Hi Reader, By the time Thanksgiving Eve (today!) rolls around, I always imagine everyone else is where I am: fridge groaning, turkey dry-brining, stock made, pie dough chilling, and at least one relative already getting on your nerves. That’s because I’m a little…intense about Thanksgiving. I start on Saturday with a five-day schedule. (Yes, a schedule schedule. Color-coded. Don’t judge.) But this year, I stumbled across an article that said the busiest day for grocery shopping for...
1 day ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, Let’s get something straight: I have nothing against turkey. I’ve brined it, buttered it, massaged it like a Swedish spa therapist, and once—God help me—even sous vided it. But let’s be honest. Not everyone swoons over the big bird come Thanksgiving. Some people—clutch pearls—just don’t like turkey. Others have suffered one too many dry slices smothered in lumpy gravy at a second cousin’s folding table. And us? The One has been known to make Thanksgiving in the middle of April, and...
4 days ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, I’ll never forget my first carving attempt. It wasn't a turkey. No, I had to go all-in on a goose! This was Christmas 1988, when I was young, thin, and beautiful. (You can read the full account here.) Because I figured geese were just like turkeys, I turned the bird over and over, searching for that little pop-up thermometer thingy before roasting it. I found none. When it came time to eat, I steeled myself and began slicing. But every time I cut, I hit bone. The knife just slid...
6 days ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, I’ve been thinking a lot about Lisbon lately—because next May, The One and I are going back. And we want you to join us. Whenever I think of Lisbon, a certain version of myself comes flooding back: younger (thinner!), wide-eyed, lugging far too many notebooks, and trying to capture the tastes and rhythms of Portugal while writing The New Portuguese Table. ☞ LEARN MORE I lived in Lisbon for months at a time. Not as a tourist, not as a passer-through, but as someone trying to...
7 days ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader, When I was younger—and oh-so-very single—I treated Thanksgiving the way some people treat a new relationship: with enthusiasm, optimism, and absolutely no sense of boundaries. I experimented. Wildly. Indiscriminately. One year, I made turkey-mashed-potato-and-stuffing burritos because…why not? Another time, I ditched the 18-dish spread and instead crafted a Thanksgiving pot pie that crammed the entire holiday—turkey, stuffing, gravy, the whole dysfunctional family—under one crust....
9 days ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader, True story: one year, I cooked Thanksgiving like I was auditioning for Survivor: Roxbury Edition. I started at dawn, juggling pies, stuffing, potatoes, sides, and a turkey the size of a mini-fridge. By the time dessert rolled around, I was slumped in my chair, fork dangling midair, too tired to taste the very pies I'd threatened to leave The One over if he even so much as touched them. After our guests left, I crawled, and I do mean crawl, to bed, leaving the kitchen looking not...
11 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, When I was little, my father used to drag me to the Portuguese markets in Fall River on Saturday mornings. I say “drag,” because no self-respecting kid in the 1970s wanted to spend his weekend staring at cabbages the size of basketballs or inhaling the earthy funk of turnips stacked like cannonballs. I wanted Pop-Tarts and Twinkies. Vegetables were what you had to wade through to get to dessert. Fall Veggie Greatness (a Crash Course) Crank the oven. High heat (425°F) is your best...
13 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, I was a horribly neglected child. There—I said it. And somewhere, a cadre of ancestors is already spinning in their rosary-laden coffins. When it came to dessert, I was an Olympian, the equivalent of an elite athlete. I was constantly training. At every meal, I assessed my competitors’ positions, gauged their distance from our common prize, calculated wind shear—anything for a millisecond’s advantage. All to execute my move to get the biggest, best, most gorgeous piece of any pie,...
16 days ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, In my family, Thanksgiving didn’t begin with the turkey. Oh, no. It began the moment the doorbell rang, and my relatives descended like a biblical plague of locusts—if locusts wore polyester and carried rosaries. Within minutes, coats were flung on my grandmother's bed, the TV was blasting the Macy’s parade, and to the uninitiated and our WASP neighbors, we sounded for all the world as if we were milliseconds away from a knife fight. But that's how we Portuguese talk to each...
18 days ago • 3 min read
