the big thanksgiving planner 🍂
plus: an interview with nicola lamb + smitten kitchen keepers audio is out today!
Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Good morning!
Escape From the French Omelet [Taste]
Martha Stewart’s ‘Entertaining’ Let Me Party Like It Was 1982 [Eater]
What Happens to All Your Compost? Meet the Person Who Handles It. [NYTimes, unlocked]
Today is the day for so many things! First things first: The special audiobook edition of Smitten Kitchen Keepers, Smitten Kitchen Keepers: A Kitchen Counter Conversation is out today! Read by me with lots of side chatter and deeper dives into recipes, I hope it feels exactly like you've pulled up a chair and I'm hanging out in the kitchen with you. Because that’s all I want — I can’t imagine anything more fun. Available everywhere audiobooks are sold, such as Apple Books, Audible, Barnes & Noble, and more, read on below where I cover some frequently asked questions and even a fun way to give it as a gift.
Second and almost as exciting, we are 16 days out from Thanksgiving, which is like the Super Bowl of American cooking. For those of you who plan ahead (teach me your ways!), today I’m guiding us through my Thanksgiving staples and forever favorite recipes. We’ve got EBTP (everything but the pie) covered below, but don’t worry, sweets are coming next week.
Finally, I’m thrilled to have an interview with Nicola Lamb today, whose UK bestselling cookbook Sift: The Elements of Great Baking, is out today in the US and it’s fantastic. I know you will love it too.
Cheers!
Deb
Out today: We’ve got a whole new way to hang out in the kitchen.
To answer some frequently asked questions about the special audiobook edition of Smitten Kitchen Keepers, Smitten Kitchen Keepers: A Kitchen Counter Conversation:
So you’re… reading recipes out loud? I promise, I am not reading recipes, which would be criminally boring. In this audiobook original, I take you through 44 Smitten Kitchen Keepers super-favorites and we get to dig in deeper, more backstory, more riffs, and some great sidebars that could have never made the cut in a 336-page hardcover cookbook. It feels conversational and fun.
How do I get the recipes? A downloadable PDF will provide you with all of the recipes I discuss in the audiobook.
What’s on the cover? Oh that’s the Devil’s Food Cake with Salted Milk Chocolate Frosting and it’s the easiest and most small-crowd-pleasing 3-layer birthday cake you will ever make. We’re obsessed with it, and hope you will be too.
Bonus recipe: When you purchase the audiobook, you will receive a signed holiday card from me with a bonus recipe! To receive your card and recipe, complete the form with your purchase order number right here.
[US Residents, 18+. Ends December 13, 2024. See terms here.]
“One of the winning elements of ‘The Recipe’ is that it’s not prescriptive — rather than settling on one universal ‘perfect’ recipe, the chefs explain their personal preferences, then give listeners the information they need to make their own adjustments. By breaking their recipes down ingredient-by-ingredient, digging into what each one is doing, they make the science of cooking approachable and fun.” — New York Times, 7 Podcasts to Inspire a New Hobby 10/24/24
The latest episode of my podcast with J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, The Recipe with Kenji and Deb is all about Popcorn! You can listen to it anywhere you get your podcasts, such as Apple, Spotify, and more.
dry-brined turkey with roasted onions
This is Smitten Kitchen's first and only turkey recipe, because you'll never need another: deeply burnished, perfectly cooked, delightfully-seasoned, and crisp-skinned on a bed of onions that have been cooked in salty, buttery drippings for so long, they're otherworldly. Oh, and there are five ingredients. And a schedule. And gravy. You've got this!
cranberries: candied, fruity and drunk
Confession: I like cranberry sauce so much, I even make it in the off-season -- for pancakes, ice cream and yogurt. Here are three of my favorite approaches, the classic, the fruit-unfussy, and the grown-up one.
sour cream and chive fantails
A dinner roll that springs open in the oven like a fan with buttery pull-apart segments looks fancy but is so simple to make. I hope you get obsessed with them, too.
pretzel parker house rolls
Classic, buttery, tender and stretchy Parker House rolls with a pretzel wash that makes them dark, shiny and unmistakably special on top. We learned at our annual Friendsgiving, the only thing better than making these for the big meal is having a guest who brings them still warm.
challah stuffing
A very simple, buttery, and flexible challah stuffing you make when you realize that the perfect menu is the one you can pull off without sweating or stressing, leaving you the maximum amount of time to enjoy the feast. Tip: The Best Challah (Egg Bread) recipe in the archives makes two loaves. Make astoundingly good french toast this weekend with one; stale the second for stuffing bliss.
green bean casserole with crispy onions
A fresh, crazy delicious sauce, crisp-tender green beans and heaps of crispy fried onions that you can make all in one skillet changed my feelings about this once-maligned Thanksgiving staple forever. Be warned: If you make this once, you'll never be able to show up without it again -- unless you train an acolyte on it.
potato and leek gratin
Potatoes and leeks slow-baked in cream with a burnish of cheese and fine buttery crunch on top are the perfect welcome to gratin season, which is not a thing, I absolutely just made that up, but really should be for colder weather and short days ahead.
slow-roasted sweet potatoes
I started making my Thanksgiving sweet potatoes like this a few years ago and haven't looked back. When slow-roasted, sweet potatoes get sweeter, louder, and more nuanced than seems possible. The salty, lightly blackened skin provides a heavenly, crispy contrast. Although they're delicious just as they are, a drizzle of either melted salted butter or butter with a little maple syrup or honey whisked in, is never unwelcome.
crispy sweet potato roast
A dream of veering sweet potatoes as far from their sweet, texture-free nature and into the realm of ... potato chips, or as close as you can get them in a casserole dish. Plus, a few finishing options, from what I call Thanksgiving Salsa Verde to a luxe version with creme fraîche and chives.
unstuffed mushroom casserole
This dish knows what I bet many of us figured out a long time ago: mincing and sautéing ingredients to daintily scoop them into mushroom caps is fussy. Casseroles are not. Serve this as a side to a holiday main or as a cozy snack to be scooped onto toasts or crackers, something I would absolutely eat for dinner tonight with a big green salad, just putting that out there in the universe in case that's all it takes for it to majestically appear.
the best baked spinach
Think spinach gratins must be rich and leaden with cheese, cream and butter? Not when Julia Child shows us the way. Not only does this taste amazing, it's total weekday night fare -- as a side, scooped on toast or topped off with an egg. (Yesss.)
balsamic braised brussels with pancetta
Brussels with layers upon layers of flavor and complexity— crunchy breadcrumbs, buttery shallots and balsamic-caramelized pancetta — all nestled together in one cozy, harmonious dish.
brussels sprouts, apple and pomegranate salad
A bright, crunchy and abundantly welcome contrast to the richness of the usual Thanksgiving fare, this is a forever winter staple.
corn pudding
Corn pudding, exactly the way I like it: cozy with brown butter (and don't miss the optional hot honey brown butter drizzle), sour cream, and exactly one bag of frozen corn. It's quick to make and perfect for the holiday season. I hope you love it too.
I’ve written three cookbooks and I’m a tiny bit biased, but I think you’d love them all. Wondering what you might cook from Smitten Kitchen Keepers now that school’s back in session and the leaves are changing colors? I thought you’d never ask! Try the peanut butter, oat, and jam bars, spiced sweet potato oven fries, tangy baked eggplant and couscous, and weeknight lemon chicken wings. To finish, I recommend the apple butterscotch crisp, the pumpkin snacking cake, and/or the apple cider old-fashioned. Were you looking for a list of all the recipes in each of my cookbooks? I’ve added these in a separate page and hope it makes it easier for you to find everything you want to cook.
AN INTERVIEW WITH NICOLA LAMB
My shelves are full of wonderful cookbooks I don’t get to talk about enough, so I’ve added this section so you can get to know the cool people behind them. Today we're chatting with Nicola Lamb. Her new cookbook, Sift: The Elements of Great Baking, is out today in the US (and already a Sunday Times bestseller in the UK)!
1. What inspired your cookbook?
SIFT is the book I wish I'd had when I first started baking. When I started out, I was intimidated by a lot of the big, heavy books aimed at professionals, but I wanted more detail and answers than some of the home baking books offered. In SIFT, I’ve strived to create a happy medium, blending technical details with base recipes you can go back to again and again!
2. What recipe are you the most proud of in the book, or felt the most triumphant when you got it right?
I worked so hard on developing a croissant recipe that gives you good results at home. It’s been developed especially for hand laminating and I have put so much information in there that I think will give people such good results; I’ve made all the mistakes (and there have been some shockers!) so you can have the best chance of success at home. It’s a proper project but worth it.
3. What recipe is so low-effort, high-reward that it's worth cooking for dinner tonight, even if we're tired and don't want to cook?
The brown butter banana cookies are going to be your new favorite way to use up old bananas. They are so fast to make and have gooey oatmeal raisin energy, but with more brown sugar and ripe fruit roundness. Dream.
4. What's something you wish more people knew about your book?
I’m so proud of the in depth reference sections at the beginning of the book - I want SIFT to be a confidence boosting manual that you can always come back to and rely on when you want to understand the “why” of baking. And I love that the recipes are organized by how long they take to make (with actual timelines!), so you can always fit a bake into your schedule!
Thank you, Nicola! You can order Sift right here.
old-school dinner rolls
shop my favorites
Ever wonder where I get my cutting boards, paring knives, offset spatulas and more than you see when I cook? I've created a page on Smitten Kitchen with links to some of my favorite kitchen items, the ones I'm asked about the most — yes, including the the Smitten Kitchen x Staub Braiser, which is back in stock! For each item, I've attempted to provide a range of shopping links so we're not just focusing on one giant retailer.
See you next week!
