Good morning. The emails are starting to come in now from friends, the texts, the direct messages, the phone messages left in consideration and in haste: Just checking in about Thanksgiving. Had a couple questions.
I imagine you do. We all do, even those of us who traffic in Thanksgiving for a living, who have written a book on the subject, who start cooking turkeys in September in search of recipes that we believe will someday bring someone somewhere joy: a Cantonese-style turkey (above), say; or a mojo-marinated turkey to evoke Cuba; a red-chile braised turkey that tastes of New Mexico; a jerk-style Jamaican turkey bright with thyme and allspice.
The days run into one another, and all of a sudden we’re less than a month from the holiday and it’s worth asking: Do you have a plan? I realize it makes me into Mr. Hectoring Guy and I’m sorry, but the time to start drafting that plan is now. That action will pay off handsomely next month, I promise.
So take a look at our Thanksgiving offerings today, if you would, and see if they don’t inspire you to bake some holiday pies this weekend as a practice session for November. Use our menu planner to see what you might cook alongside them. Get in the holiday spirit with a pumpkin pie milkshake. (It’s good!) At the very least, reach out to those who’ll be attending your Thanksgiving this year, to see what they’re interested in doing to make it better than the last one. Then use that information to start a list you’ll update for the next four weeks.
Then check out this new recipe from Colu Henry for roasted carrots with cilantro, yogurt and peanuts. I think that’s a fine vegetarian main course on Saturday night, or a beautiful accompaniment to a simple roast chicken.
Sunday is for apple-butter sticky buns with pecans and currants. (Isn’t it?) Also for making and devouring the best fried eggplant sandwich you can get on a Sunday when Defonte’s in Brooklyn is closed. Inside information: Omit the roast beef. It can be, as the kids on Montague Street say, a little extra.
And, for dinner, make David Tanis’s excellent recipe for midnight pasta with garlic, anchovy, capers and red pepper. It is so, so great.
Thousands and thousands more recipes to cook this weekend and for Thanksgiving are waiting for you on NYT Cooking. Please, if you don’t have one already, take out a subscription so that you can access them all. (Also, so that we can keep doing this. It’s a mutually beneficent kind of situation.)
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Now, it doesn’t have a whit to do with hens or turmeric, and I don’t know how I missed its initial publication a few years ago, but it fell in my lap randomly and I’m here to say I love this great Patrick Symmes story in Outside, about the power of fly-fishing to mend lives: “The PTSD River Cure.”
Our Parul Sehgal is wrestling with ghosts, and it’s great and spooky reading to be sure.
Finally, holy cow this podcast series “Carruth,” from The Charlotte Observer, an investigation into the shooting of Cherica Adams in 1999 and the conviction of her boyfriend, the NFL star Rae Carruth, on charges that he hired a hitman to kill her.
Have a great weekend. I’ll see you on Sunday.
