Consider This from NPR - How to Cook a Faster, Easier Thanksgiving Dinner

Episode Date: November 19, 2022

Thanksgiving is probably the most celebrated meal of the year. But for a lot of home cooks or new cooks, or would-be cooks-- it's also the most daunting. But what if there was a much easier approach to Thanksgiving for cooks who don't have the time - or frankly, the patience? What if you could make Thanksgiving dinner in a few hours with one pot and one pan? No kidding! Host Michel Martin speaks with Melissa Clark, a food writer for the New York Times. Clark shares a super easy Thanksgiving dinner recipe from her latest cookbook, Dinner in One: Exceptional and Easy One Pan Meals. And the cooking pros featured in our In A Pinch offer tips on pulling off a no-hassle holiday meal.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu slash forward. Isn't it enough that I'm making Thanksgiving dinner for everyone? You know, everyone wants a different kind of potato, so I'm making different kinds of potatoes. I'll do the turkey. Ashley, you do the cranberry sauce. Carlton, you do the stuffing. Hillary, you do the yams and the rolls.

Just curious, does anybody know anything about cooking? No pressure, just like cooking a turkey, for example. From Friends to Fresh Prince to New Girl, the crazy Thanksgiving dinner, it's a sitcom staple. But all joking aside, making Thanksgiving dinner is a lot of pressure and a lot of work. All that brining, boiling, basting. Thanksgiving can be the most daunting meal of the year, even for an experienced cook. We're supposed to get stressed about Thanksgiving. It's part of our national identity. Melissa Clark writes about food for The New York Times, including the column A Good Appetite.

And she's written more than 40 cookbooks. And still... Sometimes when I make something that doesn't come out the way I want it to come out, sometimes I'll pretend that it tastes just fine, hoping that my guests won't notice. I'm like, maybe they've had enough wine and they're not going to actually realize that that's not supposed to, you know, taste like that. Now look, you could go to one of your favorite restaurants, or you could bypass the kitchen and have a whole meal delivered to your door if you've got it like that. And you could just order random takeout. But maybe you like to cook. You just don't have the time, patience, or counter space to deal with a traditional meal. Consider this. There may be no such thing as a

completely stress-free Thanksgiving. There's always that relative to deal with. But there may be ways to make the holiday less intimidating, so you won't find yourself in your own sitcom episode. Never stress in the kitchen, girl. The world is hard enough. Food shouldn't be part of the hard. That's coming up. From NPR, I'm Michelle Martin. It's Saturday, November 19th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees.

Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. Growing up, watching my granny and my mom and my aunts, when they cooked, they didn't have measurements. Tabitha Brown is author of the vegan cookbook, Cooking from the Spirit, easy, delicious, and joyful plant-based inspirations. Brown has shows on the Food Network and YouTube, and millions follow her TikTok cooking videos. But she says for her, cooking is less about recipes and more about self-care. Loving yourself enough to prepare delicious, healthy food with confidence and minimal fuss. You've got to trust your spirit

as you put them ingredients in there. And I messed up many meals in the beginning because I didn't know myself that well. I had to get to know myself in the kitchen. Brown and other cooks spoke with us as part of our series In a Pinch, giving us pro tips for pulling together easy fast meals for when you're short on time or ingredients. And some of these tips actually come in handy for preparing a hassle-free Thanksgiving dinner. So tip number one from Tabitha Brown, trust yourself.

You got this. What's the right amount of seasoning, you ask? Let your spirit guide your hand. Tip number two, preparing and cooking at the His newest cookbook is How to Cook Everything Fast. And he says a key to getting out of the kitchen faster is a little time management and a little multitasking. There's a lot of downtime in cooking. It takes time for the heat that you're using to be applied to the food that you're using it on. And you can use that time to do other things that make the

whole procedure go more quickly. And Thanksgiving tip number three? Make a simple meal. Make it absolutely delicious. Your friends won't have more fun if you spent the entire day baking. In fact, they'll have more fun if you're relaxed and happy. That golden rule is from the Barefoot Contessa herself, Ina Garten. She shared recipes with us from her new cookbook, Go To Dinners. She says the book was inspired by the pandemic when going out for meals wasn't an option. And like a lot of people, she found herself doing a lot of cooking. And in lieu of losing her mind and hating life, she decided to simplify things. Garten told us going through the pandemic and

rethinking some things reinforced another idea, one that gets right to the heart of why we celebrate Thanksgiving to begin with. I think it's become much more clear that we have to make an effort to be with people that we love, to take care of each other in a world that seems to be spinning out of control. I think there's nothing more important. Coming up, even if you've never cooked Thanksgiving dinner before, there's a recipe so simple that you can have your turkey and eat it too in about two hours. No fooling. I feel like there are strategies that help me and they can help everyone else too, to get Thanksgiving on the table and enjoy it a little bit when we return. I love a sheet pan meal.

I didn't invent them, but I was an early adopter. That's Melissa Clark again. Her latest cookbook is called Dinner in One, exceptional and easy one-pan meals. And this may be a game changer for the Thanksgiving phobic. She has a recipe for a one-pan,, one pot Thanksgiving dinner, which sounds miraculous. I asked her to share her approach to an easier Thanksgiving meal. And like most experienced cooks and chefs, Clark says you should never underestimate the power of planning.

I start to do as many things as I can make ahead. I have already done my pie crusts. They're in the freezer. I have started making things like my cranberry sauce, which can get made ahead. I've definitely ordered my turkey. If all of you haven't ordered your turkey, you should do so right now. And I've also started putting together my grocery lists. And this is really important because if I don't have it written down on a piece of paper,

I'm going to forget it. So start making your lists now. Do you think though, like, I definitely want to hear your tricks and hacks for getting through this and making it a little easier. But if we're really honest with ourselves, do you think that part of the Thanksgiving lore is rooted in the idea that we're supposed to suffer? Like it's supposed to be really hard and it's supposed to be like really hard and exhausting. And you're supposed to kind of, especially if you're the cook, kind of like just kind of hobble to the table

broken and exhausted or something. Yeah, exactly. It was designed to try to break us. But I mean, if you think about it, it really was. I mean, let's just start with the turkey. How often are you asked to wrestle a 20-pound anything into your oven, right? This is a once-a-year occurrence. Turkeys are five times the size of your average chicken.

This is a challenge for professional chefs as well as people who don't necessarily cook all that much. So I do think that when you're starting with something like a turkey, of course it's going to be challenging. For some people, that's part of the fun. For some people, it is something that they absolutely dread. But there is a way to get through it. And we certainly want to help you do that. Especially at NYT Cooking, there are so many ways we have to help you get that turkey on the table. But to your point, yes, I feel like there is something about the turkey that's just made to put us through the motions, to really put us through the ringer. Okay, before we talk about the way we're going to succeed here, you know, I'm going to ask, has part of the, I don't know, the lore of Thanksgiving are the dinners that went spectacularly wrong?

I just wonder, I wonder, okay, do you have any of those that you are willing to share? Oh my gosh, you mean the time that we brought the turkey to the table and we realized that it wasn't actually cooked all the way through? Oh no. That's even happened to us. That's happened to me. Ooh, and nobody ended up in the hospital, I hope. No, no, we just had to, we had to hack it apart and put it back in the oven. And you know what? Sometimes, I think those make for the best memories too, the times when the things don't go perfectly.

Nobody got sick. We were all fine. We just had to maybe eat dinner a little bit later. And we didn't have that Norman Rockwell moment of carving the turkey because we had to hack it apart when it was still kind of bloody inside. But then we put it back in the oven and it was good. You know, sometimes those things happen. Here's a trick for people though. When you take the turkey's temperature, make sure to go all the way into that thigh and not just halfway because you really want to make sure you're getting an accurate temperature. This happened to my family many, many years ago and we learned that lesson and never went back. So it's all been good since then. So tell us about your one pan, one pot Thanksgiving. I mean, it sounds like even the most Thanksgiving-phobic cook could pull off. Okay, so the idea for the one pan, one pot Thanksgiving came from the editors, my editors

at the New York Times at NYT Cooking. And the idea was to play off of a sheet pan meal. I love a sheet pan meal. And to me, the idea of just putting all of your food on one sheet pan and putting it in the oven and then letting it do its thing while you go do something else is just, it's the way I like to cook. It's a great way of getting a fast meal on the table. And it is something you can still do for Thanksgiving if you plan it really well. So my editor said to me, you know, you love to do this with other meals. Can you somehow do this for Thanksgiving? And the answer turned out to be yes. So with one sheet pan, and then you do need one pot for the cranberry sauce. And if you

want to make gravy, but if you're not worried about cranberry sauce and gravy, you can do the whole thing on a sheet pan. And this is how you do it. So you start with a turkey breast. So one pan Thanksgiving meal is not something you can serve to 20 of your nearest and dearest. This is for a small, intimate Thanksgiving. You can serve four to six people. So just wrap your head around that first. Well, four to six people is not small. I mean, to be able to do that without a whole ton of dishes, that's still not a bad idea. So, you know what I mean? Four to six people is not like, is not like a Swanson TV dinner. Exactly. No disrespect to Swanson. You know, it's also something that you can do. I mean, I love Thanksgiving, not on Thanksgiving, especially leftovers. To have those leftovers, you know, in the middle of January is a wonderful thing. So to

take that, the idea of Thanksgiving and know that you can do it anytime you want is actually pretty thrilling. So for the New York Times, and you can still get the recipe, it's at NYT Cooking. You can get the one pan, one pot Thanksgiving. And so you have your turkey breast and I wrapped it in bacon, of course, because why wouldn't you wrap a turkey breast in bacon? It adds so much flavor. And then on the same pan, I've got my Brussels sprouts and I have little roasted sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top. So you have almost like mini individual sweet potato casseroles and that's on your sheet pan. And then in the pot, the pot has to do double duty. You have to do your cranberry sauce first, and then you take that out, and then you can do your gravy.

So everything in one pan and one pot. And it's, I mean, it's definitely a little bit of a cheat, but it's so, if you're a small household or you're just a couple of people and you're wondering, how am I going to do Thanksgiving and have all of the flavors that I want? This is going to be your answer. And you can do the whole thing. I think the whole thing is under two hours. So this might be, you know, if you're looking for the last minute solution, this might be for you. And so you get all the flavors, like you get all those traditional Thanksgiving flavors, but you know, in one pan, one pot. Exactly. And then when I wrote my cookbook,

Dinner in One, I took that same idea and I just, I pared it down even more. And so it's a sheet pan Thanksgiving. And the idea for this one, because you don't have the gravy or the cranberry sauce, the idea here is you're just having the turkey, the Brussels sprouts and the sweet potatoes. And I simplified it so that this is really a meal that you can make in under an hour. This is your January Thanksgiving meal. Like you want a lovely turkey, Brussels sprouts, and sweet potatoes in the middle of January. And then you want to make those turkey sandwiches. This recipe will get you there in an hour. Okay. But what about dessert? Oh my gosh. Well, dessert, you know, you're just going to have to have someone bring dessert. You're going to, that's when you go buy your pie. Or maybe you've made your pie ahead of time.

Okay. So before we let you go, everybody always has their first time, right? Do you have any advice or encouragement for somebody doing that first Thanksgiving dinner, which feels so big? It is. I mean, your first Thanksgiving dinner is a milestone, and you should treat it like a milestone. You know, this is something that it's exciting. It is something that once you do it, it'll always be easier the second time. I mean, roast, especially if you're going to roast a turkey and it's your first turkey, just accept the fact that it is going to be, it's challenging. It is a giant bird. Even if you have a small bird, it's still the smallest bird you can get is 10 pounds. Just acknowledge that this is a challenge, but at the same time, also think about why you're cooking this. You're cooking this

because you want to be with the people you love. You want to have them in your home. You want to feed them and give them nourishment and love, and they will love you even if you have to hack up your turkey and put it back in the oven because you didn't cook it through. You know what? I still love my family after that. It's going to be okay. Unless, you know, the oven catches on fire, which won't happen with a turkey, by the way. So you're safe there. There's nothing you can do that will really hurt anybody.

It's all just about sharing love and good times. So acknowledge the challenge, but also be easy on yourself. Don't judge yourself too harshly. No one else is judging you. Melissa Clark is a food writer for the New York Times. Her latest cookbook is Dinner in One, exceptional and easy one pan meals.

Melissa Clark, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thanks for having me and happy Thanksgiving. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Michelle Martin.