The Yellow House

Last year I was away for Thanksgiving, but this year, Ben and I are hosting family at our home and I could not be more excited. Remember that time I said I liked potlucks? It was a stretch. I like to be in charge of big dinners, there, I said it. If a potluck is a democracy, I can deal with it, but when it comes to my table it’s possible that I prefer a benevolent monarchy. We can all infer what we will about my control tendencies from this, but I am stoked. Let’s talk about the big day. The wonderful Food52 folks invited me over to launch a new feature, “Halfway to Dinner”. A guest blogger will introduce a base ingredient or recipe (such as a pot of beans, a big batch of rice, a roast chicken) and demonstrate creative ways to use it for meals all week long. Writing about good, everyday cooking has become a bit of an obsession lately, so I jumped at the chance. The debut column is about—you guessed it—turkey, so you’ll have some ideas for other ways to use up your leftovers besides the ordinary (albeit good!) turkey-cranberry sandwich. Head over to Food52 to read it.

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Around here there’s been a lot of cooking but not much posting; funny how that happens. I want to talk Thanksgiving with you all, but it’ll have to wait until tomorrow or Monday. Until then, I thought I’d check in with a few photos of what my November’s been like. There have been an unusual amount of turkey encounters to report. 1) Wild: I woke up one damp morning to this enormous flock (21! 21 wild turkeys!) making orp-orp noises in our front yard. 2) Domesticated: I cooked a bird for a project I’m working on; I’ll tell you about it soon.Detritus after Sandy power outages: burnt down candles, oil lamps, dead laptop, abandoned banjo. A praying mantis that we watched grow up through the spring and summer clung to our window screen for a week, her swan song before the first hard frost. I cooked a giant pot of soup (this one) over a fire (unfortunately out of necessity rather than romance; our stove/oven broke AGAIN, I don’t want to talk about it). We had good people over to eat it. We took a whirlwind Midwest roadtrip where the only photos I took were blurry self-timer portraits in a Michigan vineyard. And I baked this cake, except with vanilla sour cream frosting, on an afternoon with exceptionally pretty light.

Can you believe we’re heading into the holidays? Things have been a little distracting for me—I’m starting a new job in December—but I want to be here more often. So, see you soon.