Good morning. We’ll get to the recipes soon enough, to this insanely good macaroni and cheese (above), to Julia Moskin’s hashed brussels sprouts, to gravy instruction and a whole lot more. This is perhaps the time you need recipes most, of any time of year.
But there are two important points to make before we talk about them, information hard-won over years of Thanksgiving reporting, participatory journalism at its most delicious.
The first has to do with your cooking. It is worth repeating like a mantra for the next 24 hours: Everything is going to be all right. You’re going to hit your marks and serve your food, and everyone’s going to coo and gurgle and eat like feral hogs. (Delicious, by the way.) Things will go wrong, and you’ll laugh and recover. Cranberry sauce and giblet gravy can cover a multitude of sins. It’s Thanksgiving. Surf it. Hang loose.
The second has to do with the table and what to do when that new person at the feast reveals herself a conspiracy theorist, when Uncle Fester starts talking politics, when your aunt ramps up with the crazy. Nothing, really. You are not going to change anyone’s mind on Thanksgiving, not about anything. Just smile and listen, then ask for seconds, for thirds, and clear the table when you’re done. Don’t prosecute. Don’t inveigh. Just listen. Later you can scream into a pillow — but by then, having done as I suggested, you won’t want to. You’ll be chuckling instead.
That’s what I’ve got for you, anyway, here on Thanksgiving Eve. That and some ideas for what you might cook tonight. Pasta with sausage and Parm? Oyster curry? Spicy roasted shrimp and broccoli rabe? I like the idea of cooking out of a pantry far from the pilgrims’ own, free of gravy, big on acid and fire. Thai larb gai! Spicy pan-fried noodles!
There are thousands and thousands more ideas for what to cook tonight, tomorrow and in coming days on NYT Cooking. Including, of course, a huge number of recipes for Thanksgiving and instructions for how to execute them. (Here’s how to cook a turkey. How to make stuffing. How to make cranberry sauce. How to make pie crust.)
Yes, you need a subscription to access the site and apps. I think that’s a fair deal. You get to search and click at will, save and organize your recipes, rate them and leave notes on them for yourself or others, send yourself grocery lists, the whole megillah. And I, in turn, get to keep my job. Please join us, if you haven’t already. (Black Friday’s coming and gift subscriptions are cooler than big-screen TVs.)
You can also find us on Facebook, where we support a community of home cooks sharing recipes and pictures of animals. We’re on Instagram, too, with beautiful art, and on YouTube, where Melissa Clark recently showed us around her home kitchen. Like and subscribe!
And should anything go wrong along the way, either with your cooking or our technology, please write: cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you, though not after 3 p.m. tomorrow, Eastern Standard Time, when we’ll take off to feast.
Now, please, please, please read Julia on Jell-O molds and Thanksgiving. (And listen to me talking Thanksgiving in general, on the CBS This Morning podcast!)
It’s nothing to do with chestnuts or sea scallops, but you ought to read Michael Kimmelman’s review of J. W. Mohnhaupt’s “The Zookeepers’ War,” in Air Mail. It contains a good number of excellent sentences, my favorite of which is: “Germans go to zoos the way the French go on strike: frequently.”
Looking forward to posting photographs of your feast on social media? You should avail yourself of Andrew Scrivani’s new book, “That Photo Makes Me Hungry,” about photographing food for fun and profit. You’ll recognize Andrew’s work; it is all over NYT Cooking.
If you missed the news as I did, the Montana landscape painter and author Russell Chatham died a few weeks ago, at 80. Here is his obituary in the Billings Gazette.
Finally, here’s Maurice Steger with Vivaldi’s “Recorder Concerto in C Major, RV 443” and it’s bonkers. Tomorrow, we’re all going to cook the way he plays. Have a great holiday. I’ll be back on Friday.
