Good morning. You’ll be making pie dough this weekend. (Right?) You’ll be buying wine for the feast. (Or farming out that job to siblings?) You’ll be standing in the dining room and staring at the table and wondering how many people really can fit around it before you have to bust out the plywood and sawhorses, the extra-long runner, the chairs from upstairs. (Or is that just me?) Anyway, you’re looking at two days of lists, check marks and lots of Thanksgiving self-instruction this weekend, and a lot of physical work on top of that if you’ve got a yard and it’s filled with leaves.
It is no doubt outrageous, then, for me to ask you to make risotto this evening, and not even to eat tonight, but to save for dinner tomorrow. But I will, and here’s why: Gabrielle Hamilton wrote about the pleasures of cooking with day-old risotto Milanese for The Times this week, and her recipe for risotto al salto (above) is or ought to be the thing we all cook this weekend, with pleasure and style. It’s sautéed risotto, essentially, in Gabrielle’s words, “one perfect, saffron-gold disc on a bone white china plate.” It’s outrageous, all right, in the very best way.
So make the rice for that tonight, stir-stir-stir. And then when you’re done with the precise labor, you can turn to a dinner of crazy simplicity: hot dogs dressed in the Mexican style, a taste of Los Angeles, a great end to the week.
Saturday and Sunday, you can consider Thursday’s feast. There’s vegan Thanksgiving to think about, and Thanksgiving appetizers, too. (At least if you serve appetizers on Thanksgiving. I do not. There’ll be plenty of food in a minute, and the longer you wait, the hungrier you’ll be. I did not wake at dawn, so you might fill yourself with devils on horseback and later decline a second serving of mushroom bread pudding to go with the turkey.) There’s maybe the bird to pick up. You’ll want to get ready to employ J. Kenji López-Alt’s awesome new technique for making roast potatoes better. (Here’s the recipe.) Certainly there’s this amazing new recipe from Alison Roman to think about making as well, for spicy caramelized squash with lemon and hazelnuts. Thanksgiving is so fantastic.
Thousands more ideas for what to cook for the holiday are on NYT Cooking. We even have a page devoted to Thanksgiving, that collects all our recipes in one place — or you can employ tight focus and celebrate with “Melissa Clark’s Thanksgiving” alone. Yes, you need a subscription to access all that. In return, we’ll continue to work hard to make our site and apps the best available anywhere, and therefore worth your investment. Fair trade! (Black Friday preview: We sell gift subscriptions.)
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Now, nothing to do with pumpkin spice or turkey broth, but what did you make of this new Tesla pickup truck revealed in Los Angeles?
This is the weekend for our annual reading of Colin Nissan’s profane 2009 essay about decorative gourds, in McSweeney’s, which has shaped up as the “Alice’s Restaurant” of post-Boomer Thanksgiving culture.
Do read Alexandra Schwartz on the Park Slope Food Co-op, in The New Yorker. I worked shifts there in the early 1990s, unloading trucks well before dawn. It was not for me, though I learned a lot about what life must have been like behind the Iron Curtain. (I have friends who love the place unreservedly.) I am anyway not a monogamous shopper.
Finally, Caryn Ganz got me going on this new song from The Secret Sisters, “Cabin.” Give that a run this weekend. I’ll see you on Sunday.
