Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast - Happy Thanksgiving From Your Mamas Kitchen

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

On this special Thanksgiving episode of Your Mama's Kitchen, we take a walk down memory lane to reminisce on some of the greatest holiday hosting tips we've gotten from our guests. Gayle King shares her secret to a tender turkey, Stephen and Evie Colbert talk about their cheesy holiday tradition, Ina Garten shares her personal hosting musts and more!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Your Mama's Kitchen is brought to you by Rivian. Hello, hello, welcome back to Your Mama's Kitchen. This is the place where we explore how we are shaped as adults by the kitchens that we grew up in as kids. I'm Michelle Norris. And as we get ready for all that Thanksgiving will bring to our kitchens and dinner tables this week, we at Your Mama's Kitchen wanted to take you down memory lane to some of our favorite conversations with guests to give you some fun ideas on what to put on your table and how you can be the hostess with the mostest this season. I remember when Gail King told us about her surprising secret to serving up a tender turkey.

It's not something you might expect. Thanksgiving was a big deal because she did all the cooking, but she did all the cooking always. She had a thing that we always each had to slap the turkey before it went in the oven. Wait, what? Yes, exactly right. Slap the turkey. Was this superstitious? Was it? Because my mom said, I think that was just her way of engaging us. She said that it made the turkey more tender. And so we would all have to come in the kitchen, line up and do a... On a raw turkey.

Yep. You know, he was all based in all that good stuff. We'd all slap it and she said that would make it more tender. And now all of my sisters do that with their kids and their family. Everybody has to come in and slap the turkey. Okay. There's going to be people all over America slapping their turkeys on Thanksgiving because of this. Because my mom said that it made it more tender. Okay. Not everybody likes turkey. And if you are personally not a fan of turkey, Pete Holmes might have a different show-stopping protein for your dinner table. And yet another interesting way to cook it. And when I say interesting, I mean interesting. Here's how he describes his family's holiday table. And shall we say, unusual tradition? There's a lot of smoked fish. It was a lot of pickled fish. Herring. Herring, there was eel. We would eat eel, like just a slice of eel. Like, you knew what it was. It was a, you were eating an eel off the bone.

And then later it got kind of fancy. She would steam, my Aunt Jean would steam lobsters in the dishwasher. So, wait, wait, wait, back it up. Back up. Back up. Steam lobsters in the dishwasher? Yeah, apparently you can. can cook lobsters if you put them on the steam setting in the dishwasher. Yeah, yeah, I didn't know.

What? I didn't know either. And that started, that was maybe the last four or five years. That was a later addition. But we would eat dishwasher. We would eat dishwasher lobster. We would eat dishwasher lobster. I want to try this now. I actually want to try this. But does your dishwasher smell like lobster, like, for a long time after that? Do you have to, like, run lemons or something through it? exercise it so you get the lobster smell out of it? I think you need a little cascade, just run one with no dishes in there just to get the smell out, probably. I mean, lobster's no joke.

There's a definite aroma. Yeah, a definite odor. Yeah. But, you know, a steam is a steam. That's not what we said, but it's what we could have said. A steam is a steam. Now I'm wondering if restaurants do this. If they just get a bunch of dishbrush, a bunch of kitchen aids back there and steam the lobsters.

I mean, it's so funny when we... It's kind of brilliant, though. Have you ever done a lobster in the dishwasher? We've never used our dishwasher for anything other than washing dishes. But as we're talking, I'm like, are we missing out a whole angle? I'm married to a man who loves seafood. And so upon hearing this episode, I have a feeling that we're going to be doing this in our house. Honestly.

Honey, you know what you've done. You have kicked off a viral TikTok thing. You're going to be people that are going to be like steaming their lobsters and their crab legs all over the place. and you will take, you know, we'll all credit it to you. Well, to Aunt Jean, full respect. On Jean, yes. Full respect to Aunt Jean.

Old Jean. Original Gene. Every time I hear Pete Holmes, tell that story, I wonder, what does the dishwasher smell like after cooking all those lobsters? Well, we're not going to worry about that right now. We're just going to move on.

And if you were thinking of adding some sugar to your table, Andrew Ray shared with us a charity cookie recipe from his mother, comes from his childhood, and he says that it works for any occasion, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Duali, Kwanza, whatever. His mother's famous cookies come from a recipe that you can customize for any holiday. Cookies is really, any kind of cookie is an opportunity to, that is something I remember distinctly about my mom's cooking. In one of your cookbooks, you have the most wonderful allergy to cookies. and cookie dough and your mother's cookies and your experience trying to figure out how to make her cookies,

but also as a very young kid, the way that she would let you put the ingredients together, and then you were able to present this to the world and saying, and everyone would say, this is something that, did they call you Andrew or Andy, that Andy put together, that Andy did? We always gift our listeners with a recipe, and this is the recipe that you wanted to share with our listeners, was this sort of all-purpose cookie dough. Can you tell us a little bit about it? It's, you know, chocolate chip cookies,

minus the chocolate chips. There are a very basic recipe. There are not too many permutations you can do there, but there's some upgrades in there. I like to brown the butter. That's something I learned from Jay Kenji-Lopez-Alth. Obviously, just gives a roostier, nuttier flavor, richer flavor.

You have to use more butter as a result, so they're butterier. There's a tablespoon of ground hazelnut coffee that I think no matter what you're putting in the cookies, it's subtle and it's a massive upgrade. It just

tastes so good. It makes them I don't know. I don't know how to describe it. Makes them taste slightly like hazelnut coffee. And I think the most important part is to let out your inner child, when deciding what to mix in there.

Go crazy. But whatever you got in there that you think is going to taste good. So it's, none of the things I just listed were in my mom's recipe. But what she did do was let me, like you said, give me that kind of validation of like you did the autonomy agency. You did this. You made this,

even though all I did was just mix it or, you know, spill her flour or something. And to embrace that moment in a child's life, I think I feel that when I make these cookies because they let me feel like a kid again. A lot of us have to actually get up and go to work on Thanksgiving, and that can certainly make things complicated. El Roker of today's show fame pulls Thanksgiving duty every year for the Macy's Day parade. That brings joy to a lot of people, but it cuts into the prep time for a big meal later in the day. But, as he told us, that did not stop him from building a lovely holiday tradition that is easy and delicious. There's no shame in letting someone else do the cooking.

Ten years ago, Deborah and I were having lunch at Bar-Baloud on the west side near ABC. And Danielle Ballude came in. Famous chef, we should just say for people. Famous chef. Famous chef. Just not New York, but around the world at this point. Anyway, he came into the restaurant and he said, what are you doing for Thanksgiving? And I said, well, Danielle, I did this whole thing.

Why don't you come to the restaurant and come to Danielle for Thanksgiving? I said, oh, that's nice. Thank you. I had no intentions of doing it. And Deborah said, why don't we just try it? And I went, and they had the traditional Thanksgiving meal. And then so. And it was like this revelation.

It was like the skies parted. The sun came down, shone on this table. And I said, oh, my God, why haven't we done this before? This is spectacular. Oh, my God. And to the point where, and they give you leftovers to take home. So I haven't made a Thanksgiving meal in probably 10 years. Our Thanksgiving tradition is parade, get home, shower, change, and then dinner at 10.

For those who do cook, gathering together in a crowded kitchen is one of the things that makes the holiday special. The author Kevin Kwan shared one of his family's special holiday traditions that dates back to when they lived in Singapore. There was another beautiful dish that we made. That's, you know, we called it growing up. We called it Zong, which is a Cantonese word. But it's like a rice packet, right? It's like a rice dumpling. that's kind of pyramid-shaped.

And the beautiful thing about these rice dumplings was it was a ritual that was seasonal and it involves all the interconnected families that were sort of part of our extended family. At some point every year, they would begin harvesting these leaves, these long, I think they were leaves from a bamboo plant. And so someone would come over, they would begin hacking down these leaves.

Maybe they were banana leaves. And then they would... Banana leaves would make sense. Yeah. And then they would, I'm sorry for my ignorance. I really should have been better prepared for this. But then they would, you know, they would soak the leaves in these big pails of water, dry the leaves. And the leaves were what held these glutinous rice dumplings.

then all the different cooks from the different households, you know, my grand-uncle, another aunt had a cook. They'd all come over, and they'd spend days and days making these huge vats of rice, you know, different rice dumplings filled with different ingredients. Some of them were savory, had, you know, lovely pork or chicken, and, you know, some had sweet red bean. Some were cloutness rice balls

that you would eat with honey. You know, or treacle, golden syrup, Lyle's golden syrup over. So, you know, but they would make thousands of these dumplings and wrap them up in these banana leaves into these lovely pyramid-shaped dumplings. And then they would go into these giant steamers. And they would do these outdoors in the garage. And I just remember, it was a whole week of all these people coming together. What was the occasion for this? I think it coincided with some

Lunar Festival. It wasn't a New Year thing because New Year had different foods. Every season, every holiday had different foods. It's just a beautiful tradition. It's spelled Z-H-O-N-G for people listening. Yeah.

Is that correct? In case, you know, you at the end of this episode want to run to the Google or run to a cookbook of sorts to learn more about the food their tradition, but it sounds like it's just beautiful that your family and their extended staffs coming together, everybody having a role to play. Everyone had a role to play, and then the dumplings were always divvied up between the families,

right? So it was really, this, it linked the families in a very special way. And I think also, you know, as I got older and began to really sort of realize what was happening, so many of these of these people that had been on staff, you know, had been on staff for decades and decades and decades with these families. And they knew each other and they were friends. And this was their time to get together and trade gossip. You know what I mean? The holidays have a way of sneaking up on you. It can almost feel like a freight train on your back. One minute it's fall, the next minute, you're pulling out decorations, you're trying to figure out a menu, you're trying to figure out where did I put all the good serving

spoons and the cake platter that I know I'm going to need. But once everyone's under one roof, something shifts. We start to breathe a little bit deeper. The noise, the cooking, the chaos, it actually feels right. Well, this year, we're going to try something a little bit different. We're going to host, as we always do, in the house. But sometime around the holidays, we thought it might be fun to create an adventure to go to someone else's home and set up shop there and find a space that is warm and inviting, has a great big kitchen so we can create a great big meal or two or three or four so we can play games at night, so we can watch movies on TV and listen to holiday songs and maybe sing along with them to create all kinds of memories in someone else's space.

And the idea of setting up shop reminds me that home isn't always the address on the envelope that comes to your house that's delivered by the mailman. It's wherever your people are. Home is where you find your best self. And it also made me think that while people are off celebrating, that their home could be used as well to create memories for somebody else. Hosting isn't just about extra money. It's about connection. It's about letting someone else make their own memories in the space that you love. Maybe it's friends doing a gift exchange or maybe it's a family cooking together, maybe it's someone throwing a holiday cookie bake. Whatever it is, your space could help someone else create beautiful memories. I like to think that when someone else is away,

that someone else could fill your house with that same holiday energy. Music playing, food on the table, laughter echoing through the hallways, Christmas tree, burning bright. That's what makes hosting so special. It's not just opening your door. It's opening up the chance. It's opening up the for someone else to feel at home. And the bonus, that extra income helps make our next adventure possible. That's a pretty good thing. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host.

The Thanksgiving table is more than just about meals. It's about creating a holiday story. And every story needs the right ingredients. And when it's Thanksgiving, well, the turkey is the star of the show. And I'm going to share a story with you that I'm not particularly proud of. And I was a lot younger, a lot newer in the kitchen. I was having a hard time nailing the turkey. And I needed a replacement turkey.

And I was frantic to find one. And guess what? Whole Foods Market saved the day with a turkey that was both affordable and a turkey that I know was raised with care. What a relief. Their turkeys start at just $1.49 a pound, and every single one is raised with no antibiotics ever, and it can be the centerpiece of your holiday story without the worry. And the real magic for me is a supporting cast. The sides, that's where the magic happens. And I lean on Whole Foods, 365 brand for all the things that I need. It's my secret for a flawless, affordable feast, and we're talking organic carrots for that perfect glazed

dish. I'm talking about green beans for the casserole or for any other green bean dish that you might want to make because there are so many options for the holiday, from essentials like creamy condensed soups to organic baking spices that when it comes time to baking those delicious desserts makes the entire house smell like one great big hug. And for those moments when guests arrive and you're still in the kitchen, but you need to have something to greet them with that taste delicious. While those 365 frozen appetizers will always do the trick, the keesh trio or the butterfly shrimp can be lifesavers and people will remember it and they will talk about it for years to come. They feel special and they let you finish up in the kitchen. Enjoy so many ways to save on your

Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market and I hope the holiday is bountiful in all the best ways. We all know that food waste is bad for the planet, but that doesn't mean we're ready to start a compost pile or we're okay with having a smelly fruit fly condo compost pail on the counter. That's why I am so into the mill food recycler. The whole idea is to make keeping food out of the trash as easy as dropping it into the trash. I just add my scraps and I mean like almost anything. I mean anything from chicken wing bones to all. avocado pits to canelope rinds, and Mill runs automatically while I sleep. I can keep filling it for weeks, and it never smells. What really surprises me is the peace of mind. I used to feel guilty

every time I tossed out wilted spinach or half-eaten leftovers. Now I just drop them into the bin, open the lid, drop them in, and I know that they're going to a better place. You can use the grounds in your garden or feed them to your chickens, but me, I have Mill, get them, to small farms for me so farmers can grow more food. You just send those grounds off to farms in little boxes that Mill can provide, and they will turn that back into real food for real animals. That's such a good feeling. It's a full circle moment that I didn't know that I needed.

You can have your own full circle moment. Try Mill, risk-free, and get $75 off at Mill.com slash YMK podcast. That's Mill.com. slash YMK Podcast. Now, we've talked about the main course. We've talked about something sweet on the table, how you spend your time. But when the guests first arrive, sometimes it's nice to have a delicious little nibble waiting for them when they ring the doorbell.

Stephen Colbert and his wife Evie also have a special holiday tradition that is as delicious as it sounds. Cheese biscuits. Evie's mother was famous. all over South Carolina for her little cheese biscuits. And now that she's gone, keeping them on the holiday menu is a way to keep a loved one close. Now, one of the first people we meet in this cookbook, Evie is your mother. And it begins the first recipe of these cheese biscuits. Right. Which you deliver on Christmas morning. Right. And the picture is just so beautiful with that

single pecan on top. Is that a tradition that you still carry on? Yes, yes. I do it sometimes in New Jersey, but we spend every Christmas back down here in Charleston. So even after my mother was gone, my father, my sister and I would make them with my father and still take them around and deliver them to people on Christmas Eve. And the funny thing is, they call them Patty's cheese biscuits. Are we going to get Patty's cheese biscuits? Are you still going to do it? So I don't know. Now the dad's gone this Christmas, my sister and I'll have to decide what to do. But, like, Last Christmas, we definitely did it with dad. I think he got to do it. You got to do it. You just can't stop, you know? Because it's interesting, right? Food holds so many memories.

And mom's close friends and so many people who love both my parents, they take a bite of that and they think about my family and my parents. And I don't want them to lose that. And I don't want to lose that. That's the first thing I had to eat in your family's house was a cheese biscuit. The night I came to pick up Evie for our first date on December 26th, 1990. and I showed up to the door and I rang the doorbell and I heard these wingtip shoes come to the door and I went, oh my gosh, it's your father. Oh my gosh, I haven't dealt with a father in a long since high school.

Oh boy, I got to change my, got to change gears here. He opened the door and he goes, she's not ready, son, come on in. And so he takes me back and he goes, can I get you drink? And I said, uh, sure, what do you got? And he said, I've got bourbon and I've got vodka. And I knew, I knew, He, by the way, probably had way more than that. He probably was like, I'm just not going to mess with anything else. And he said, I'll take a bourbon. And he goes, and bourbon in what? And I, you know, I was a 26-year-old man or boy, really kind of at the time.

And I wanted a bourbon and ginger ale, but I knew that you couldn't say, giving my bourbon with something sweet to a middle-aged Southern man because he would judge me. And so I said, bourboned in something. And he goes, I have water and soda water. I said, okay, I'll take soda water. And so when Evie walked in the room, when my wife walked in the room, I was drinking bourbon and soda and I was having a cheese biscuit, and that'll always be there home to me.

That'll always be a happy thing. And at Christmas time, I have to have a bourbon and soda and I have to have a cheese biscuit. And I'm right back there in the room with Peter McGee and Patty McGee, who also came down before Evie did. Your mother beat you into the room, too. Well, you know, maybe I was just sitting up there twiddling my fingers. You don't ever know, will you?

Hosting isn't easy. It's a marvelous thing when you can make it look easy, but it rarely actually is easy. And if you find yourself in the host seat this holiday, Bree Larson and Courtney McBroom, who just published a wonderful new cookbook, have some tips for you. Everything you can do in advance, do it. So don't be like, don't, don't be like, I'm going to have a party tomorrow. I'm going to have a party in two weeks. When I have in my free time between those two weeks, I'm going to. going to make the playlist. I'm going to make any decorations I want to do. I'm going to look at the, I'm going to decide on the menu and I'm going to back it out. And anything that can be made in advance, I'm going to do that. Anything that can be in the freezer. Like meased out in advance, I'm going to do that. I'm going to figure out which platters, what platters are going to be used and stage it. And I'm going to put a little post-it note inside to be like, this is for the roast chicken. So I don't forget. And in our book, we've done that for you. Anything that could be

made in advance. We note it. We create preplice for you so you can like follow the prepolis. And I think that alone is, well, it's so freeing. And we have millions of more tips. Do you have a tip you want to give? Yeah, I do. I mean, my mom is the queen of this, but thinking about budget, I think budget, especially when you're getting into like holiday season and you're imagining like having six people over, that's expensive. It doesn't matter who you are. it's expensive. So my mom is the queen of this where she will think about, okay, Thanksgiving is coming. And she will start to note when there's sales for things, when there's things. And she paces it out. So she's first of all not spending a bunch of money in one week. She's building it over the course of time. And then the other one is actually creating a budget, which is like not the fun conversation to have. But if you do that, it really helps you.

It'll help you make your menu because you'll know what it is that you can afford to make. If you realize that it'll help you say no if someone asks for a plus one that you're like, I can't afford. I know it's like going to cost me another 20 bucks. I can't do that. It will make you ask for help, meaning have someone bring ice, have someone bring a bottle of wine. If you're feeling really cozy, ask them to bring a side dish or like an appetizer, a bag of nuts that you guys can have as like bar snacks. It's okay. But I think being realistic

about those things will allow you to feel really comfortable and less stressed out. And then if saying you've been able to do all of that and you're feeling really good, set it up so that when your guests come in, they are kind of, it's self-service, right? You come in, they go, this is where the bathroom is, let me get you a drink. These are, if you want it to be this way, I love to show people, this is where the water comes from. These are where the cups are. This is where the ice is. From now on, for forever, you're allowed to grab those things. You don't have to ask me for those things. And so then it's set up. Everybody's seated over here. I like to put a jigsaw puzzle in the area that I want people to congregate, for example. People will go towards that. And then you kind of like slowly corral

people so that they know where to go and it's like, you're good. You know, I think people get a little where they're like, how do I know how to help people enter? You know? It's like, have your drinks ready, show people where to go, get them seated, you're good. Have like a batch out cocktail. They can serve themselves. And like you really hit it with the jigsaw puzzle. Like it's we found in all of our experience, it's really nice to give people something to do, something to talk about, something to like rally around, whether that's a jigsaw puzzle or like a theme or a dress code, like something fun to give people a reason to like talk about something besides the weather. You all seem like you're big on games too.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm very big on games, again, because they're a container. And I also feel like games and dress codes are things that people are really intimidated by. And I'm here to encourage people that it will make your party so much easier. If you're not somebody that hosts often, like one party we haven't thrown that we really want to do is the wear something that you never get to wear, but you always want to. party. Yeah, that's it. It doesn't have to be a hard dress code. It can be like cozy pajamas. You know, it doesn't have to be like some wild dress code, but just like something for people to rally.

So that if you have a party where say, you know, it's a bunch of people that haven't met each other before and you're nervous about how is that conversation going to go, you create this anticipation of, okay, they're going to walk through the dorm, what are they wearing? And then person goes to, oh, my God, you're wearing? Like, what is this? Like, oh, it's my wedding dress. I haven't got to wear it. I always want to wear it again. Or like somebody else comes in and they're like in a top hat or like someone's in a bikini. or whatever. And like you have immediately something to talk about. Yeah. And it just makes everything smooth. And then again, it's like, I am the first person that if I start to feel like things are lulling, people don't know what to talk about, I'm either giving out conversation starters or I'm saying I'm dumping Legos on the dining table. I'm like all about like give people direction if they need

it. And a lot of the times they don't. But if you just have those things in your back pocket, you're good. Here at your mama's kitchen, we had the pleasure of chatting with the queen of hosting Ina Garten. And during our chat, she shared some of her best hostess tips, and we did not include it in her episode earlier this year, but this seems like a perfect time to serve it up. Here's Ina's gold star tips for hosting a great gathering. After living in Paris, your thoughts on American butter, on American poultry and pork, and for that matter, American flour. Okay, American butter.

I mean, there is good American butter. I use cabot butter all the time. It's delicious. And they're really good butters. French butter is a whole other thing. It's got a, I think, a lower water content. It's got a higher butterfat content. And also, it's got, like, I particularly love

Bird de Barat, from Barat. It has flaked sea salt in it. So it's got not just a saltiness, but a crunchiness to it. That it's just like crazy delicious. So, yeah, I think French butter is really fabulous. What was the next one? Poultry. I think the poultry is good in both places.

I mean, we have a chicken farm in East Hampton at Iacona, which is just fabulous. So it depends. And I use some good chickens from the butcher. I think they're really good. And that's true in France. pork is a whole other category. It doesn't even, there's no relationship whatsoever. In France, pork has raised the old-fashioned way and it has flavor.

It cooks really well. The butcher taught me this, if you put pork, like a roti de pork, a roast fork in the oven, in a cold oven and then turn the oven on, it's like completely different kind of pork. And I tested it once because I didn't really believe it was true. I have two ovens in France and I took, I bought a little bit of. a pork roast and cut it in half. This is the scientist in me. And I put half in the cold oven and half in a traditional oven to see if it would make a difference. It was night and day. I couldn't believe it. And I tried it here. It didn't work because the pork is different. I'm going to be trying

that because I love to do a pork shoulder. And then the difference in flour because I was just in France this year for the Olympics. And the bread is just different. It's just better. Well, the flower here has been grown over the past, I think, 25 or 30 years. The breadmakers in America have asked the wheat growers to have higher and higher levels of gluten in the flour so that they don't have to need it as much in order to make bread. And that's going to change the flour. And that's not true in France, as far as I know. So I think it is different.

It is different. And it's better. Okay. What is your biggest cheat in the kitchen? I'll tell you mine. It's store-bought pie. Yes, which is actually pretty good. What's my favorite sheet?

I think frozen peas are probably right up there. Puff pastry. Oh, puff pastry. Sturbop pastry. You can't make it. I mean, you can, but it's a real pain. You need special equipment and things, and you can buy really good puff pastry.

Okay, as I was plowing through your cup books, I realized that you have a thing for buttermilk. And buttermilk gets a bad name. My dad used to drink buttermilk, drink a glass. I can imagine drinking it. He's from the South, but he loved it. I think my grandfather did too. It's used in so many of your recipes, in your salad dressings, in your pancakes, in that amazing

mustard roasted chicken with the breadcrumbs, which I've made. When did you fall in love with buttermilk? Well, I like the tanginess. I mean, I've always loved the flavor like sour cream, that kind of culture. And so buttermilk is basically the, you know. the liquid form of that. Yeah, I've always liked that. So time for many of us is the real challenge when we try to entertain, whether it's just with our family members on a large scale, if you're, if you're doing something and even barbecue or a picnic. What is the one thing that you would tell

people about timing that would help change the game and make that process a little smoother for them? I think the key is to remember this is a party so that you can connect with your friends, that it's not about the food. So I was actually doing a dinner recently, maybe a few weeks ago. And I was making a fillet of beef with basal parmesan mayonnaise and a Charlie Bird salad, which is fairly simple to do. You can prep everything in advance. And I thought, well, I'm going to make watermelon lemonade to go with that.

And then I thought, are my friend's really going to have more fun if I make the watermelon lemonade? And I thought, no, they're not. So I'm going to have a really good bottle of rosé. And then I was going to make something else for dessert. And I thought, you know what? There's a really good peach tart at a bakery near me. Are my friends really going to have more fun if I spend the entire afternoon making dessert or if I just have this peach tart?

And I'm relaxed and having fun myself. And I went and got the peach tart. I just think that's the key is to remember that it's really about the people, not about the food, and it's never about showing off. And the other thing I always do, and people are really surprised when they come and they see a schedule. I write down every single detail of what I have to do the day of the party. So if I have to, at 5 o'clock, I have to turn the oven to 500 degrees, I write it down.

And then it says 520, put the filet beef in the oven. 5.45, take the filet beef out. Well, those aren't the right times. But anyway, you know what I mean? And 6 o'clock make the salad dressing. So I know at 2 o'clock in the afternoon when I'm going, oh my God, I have to start making dinner. I realize, no, I don't.

That if I started five and I follow the schedule, it'll be done in time. Another good tip. Last tip I'm going to ask you about is a cocktail tip because you know I have to ask you about you're the queen of cocktails. And when I think of your cocktails, I think of summer because of the lemon drop and the cosmopolitan to me always feels sort of summery. Oh, it is. Yeah.

But do you have a good cocktail tip for the holiday season for the fall or the winter when it starts to get cold outside? My favorite winter cocktail is a whiskey sour. And I have to say, I always hope, beyond hope, that if I go out, I can have a good whiskey sour, but it's never exactly what I'm looking for. And the key is fresh orange juice, fresh lemon juice. I make it with bourbon, good bourbon, and some sugar syrup. And just shake it up and make sure it's diluted a little bit with the ice. And it's absolutely fresh and delicious and just warms your insides. Do you make your own sugar syrup? Yeah, sugar syrup is really simple. It's one part, water, one part of sugar. You bring it to a boil, let it cool, and just put it in a container in the refrigerator it lasts forever.

Thank you, Ina, for sharing your best hosting tips. Thank you for joining us for this special Thanksgiving episode. Wherever you are and whatever you do, I hope you're surrounded by love, laughter, and good company. Let us all remember those who don't have enough on their holiday table or at any time of the year. Do what you can, when you can, for who you can. I hope the holidays are bountiful in the best possible way. Thanks for spending time with us. Happy, happy, happy.