Thanksgiving recipe edition
It’s Thanksgiving season: one of my favorite times of year! I love that Thanksgiving is a food holiday, and one where we get to make rich, fun dishes that we usually don’t make the rest of the year.
We usually spend Thanksgiving with my family in Illinois, so I don’t typically have the opportunity to do Thanksgiving hosting or a lot of cooking myself. Last year, because of Covid, we didn’t travel home to see my family, and Renan and I had a little Thanksgiving at home with just the two of us, putting our own spin on it for the first time.
While it was a bummer to miss out on seeing family, it was also fun in its own way: I did exhaustive research on recipes, planned my ideal menu of all sides and no turkey (Sidesgiving!), cooked all day, watched all the Friends Thanksgiving episodes, and picked up wines, pie, and flowers from some of my favorite local spots in my neighborhood in Brooklyn.
This year, I’m going home to visit family again for Thanksgiving, and it’s nice to get some of those pre-Covid holiday traditions back. But there’s also something nice about creating our own traditions! Since I’ll be heading to Chicago next weekend for Thanksgiving week, I hosted a little Friendsgiving last night and reprised my Sidesgiving idea from last year and made the same mac and cheese recipe; both of these now feel like fun new traditions I look forward to keeping up.
If you’re looking for Thanksgiving recipe inspiration, take a look back at my newsletter around this time last year, where I rounded up dozens of the Thanksgiving side dish recipes I had bookmarked while researching and planning my menu. (We all know sides are the best part — who needs turkey!)
Good things to read
The great irony-level collapse, Gawker.
Loving your job is a capitalist trap, The Atlantic.
The great organic food fraud, The New Yorker.
‘We’re like the anti-Billions:’ How Succession makes wealth look miserable, The Ringer.
What paternity leave does for a father’s brain, New York Times.
Carrie’s back! Sarah Jessica Parker opens up about a grand return, Vogue.
Is “cozy season” a cry for help? Kathryn Jezer-Morton/Substack.
What winter-haters get wrong, The Atlantic.
Good things to cook
For my Friendsgiving this weekend, I made Millie Peartree’s southern mac and cheese and these very easy mashed sweet potatoes with maple and brown butter.
Thanks for reading! If you like this newsletter, you can click the “heart” at the top of this post on Substack or share it on social media or forward to a friend — they can subscribe at nishachittal.substack.com. You can also leave a comment on this post to tell me what you think! And you can follow me on Twitter here and Instagram here.