Good morning. I’ve never been much for salad on Thanksgiving. In fact, I’ve been pretty strident about not serving salad at all on Thanksgiving. If you want an acidic hit against the richness of gravy-slicked turkey and buttery mashed potatoes, isn’t that what the cranberry sauce is for?
But holy cow, Yewande Komolafe may have changed my mind with her new recipe for beet salad with roasted chickpeas and coriander yogurt (above). It’s practically a side dish, and the yogurt dressing would go fantastically with sliced turkey if you served it as a gravy. Make that for a practice round and see what you think.
As a riff on a Thai pomelo salad, Yewande developed a cool grapefruit-herb salad with toasted coconut, salty peanuts and crunchy shallots for layers of flavor and texture. Maybe consider that as well?
Her green salad with apples is no slouch, either. Autumnal and tart, it would provide a really nice counterpoint to drippings-soaked stuffing and lush butternut squash. I’m going to give that a try this weekend to see whether it can make the jump to this year’s Thanksgiving menu.
On these matters of salad, do I contradict myself? I channel Walt Whitman: “Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).”
I’ve also been bossy about Thanksgiving pie. I feel it necessary that there always be pie at Thanksgiving. I don’t think Melissa Clark would disagree, but she has developed a few Thanksgiving dessert recipes this year that aren’t pies, and they’re worthy of consideration for the holiday table. (Along with bourbon pecan pie, of course.)
She has, for instance, a red-wine and pear cardamom cake, an autumnal riff on Marian Burros’s original plum torte, one of our most popular recipes. Buttery and moist, it stands on its own, though it’s very delicious with whipped or sour cream.
Her miniature oatmeal-cranberry whoopie pies, sandwiching a cream cheese and cranberry filling, are likewise packed with flavor, spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger and studded with dried cranberries.
And how about her baked butterscotch-pumpkin custard with spiced whipped cream? It’s like a giant butterscotch pudding served in a large dish to spoon out after dinner. Nothing wrong with that. Rehearse one or more of those soon, and you may discover your Thanksgiving dessert game reframed.
This weekend you might also consider what wines to serve at the feast, and Eric Asimov’s annual Thanksgiving wine panel will be of great service. He suggests that the question of what bottles you choose is “not worth agonizing over. With a finite capacity for holiday problem-solving, let wine be the easiest part of your plan.”
There is a great deal more Thanksgiving advice, and hundreds and hundreds more Thanksgiving recipes, waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. We provide additional inspiration on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
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Now, it’s nothing to do with dry-brined turkey or sweet potato casserole, but it is Veterans Day. I want to point you toward a contest that the Department of Veterans Affairs runs each year to select a poster commemorating the day. They’re not the most radical pieces of art, but browse the gallery of past winners and see what you think. Here’s the 2022 selection.
A good noirish binge of a Liverpool police procedural, worth watching: “The Responder” on Britbox.
I flew out of New Orleans the other morning and got to wondering why the airport code for Louis Armstrong International Airport is MSY. That led me to airportcod.es and to the discovery that the runways were originally named for the Moisant Stock Yards nearby.
Finally, spend a little time browsing Georgia O’Keeffe’s recipe box, digitized at the Beinecke Library at Yale. And I’ll see you on Sunday.
