think less about the main course

My ill-timed holiday hosting advice (use it on New Year's, I guess!), plus a whole bunch of recipe recommendations

Lately: Happy/merry everything! I hope you all had a good week, with plenty of food and less work than usual. I was in St. Louis for five days, which might be my longest trip home for a holiday since the pandemic, and it was perfect. … For Christmas, I inherited my mom’s old copy of Marcella Hazan’s “The Classic Italian Cookbook,” which feels like something I need to devote some serious time to in January. I smell bolognese in my future. I also got the new King Arthur “Big Book of Bread,” which is going to be covered in greasy fingerprints in no time.

Holiday hosting is a mind-numbing, muscle-aching art. You scroll the New York Times Cooking app for what seems like an hour, and then you glance at the clock and realize it’s been five. You make timelines and map out oven space and set so many timers, you end up forgetting which is dinging for what. An elaborate cut of meat takes up half your fridge, and you find yourself jamming packs of herbs and bags of spinach into every conceivable nook and cranny. You clean the last dish and collapse into a chair and realize you’ve walked 10,000 steps, all of them around your kitchen island, and you’ve got blisters, and there’s a very specific, nerve-pinching pain on the right side of your neck.

I love every moment of the absurd production. Sure, it’d be nice if my neck felt better. And I wish I could’ve flown home to D.C. with a hunk of cheesecake in my purse. But those are my only complaints. This year especially, I feel great about the choices I made at Thanksgiving and Christmas — the recipes, the menu, even the amount of food — and so today, I want to debrief and send along some recipe recommendations and tips.

I know, I know. The holidays are coming to a close. This advice is outdated. Woulda been great last weekend. But here’s my retort: You can bookmark these recipes for 11 months or plan a big New Year’s party or just make bread pudding on a random Tuesday.

That said, here are some rules I found myself following this holiday season — some general, and some oddly specific:

1. Think about leftovers before you’ve even started making the food for the main event. That means bake some good bread, or buy some, and keep it in the pantry until the day after you’ve celebrated. Buy fixings for good sandwiches, or pick sides you know will keep. You’re going to have too much food. You’re going to berate yourself if you throw too much away. So find ways to make leftovers seem like something other than monotonous.

2. Do the dishes as often as humanly possible.

3. Get used dishtowels off your countertop, out of your kitchen and into the laundry as soon as they’re too damp and dirty to use.

4. Don’t spend too much time on salad. That means thinking about it, chopping ingredients for it, debating if you need one.

5. Crab cakes are really easy to make and will impress everyone you’re hosting. If you want to seem like a fancier person than you are, make crab cakes. (Also, make the mixture in the morning and fry yourself a cake for lunch. It’s the equivalent of swiping a piece of pie without anyone noticing.)

6. Hydrate.

7. Think less about the main course.

8. THINK EVEN LESS ABOUT THE MAIN COURSE. Actually, that’s the central focus of this newsletter. If you glean one thing, it’s this: You know how to make your main course. Do it well, and do it the same, year after year. Pick the way you like to make your turkey and stick to it. Settle on your Christmas protein and make no changes. No one’s ever going to leave your house and say, “Gosh, that beautiful beef tenderloin was just too similar to last year’s beautiful beef tenderloin.” That way, you can focus on everything else, the stuff that will really make the dinner shine. You can finally decide you have the bandwidth to abandon your great-aunt’s green bean casserole. So with that in mind, here are a whole bunch of recipe recommendations for … everything else:

I’m an unwavering proponent of Christmas morning brunch. In my family, at least, holiday dinners tend to be so early that lunches can feel superfluous — which means you should make a feast of a breakfast and forget about lunch altogether. Here’s the pairing I went with this year, with some obscenely thick-cut bacon (cooked in the oven, obviously) on the side:

• lemon ricotta pancakes from New York Times Cooking

• spinach and gruyere breakfast casserole from New York Times Cooking

sourdough rolls

What is the holiday season if not an opportunity to metamorphose into a carbohydrate? Every year, without fail, my mother comes home from a local bakery with twice as much bread as she’d actually ordered; the place must have the world’s most chaotic bagging system for pre-orders. This year, she managed to catch a stowaway coffee cake and return it, but when she got back to the house she discovered an extra loaf of bread plus three times as many rolls as she’d paid for. And on top of all that, bread baking has become a core facet of my identity in 2024 — so she’d have been better off ordering nothing at all. Even so, the strides we made in consuming said bread over the 48 hours of Christmas Eve and Christmas day were remarkable. Here’s what I baked (over and over) for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners: