Go for the gold: Thanksgiving, Already?

October 25, 2021

Kate Sears for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.

Thanksgiving, Already?

By Sam Sifton

Good morning. We're just a month out from Thanksgiving, 30 days from a holiday that last year was deeply strange for a lot of us and that this year promises — what, a return to everything as it was in 2019? Probably not. We're excited about what's coming, but nervous, too. We're managing as best we can.

And that's unsettling, no matter how delicious the oyster dressing, the scalloped potatoes, the pecan pie. We'll need to take care of one another this year, above all.

So sketch out your plans. Make invitations. Book your flights. Order your turkey from the place that raises the birds on poems, yoga and organic feed. Line up some wine. But remember as you do that Thanksgiving will land differently this year for each of your guests, for your host, for your parents, for your children, for your friends. Listen to each, to what they say and importantly what they do not. Practice radical empathy. And everything will be all right.

Keep cooking, too, for the practice and the joy it brings. This week, I'd like to suggest this terrific new recipe for roasted chicken and pears (above), which is an awesome way to use autumn pears that aren't quite ripe. They tenderize in the oven and melt into the chicken fat. A final sprinkle of sunflower seeds offers crunch, while a thatch of arugula offers peppery freshness. Really good.

Or you might try this Southern classic: fried catfish and spaghetti, a beautiful combination of crisp, cornmeal-crusted fish and tomato-sauced pasta.

You could make beans and greens with doenjang, a one-pot dinner of comforting white beans and chard that get a savory boost from the Korean fermented soybean paste and a little drizzle of honey.

Slow-cooker spinach lasagna? Twice-baked potatoes with cauliflower and cheese? Three-cup chicken? Any will deliver. All should delight.

Click your way over to New York Times Cooking to see what else you find. You'll need a subscription, it's true, but we think you'll find it worth the scratch: many thousands of recipes, along with the tools and features we've built to help you use them, and the notes of fellow subscribers beneath recipes to help you make your choice. Subscriptions are important. They support our work and allow it to continue. I hope, if you haven't already, that you will subscribe today.

And we will be standing by in the meantime, should anything go awry in your cooking or in our code. Just write cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you.

Now, it's nothing to do with food, but you should read Dan Barry on the estate of the magician Ricky Jay, in The Times. (And here's Jay himself, with Jay Leno on "The Tonight Show" back in 1997.)

Also in The Times, I loved this story by Catherine Hickley on the restoration of Vermeer's "Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window," and how a long-hidden portrait of a naked Cupid in the background of the painting changes its meaning in fascinating ways.

Even if it was only virtually, I loved browsing the works in the exhibition "Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories" at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Finally, I'll leave you with some music from the chillout tent: Jorma Kaukonen, "Hesitation Blues." We all get them, sometimes. I'll be back on Wednesday.

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