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....
4 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...
6 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...
8 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,...
11 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...
13 days ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, Before November turned to Thanksgiving, the month was always about dinners that stuck to your ribs and fogged the kitchen windows until you could finger-paint on them. My mother had an uncanny way of knowing just when the chill in the air crossed from “brisk” to “bone-deep.” That’s when she’d pull out the stockpot. Suddenly, a chicken became three meals, beans lost their anonymity in a garlicky stew, and cabbage was transformed into something that could make you forget it was,...
20 days ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, In my family, turkey wasn't a thing for Thanksgiving. My dad, for whatever reason, didn't like it. Instead, we had capons, which I happily ate until he told me they were "emasculated chickens." After that, I was Team Side Dishes. My grandmother’s dressing, my mother’s mashed potatoes, my godmother's French stuffing, the obligatory green beans that no one touched but everyone felt guilty omitting. You wanna do WHAT to me? Of course, back then, it was chaos. My mother swore she had...
25 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, I’ll admit it: For years, I thought pumpkin’s sole purpose was pie. And not even a pie I liked all that much. (Yes, I said it. Send unto me thy angry and indignant electronic correspondence.) Then I met You Know Who. The man is mad about pumpkin. I mean totally loony (which I can say, given my numerous and varied mental health diagnoses over the decades). It started innocently enough. He wanted a pumpkin pie. Sure, I said. Back then, I was still cooking from the back of boxes and...
27 days ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, Some people spend Sundays reading stories. I spend them weaving one—with onions, garlic, and a pot that’s been on the stove so long it deserves royalties. Growing up, Sunday Supper was less meal, more epic saga. Think Tolstoy's "War and Peace." By the time I woke, the kitchen was already buzzing: Mama Leite browning meat with the ferocity of a Russian peasant, my grandmother muttering prayers over the stockpot, not unlike one of Macbeth's witches. By noon, the whole house smelled...
29 days ago • 4 min read
