock it. Mr. Friday spoke with some yearning about a new brining combo he’d love to try this year. The Tall One has enjoyed success smoking a few birds. I guess we will have to be open to the adventuresome cooks who are taking an interest in the assembly of Thanksgiving this year. They are also chatting, albeit casually, about stepping up our side dish repertoire. I find this more alarming. I like some traditions to be consistent and unvaried.

I read a listicle in Thrillist this week about the side dishes most preferred by each state. It was an eye-opener. I had never considered macaroni and cheese as a viable Thanksgiving side dish before. https://www.thrillist.com/news/nation/most-popular-thanksgiving-sides-list-2020-zippia

Maryland, according to Thrillist, is a mac and cheese state. So is my adopted home, North Carolina. But Connecticut, where I grew up, is a mashed potato state. Bland and starchy Connecticut? It could well be, but add some good quality butter and a pinch of Maldon salt, I think you will find mashed potatoes the perfect accompaniment to roast turkey. And as divine as mac and cheese may well be, can you hollow it out to create a little gravy reservoir? Doubtful.

I suppose it could be worse, Indiana likes deviled eggs. At Thanksgiving? That strikes me as both odd and wrong. But I also believe that the only sort of hors d’oeuvres you should consume at Thanksgiving are the cashews you pick very carefully out of a silver bowl of mixed nuts, and a very 1950s-feeling relish platter, with celery, carrot sticks, radishes and gherkin pickles. You should get to the table with an empty belly. That is the best way to appreciate and consume your fair share of Parker House rolls.

We have a family debate every year whether we should have Parker House rolls or Pillsbury crescent rolls, not being very talented yeast roll bakers. We rely on Pepperidge Farm and Pillsbury every holiday season, but we forget from year to year which we prefer. Annual group amnesia is our most unfailing family characteristic. And if we ever move to West Virginia, Oklahoma, Missouri, or Utah we will fit right in, as they prefer rolls, which I assume means generic dinner rolls. South Dakota will clinch the argument for crescent rolls.

We lived in Florida for more than 20 years, and I can safely say that never once did we have sweet potato casserole. Lucky me. I’ve never lived in Kentucky, where broccoli casserole is a favorite side dish. It must be grim living in Kentucky.

Green bean casserole is the favorite in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. I like green beans as much as the next, but I draw the line at anything that uses a can of mushroom soup. Over the years I have politely moved green bean casserole around on my plate, or hidden it under a crescent roll. I find that cranberry relish is a wonderful agent for disguising discards.

I think stuffing and dressing are a personal decision – like religion or political party. I will not question you openly about your choice. That said, Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and New Jersey like stuffing, whereas Louisiana and Alabama prefer dressing.

We always mash potatoes. Some years we peel a bag o’russets (usually when we are testing out a new boyfriend or girlfriend), or we go wild and boil up some new, pink-skinned potatoes. We might need to try Alaska’s preferred side: hash brown casserole. That seems worth edging warily out of our stodgy comfort zone.

We are prepared to be a little adventurous with our side selections this year. I don’t think we will try the white gravy that is the fave in Arkansas, but maybe we will go out on a limb and have some Iowa corn with our dressing, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, cranberry relish, and turkey. We will leave the mac and cheese, broccoli casserole, and white gravy for the devotees of regional cuisine.

Be careful out there. Here is a link to CDC guidelines for our COVID Thanksgiving: https://www.thrillist.com/news/nation/cdc-recommendations-for-thanksgiving-2020-guidelines

“What I say is that, if a man really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.”
― A.A. Milne

Normally November is the busiest time for cooks and food writers – we cannot get enough of making plans and menus for Thanksgiving and the December holidays at which we gather together. This is not a normal year. We are all dancing as fast as we can to hold onto our fraying sanity, while wearing masks and keeping everyone else at arm’s length. Unless we are very comfortable with Zoom, there won’t be any holiday parties. The only plus is that we won’t have to talk about the election with our uncles. But wouldn’t it be nice to see them all again?

We are opting for a smaller, less boisterous Thanksgiving. At which we will earnestly ask for blessings for everyone, and will remember jollier times. Like the Thanksgiving where we ran out of chairs and the children were relegated to a coffee table. And how, like clockwork, we almost always manage to forget the green beans until after the parade of food from the kitchen to the table has begun. Our cast of characters will be smaller this year. We always have a couple of mashed potato specialists, but only one master baster. We will suffer pie-wise, because Courtnei brings the only acceptable pecan pie. And Julia is in charge of the corn bread stuffing. It just won’t feel the same.

One Thanksgiving in Florida we ate outside, because it was a pleasant temperature and there were lots of wriggling children. We fired up the fairy lights and moved the stereo speakers out onto the back porch. It was an adventure to eat formally, with candles and sterling, and the ancestral china, and tinkling crystal outside, not because we were minimizing the spread of germs. Outside dining is an option for some folks this year. Everyone brings a covered dish, a blanket and some hand sanitizer. (Can I suggest from personal experience that you leave the good china inside, and go for the everyday? It will be dark, after all.) It will be challenging, but I bet we see some clever Instagram feeds of families breaking bread while bundled up. And think about grilling a turkey breast instead of deep frying an entire bird – you can spend even more time outdoors: https://www.101cookingfortwo.com/grilled-brown-sugar-rubbed-turkey/ Added extra: the white wine will chill itself.

So start your low-key Thanksgiving planning. Be innovative. Instead of forgetting the green beans this year, why don’t you try roasting some Brussels sprouts? https://www.wellplated.com/oven-roasted-brussels-sprouts/

If you are going to be a smaller family unit this year, how about making your life easy? Roast a chicken. You can still eat drumsticks: https://food52.com/recipes/17568-barbara-kafka-s-simplest-roast-chicken Then you can splash out for some really nice wine, and make a labor intensive and decadent dessert involving choux pastry, chocolate and creme pat: https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/choux-pastry/

A dose of romance could liven up a holiday spent at home. Lots of candles and a brace of Cornish game hen, wild rice, roasted Brussels sprouts, chocolate eclairs, with fewer dishes to wash. Take a nice meandering walk in the cold, and have an evening streaming comforting Hayao Miyazaki films. Find something to make yourselves happy. And in 20 years, you’ll have something to remember when this chapter is all over.

With COVID lurking around every corner these days, we have to be flexible and learn how to pivot. Maybe next year we will be back to normal, while listening to the uncles still droning on about the election. And won’t that be grand?

“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.”
― Oscar Wilde

Ever mindful of the restrictions of social distancing during these days of COVID, we try to be a little fancier when we cook at home on Saturday nights. We light candles, make sure the napkins match the tablecloth, have a slightly pricier bottle of wine and sometimes plan a dessert. And sometimes we have indulgent side dishes.

We are always trying to find a new way to cook potatoes. Once a week I like to be reckless and have French fries – which are devilishly difficult to prepare at home. I have bought gallons of many kinds of oil, looking for the cleanest, lightest, most-able-to-withstand-the-most-heat. I have ordered duck fat twice. I have bought potato cutting machines, a mandoline, and have sharpened the knives trying to hand slice the perfect fry. I have several thermometers used for monitoring the smoke point of the oil. I have wiped down the stove top each and every time the oil errupts in geyser-like splatters from the cooking pot. It is frustrating, difficult, messy and expensive, and completely unsuccessful.

Some recipes call for soaking potatoes in cold water to encourage the starch to flow out of the raw potatoes. Some insist you do not soak. Some say dust with corn starch. Some call for frying the potato twice, to get the desirable Belgian-crisp frite effect. I seem to make the best fries when I use the store-bought, frozen, shoestring potato. And not even Ore-Ida. The cheapest store brand works best. What I really need is a professional Fry-o-later.

Compounding the frustration is my complete inability to coordinate the French fry trial and error cooking time with Mr. Friday’s delivery of hot food. When he grills, he uses a timer, so he always knows within a minute or two when the Saturday night meal will be ready to go on the table. With my scattershot fry experiments I can hold things up as I wait for the final ethereal moment of crispy fry perfection to emerge triumphant from the bath of hot, golden oil. Or I manage to bring a bowl of limp, sodden potatoes into the candlelight. Happy Saturday night!

Last week I gave up. I will leave the French fry cooking to the professionals – because I will never get that professional Fry-o-later through the front door. And maybe restrictions will lift sometime in the new year and we can all go out for dinner again. In the meantime, I tested a recipe from the New York Times that seemed daunting at first, and then I realized how easily it delivered some good, snappy and flavorful potatoes, without all the frustration, thermometers or grease splatters. It is easy, and practically hands-free.

I was stymied originally by one of the ingredients, which I could not find for love or money. Maybe you live near a Whole Foods or a fancier grocery store than is available to the rest of us mere mortals. I could not track down the pink peppercorns in “Salt-Baked New Potatoes With Pink-Peppercorn Butter”. And that was OK. Now I have an elusive item to track down, if I ever get out of town again.

The local Aldi had the cutest jewel-like new potatoes in a little string bag. Food Lion provided the two pounds of sea salt. I had the rosemary plants in the back yard. I substituted in coarsely-ground black pepper. (I also halved the recipe, because there are just 2 of us.)

Thank you, Gabrielle Hamilton for teaching me how to reclaim Saturday night dinner.

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1021483-salt-baked-new-potatoes-with-pink-peppercorn-butter?

“For the potatoes
2 pounds small, yellow-fleshed waxy potatoes (it’s fine if skins are red or purple or yellow)
2 pounds kosher salt
2 tablespoons fresh rosemary needles, stripped from their branch
2 tablespoons pink peppercorns
For the compound butter
1 tablespoon pink peppercorns
1 or 2 soft, velvety branches of rosemary (versus the very stiff, broom-bristle kind)
4 ounces salted Irish butter, tempered at room temperature until cool and waxy

PREPARATION
Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Wash the potatoes.

In a large bowl, mix the salt, rosemary needles, peppercorns and 1 cup water together with your hands, crushing the peppercorns a little between your fingers and bruising the rosemary needles to release their sticky oil, making a moist, fragrant and pink-and-green speckled sand. (You might have to add a few splashes of water if the mixture needs more moisture to feel like wet sand.)

Transfer a little less than half this salt mixture into the bottom of a wide, shallow, heavy ovenproof skillet or casserole to make a salt bed about 1/2-inch thick.

Nestle the potatoes into the sand, close to one another but not quite touching, if possible.

Pack the rest of the salt mixture over the nestled potatoes, and rub and brush and smooth it with your hands until you have tightly encased the potatoes in a little salt sarcophagus. The rounded tops of the potatoes will just show as bumps under the salt cast.

Bake the potatoes for 30 to 40 minutes, until a cake tester easily pierces the potatoes and tests warm on your chin or the back of your hand. The salt casing will dry and harden like clay — and smell delicious while baking.

While the potatoes roast, prepare the compound butter: Grind the peppercorns in a mortar and pestle with the whole branches of rosemary to create an oily, coarse powder. Remove the bruised rosemary sprigs, shaking off any clinging pink peppercorns, and discard. (You just want to extract the oily flavor from the rosemary, not the needles themselves.) In a small bowl, mash the oily peppercorn powder with the salted butter using a fork until well blended.

To serve, rap the salt-packed potatoes forcefully on a sturdy surface that can handle it, to crack the salt crust from the force. A few solid raps will loosen the potatoes inside. If the cast needs a little more help, use a regular dinner knife like a spade to just pop open the salt crust along its fault lines. The potatoes are easily plucked from the dry salt. Set out with the compound butter in a small bowl on the side.”

While these potatoes will never be the French fries of my dreams, they are wholly delish. They were a delight to excavate from the salty crust. It was like a tiny little clambake, but with out the smelly clams or corn – just some steaming hot tiny potatoes. They went well with my filet, and with Mr.Friday’s salmon. Add these beauties to your repertoire when you want to dress up a Saturday night.

“It is the kind of Saturday night that torches your life for a few hours, makes it seem like something is happening.”
― Annie Proulx

https://www.webstaurantstore.com/frymaster-mj1cf-natural-gas-floor-fryer-60-80-lb/369MJ1CFMN.html

These are the golden days of fall. Clear skies, fluttering leaves, red dogwood berries, and cooler temperatures. I’m happily rummaging through my sweater drawer, eager for a wardrobe change. Food-wise we are ready for some novelty, too. Summer salads were all well and good, but I’m thinking of heartier fare – I’ll be bidding adieu to estival cucumber salads, and hello to the many permutations of the fortifying squash.

Summer squash – namely zucchini – has worn out its welcome. Winter squash is a blessing. I have been reading recipes for raw, roasted, baked, mashed, grilled, stewed, steamed and souped-up squash. And there are oodles more for the myriad varieties of squash: acorn squash, Delicata squash, butternut squash, Sweet Dumpling squash, Turban squash, Kabocha squash, spaghetti squash, buttercup squash, and lest we forget the obvious – pumpkin squash.

I rely on Food52 for its robust ideas. How brilliant is this? Raw butternut squash: https://food52.com/blog/25641-why-you-should-eat-butternut-squash-raw

For the chilly vegetarians in your COVID pod, this is a way to warm them up with the more delicate taste of roasted acorn squash and apples: https://www.makingthymeforhealth.com/roasted-acorn-squash-and-apple-soup/

Are you trying to cut back on your carbs? Spaghetti squash might be the answer. Of course, adding cheese and bacon, and a side of garlic bread won’t really benefit your lofty dietary goals, but it is delicious: https://www.thespruceeats.com/spaghetti-squash-carbonara-4693656

There are subtle differences among squash varieties. The kabocha (which means pumpkin in Japanese) squash and the buttercup squash look very similar – they are round and squat and green, after all. But the kabocha is rounder, and has a tree-like stem. The buttercup flesh is wetter, while the kabocha is more dense and easier to handle, and more desirable. Seek out the kabocha, accept no substitutes. https://heathereatsalmondbutter.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/gettin-krazy-with-kabocha/

The Delicata squash is cream-colored with orange or green stripes, and it has a delicate, edible rind. Pair it with apples for an aromatic side dish for pork chops: https://www.loveandlemons.com/roasted-delicata-squash/

I love a good, hearty stuffed squash. Many squash are perfectly suited for stuffing and you can stuff with abandon: https://www.splendidtable.org/story/2015/11/06/stuffed-winter-squash

Breads! Bake pumpkin bread often during the fall. Homemade pumpkin spices floating around the house will cheer you up and make you smile during these anxious COVID days, which drag on and on. You will feel a great sense of accomplishment, too. Right now, mindfulness and deep breathing are to be encouraged. Plus with a slice of pumpkin bread and a cup of tea, you can take a little afternoon break as you work from home. This is extra special pumpkin bread – it has chocolate! It will give you something to look forward to: https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/pumpkin-chocolate-chip-bread/

Here is a handy overview of winter squashes: https://www.allrecipes.com/article/winter-squash-types/

“It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.”
― Alexander McCall Smith