Our Stuffing Ourselves

A little warning before we start. The night before we recorded this episode, Rishi got very little sleep, and somehow that turned his brain to mush, and he made a bunch of very juvenile jokes when we were recording. They're even stupider than usual, and some of them border on PG-13 language. So if you're a parent who listens to our show with your kids and don't want them to hear the kind of puns that a 12-year-old boy would make on the bus, maybe listen to this one first to make sure. Hi, I'm Samin Nasrat. And I'm Rishi K. Sherway. And we're Home Cooking. This is episode 26 of our four-part series. Originally supposed to have four parts. We have had already four Thanksgiving episodes alone. I love the holiday episodes, actually. I like hearing all of people's, like, quandaries and troubles. Well, then I have good news for you because this is a Thanksgiving episode. Okay, great. As you can hear, I'm having a little coffee throat situation, but I'm feeling okay. So hopefully everyone will bear with me. You had too much coffee. Too much coffee in my throat. Also, as we head into Thanksgiving, as we're recording this episode, I just wanted to say now more than ever is a great time for supporting your community, for mutual aid, for donating actual money to your local food bank. Feeding America is a great resource. you can donate directly to them, or you can search on their website for your local food bank to donate to. And there are all sorts of other mutual aid organizations. So we will link to them in our show notes. And if you can't give money or food, you could always give your time. It all helps. Samin, does your palate change when you have a cold? Absolutely. I just want the simplest to digest comfort foods, but now my comfort foods are like half nostalgic to my childhood and my like ancestry and half just like the things that I've come to love from life and travel. So I definitely just want to eat like chicken and rice in whatever form. I made like Taiwanese chicken and rice the other day. And then I had the leftovers. I made like soupy rice with chicken. Oh, and I also truly like major development I mean, in Samin land, which is I got a cold press juicer. So I'm just out here juicing my butt off. What does a cold press juicer do that's different from a regular juicer? It just presses the juice coldly. Just gives you a long stare, side eye. You know what? I don't really know what to talk about. There's the original champion juicer from the 70s and the 80s. that's the masticating juicer, which I think is the gold standard of juicers. And that's like a masticating is like, it chews up your stuff. It has a very fine sieve and then it sort of presents juice. Those take up a lot of room and they're very slow. So there was a whole other kind of juicer that was invented to be a little bit more useful at home. It was a centrifugal juicer and I had one of those for a long time, but the juicer would have a lot of waste. So now I have a new juicer. I think it's just like a modern version of a masticating juicer. But I've been making a lot of like, you know, my favorite juice at Squirrel, one of my favorite places in LA is they have this turmeric tonic, fresh turmeric and lemon juice. And I feel like Popeye after I drink it. So I've been making that for myself. And also my passion fruit vine in my yard is just like going bananas. Not to mix your fruit metaphors. Although maybe you could make a passion fruit banana juice. You totally could. And it would be really good. I was just thinking about how horny your juicer must be. There's a joke in here and I don't know what it is. You have to get it turned on so it can masticate. No, Rishi. No, no, no. Okay. We can cut that out. If it's not something you can sink your teeth into. Oh my God. Now you have to leave it. You're just like taking it to the next level. As we were recording this, it is not yet Thanksgiving time. It's creeping up on us. I feel it in the air. Have you already started thinking about your menu or what you're going to do? My plans fell through. So now Ebony and I are Thanksgiving orphans, but we may crash a friend's Thanksgiving. I told you you could come here. That sounds horrible. Why? What are you doing? Entice me, Rishi. The pleasure of my company, which is, you know. You're gonna have to work against that. You're gonna have to offer me like three to four mango pies to make up for the company. You know, I have to say last year, we had a very delightful Thanksgiving because it was just four people and we pretty much eschewed the entire thing there you go bringing mastication into again it's true you're always thinking about masticating just constantly you might have a problem i definitely do honestly my jaw is really sore i have tmj that is also tmi This is very upsetting Anyway, so we just had like a two-bone prime rib and a potato gratin and a salad and rice crispy treats That was the entire meal And it was very nice because it was like very little work. We went for a hike in the morning. We did puzzles Okay, so your plans fell through But are you at least having some daydreams about certain foods you want to eat? Mine are not always only related to thanksgiving. They're sort of the fall wave and i'm not like a pumpkin spice person in general, but I did make a pumpkin bread. Partly because Ebony was like, I've never had a pumpkin dessert. I mean, other than pumpkin pie. And this pumpkin bread is coming to me in the mail when? I ate the whole thing. There's no more. And you can find the recipe yourself on www.smittenkitchen.com. And what's brilliant about it is that Deb, the author of Smitten Kitchen, wrote the recipe to use an entire can of pumpkin puree. Oh. Because often the recipes use like one cup or a cup and a quarter, and then you have this like strange amount left over from the can. Yeah. So her pumpkin bread, it's just this towering beauty. Highly recommend four thumbs up, as Fava would say. That's Fava's rating system is four thumbs up. Yeah. My dog. So I've adopted it. The dog and the system. Both, yes. And then, you know, like I like a roast bird, But my dream Thanksgiving, which I've still never made come true for a variety of reasons, is to completely forego turkey and have Dungeness crab. Because it used to be that sort of mid-November was the opening of the Dungeness crab season here in the Bay Area. So I always thought it'd be really fun to have a big like crab and garlic bread and chicory salad dinner for Thanksgiving. But the last few years, the crab season has been delayed into December or even January. But I think that's a great idea, and it feels very much in keeping with the spirit of the questions that I have lined up for this episode. Oh, because people want to do different stuff. Yeah, I don't know if it's my own feeling of us now doing our fifth Thanksgiving episode, or also just something in the air, in the world. Pumpkin spice. The pumpkin spice is making people crave new things. But we've got several questions kind of along those lines. Hi, Samin and Rishi. This is Maya calling from Maryland outside of Washington, D.C. So we love cooking the Thanksgiving meal because we're all sort of elaborate chefs in the family. I love the project of all of us getting together and getting creative and deciding what goes on the menu every year. But I am also just getting sick of this standard Thanksgiving feast. even though we have been incorporating samin your incredible condiments the fried sage salsa verde the cilantro date chutney which is absolutely incredible we say to each other every year we need to make this more often and put it on everything and the crum crum the like fried breadcrumbs so delicious and all that has really helped to lighten the plate really make it more delicious. However, I just want something different, something that's still elaborate, something that's still multi-course, something that's still celebratory of the harvest season, but just not turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and gravy and, you know, just something a little bit different. Just break tradition a little bit in terms of what we eat, but not the tradition of the joy of cooking together. I love this. Can I play you another question? Hit me, Rishi. Here's another question we got from Claire. I will be having surgery the week before Thanksgiving, and I'm unsure how I'll be feeling in time to cook for the holiday. I'm looking for something to make in advance that I can freeze, and I'm thinking of a savory pie, but I'm open to suggestions. Like Samin, I don't love traditional Thanksgiving foods, but I would like to lean into fall flavors and foods. This really only needs to serve or feed my husband and I because our kids will probably just eat rolls like most kids do for Thanksgiving. Thanks so much for your help. Oh, my God. I love that. Let me just give you this last one. It's from Cecilia. I have pie crust anxiety. Makes me really nervous to try to make and achieve a perfect pie crust. I've powered through a couple of times and yielded pretty okay results, but I'm wondering if you have any thoughts or tips or wisdom to share of important things to think about when you're making a pie crust. My second question is, what are your thoughts on savory pies? I've tried a savory pumpkin pie before, but I am thinking it could be nice to include a savory pie with my family's Thanksgiving meal. I'm curious to hear what you have to say. Thank you so much. It was hard to just play you one because... because... Yeah, yeah. They're sort of connected, but they're not necessarily. Maya's non-traditional Thanksgiving, Claire's non-traditional Thanksgiving and a savory pie, and Cecilia's savory pie and pie crust. I like it. I like it. Oh, I've got answers for everyone. I'm so excited. Okay, let's start with Maya. Now, my number one suggestion to you would be if your family has some sort of heritage, there is maybe some sort of like ancestral theme to lean into. You know, like I've been to, you know, even like what Rishi used to talk about growing up, he would have these sort of like hybrid Indian slash American Thanksgiving feasts, right? Yeah, it was a potluck. And it wasn't so much that we eschewed the traditional Thanksgiving foods. It was more of a yes and kind of philosophy. We also had a full Indian dinner on top of that. We would have like 10 to 15 families at our house for Thanksgiving. That's amazing and very impressive. And some people would bring the Indian food. Indian food. My dad would make a turkey. I would make stuffing. Wait, did you get the stuffing mix from the Pepperidge Farm outlet store? You know it. Yes! But I don't feel like we did the thing that you're getting to with your answer for Maya. Okay, so where I'm going is, you know, like I've spent Thanksgiving with a family who's originally from Korea. And so they kind of lean into that. Did you have a Korean Thanksgiving chuseok meal? No, we just had sort of like Korean fried rice and kimchi sort of things built into sort of a Thanksgiving scaffolding. But I also think there's a way to completely forego the Thanksgiving scaffolding and just have a celebratory meal from another culture. And like what Maya says is part of the beauty and pleasure of Thanksgiving is having all these people around and all their hands around. So maybe you have a dumpling party. Maybe you have a tamale party. I think it's nice to take advantage of all the people in their hands to make the kinds of things that maybe are too labor intensive or, you know, just like involve a lot of handwork and finger work and folding and crimping. Whatever kind of meal you want to do, Samin is there handing out handjobs. Wow. Something has gotten into you today. And this is really wild considering you're literally the prudest person I've ever met. So that's one way that I would go. I definitely have had a Thanksgiving where we turned the leftover turkey into tamales with mole. Oh, wow. And that was a big, big project. So it would be fine for that to be the main project of Thanksgiving. Yeah. I also think another dish that feels very celebratory and kind of labor-intensive and wonderful and has as much, I think, the sort of grandiose reveal as a big turkey at the table is a dish called makluba. It's like a Levantine dish. many Palestinian friends that I know make it. And it's this sort of huge layered pot of rice and meat and vegetables that you layer very carefully and intentionally into the pot and you bake or cook on the stove. And then there's this beautiful upside down reveal. It's kind of like if you take Persian Tadig and multiply it times a big number. Yeah. We're mathematicians. There are two wonderful women who are both cookbook authors named Reem who are Palestinian. In fact, I have one of their books right here in front of me. Oh, yeah. Perfect. So that book is Arabiyeh by Reem Asil, who is a chef here in the Bay Area and an activist. And would you look at that She has McLuba right there on the cover of her book Being revealed being un And then another wonderful cookbook author who I love is Reem Cassis Oh look and she has a beautiful carrot McLuba, in the New York Times cooking that is super gorgeous. And if you don't want to make this, in Iran, we have a dish called tachin, which is a similar sort of layered rice and meat dish. The difference is that, well, the meat is marinated in a kind of a saffron and yogurt mixture. then when you go to layer it in, you scrape all the marinade off and then you mix it with the par-cooked rice. And so the saffron sort of penetrates the whole rice and it turns into this beautiful golden dish and it almost has a custardy texture from cooking together with this like yogurt and saffron and egg mixture. It's really, really delicious. It was one of my favorites as a kid. Clearly I have very expensive taste, literally, because like I can't even imagine the amount of saffron it takes to make a tachin properly. I'm looking at pictures of it and it looks beautiful. Yeah, it's really beautiful. So I think making a dish like that, that's a nice challenge. That I consider to be project cooking, like any of those layered rice dishes. Or you could also have a dumpling party. Another thought I had, oh my gosh, is Peking duck. You could make your own Peking duck, which is definitely project cooking. I think any of those kinds of things would be like total showstopper at the table and would be really fun. But lean into like some cultures, either celebration meal or handiwork meal. Maya said, you know, she was looking for something that was still celebratory of the harvest season. And I thought you could also look for some of the Thanksgiving ingredients that might be in other cultures' foods. That's a great idea. You know, like a Moroccan style tagine. Tagine would have the squash and the cinnamon and all that kind of stuff. So it would sort of echo some of the flavors of Thanksgiving, but in a totally different way. And a fun project there, if you wanted to make it, would be to make the couscous from scratch. We mentioned Chuseok just briefly earlier, but that is a whole menu that you could probably do because that is also, you know, it's called Korean Thanksgiving. It's a fall meal. It is a fall meal. It's the Korean version of Thanksgiving. Happens often in like early October. But I think if you have a cookbook that you love that features a cuisine that you don't normally eat, you could just go look in the index for like, what's a dish that has sweet potatoes? Or, yeah, or squash. Yeah, totally. I think that's a great idea. So Maya, power to you. Great. Okay, let's move on to Claire. Claire's about to have surgery. Yeah, and she was looking for stuff that she might be able to freeze potentially. Yes. So Claire, a very fun project, is to make butternut squash lasagna. and since it's just for two people or four people, you could make it quite small. And if you wanted it to be the full project, you could make your own pasta and assemble it from there or you could buy pre-made sheets of pasta from a pasta source near you. And then I'd recommend roasting some of whatever your favorite fall squash is and sort of mashing it up with some brown butter, some fried sage, a little bit of Parmesan cheese, a little nutmeg, and kind of having like a half puree mash. And that'll be like one of your layers. Then another layer could be sauteed spinach. And another layer could be bechamel. And you could do a few layers of each and then top it with a layer of bechamel and some mozzarella cheese. And I would probably par-bake it and then let it cool and then cover it and freeze it so that when it's time to take it out, I would take it out the day before Thanksgiving and let it defrost very slowly. And then all you have to do on Thanksgiving is just pop it back in the oven to bring it back up to temperature and let it brown on top. I actually, my very first story that I ever wrote for national press was for a little known magazine called Martha Stewart Living. And it was a Thanksgiving feature. And having not grown up with Thanksgiving and me being the lasagna person, And like my contribution was a butternut squash and bechamel and fried sage lasagna. And I do think like lasagnas are very satisfying. They're very sort of dramatic. You pull them out of the oven. They're great because you can do them in advance and freeze or refrigerate them. And there's very little work on the day of. It still gives you that satisfaction of like, I've spent a lot of time making all these components. And you absolutely can work Thanksgiving flavor in there with some sage and some brown butter and all of that. So I highly recommend. So that's one thought, but you did ask for a savory pie. So another favorite thing that I've done in past lazy years is either buy a prepared chicken pot pie from a very fancy grocery store or make a chicken pot pie or a turkey pot pie, or there's sort of those like all the Thanksgiving in one pies. It's kind of like an upside down shepherd's pie. So there will be like, you could do pie crust on the bottom or not, or you could just make a layer of mashed potatoes on the bottom and then put some like saucy chicken or turkey if you wanted to. You could put a layer of stuffing in there. Wait, wait. What if you put rice and vegetables and meat upside down in the pie and you called it mug clue pie? A saffron, Thanksgiving, Levantine, upside down. Savory pie. We're just combining all the answers into one. Mug clue pie. Mug clue pie. That's only offensive to everyone. You have to make sure, though, you have the right ratio of solids to liquids. Otherwise, it gets a little mug gloopy. Are you done? I'll have everybody know that before we began recording this episode, Rishi told me he's really burnt out, burnt to a crisp, in fact. And when I said, wow, you do look brown, he completely ignored my joke. And then he said he is very low bandwidth today for joking. and now here we are everyone this is low bandwidth thrishy you bring it out in me okay no but i do think like you could make a little thanksgiving in a pie basically is what i'm suggesting if that's what you're gonna feel sad about not having but that's still kind of a lot of work because you still have to make stuffing and mashed potatoes and chicken and cranberry sauce or whatever and layer it all in there. You could make a shepherd's pie and make it much more in the Thanksgiving flavor. But I have to say, to me, there are a few things better than a chicken pot pie. There's a recipe for it that I worked on for a long time in salt, fat, acid, heat, which we can link to. And it's totally good with store-bought puff pastry. Or another way to do it is I like making biscuits and setting the biscuit dough on top and baking it that way. So it's kind of like chicken and biscuits. So if I was doing that, I would just make the pot pie base, make the biscuits or whatever crust I'm going to do, wrap the whole thing up and freeze it and then go straight from the freezer into the oven. You know, now we're sort of going a little bit into Cecilia's question. It's like a Claire-Cecilia overlap. If you want to think even further, sort of outside the box of these pot pies and shepherd pies and things like that, the idea of like a quiche, you know, But let's think about how we could make a quiche that doesn't feel French and feels a little more... Thanksgiving-y? Yeah. Yeah, what's a flavor that you could combine with egg that would not be offensive and also feel Thanksgiving-y? Or feel autumnal? Yeah, I think, again, you could have big roasted chunks of some sort of winter squash. And that would be delicious. I would probably put some rapini. Broccoli rob is another name for it. I think broccoli rabe and something like honey nut or butternut squash are really nice friends because there's sort of the bitterness and the greens and the sweetness and the squash that balance each other out. Those would make a really nice quiche. I would probably put griot cheese in that. And then if you were a person who likes blue cheese, I might finish it with blue cheese. I don't like the taste of cooked blue cheese, but it's something that might be nice on that afterward. So that could give you a little bit of that sort of Thanksgiving flavors. in a quiche, which is a cousin of a savory pie, I guess. Yeah, it's like a savory pie that's also convertible. Has the top down. Yeah, with the top down, exactly. What about your salsa verde as a component in a quiche? Yeah, I think the fried sage salsa verde is kind of nice. It's an automatic bringer of like certain Thanksgiving tastes. It's automotomatically. It's automotomatic. Oh my gosh, another savory pie just popped into my head. Holy moly, how did I miss this? you could make a stuffing pie or a stuffing quiche. It's essentially you could make a savory bread pudding that has whatever your favorite stuffing is. You could even fold in some pieces of roasted butternut squash, not to completely echo myself over and over again, but it's kind of like you're getting the pieces of the meal in there. You could probably even put in some whole Cranberries. It's a simpler way of making that multi-layered Thanksgiving pie, sort of this like stuffing bake. If you did stuffing, stuffing kind of sounds like what you're doing. It would be like an automatic autom-automatopoeia. An automatic onomatopoeia? Automatic autom-automatopoeia. What's an autom-automatopoeia? An automatic autom-automatopoeia. Oh my God! Oh my God. Oh my God. What did we do to deserve this? Another thing you could do is the way I make stuffing, being not a person who grew up with stuffing, is I make it very, very wet. I use hearty, crusty sourdough bread that is nice and stale and I've dried out and even toasted a little bit so that it's basically as thirsty as possible. and then I soak it with like an extremely large amount of chicken stock that I've flavored with whatever I want to put in there. So I feel like sage and thyme and parsley kind of are the taste of Thanksgiving. So I put a lot of that in there. I feel like you have to put a lot of celery in there, sauteed celery. And I make the entire mix of the stuffing very, very wet. And that bread is so thirsty and absorbs so much liquid that in the baking, it becomes something else. It becomes almost like what's called a panade, which is sort of like a peasant food from Southern France, I think. They would take leftover dried bread and mix it maybe with some caramelized onions and some water and bake it. And it almost becomes like a bread pudding. But it's not exactly that, right? Well, panades are typically sliced, whereas the stuffing is like torn or cut. So it's more of like a panade to that dish. Oh my God! Honestly, I would be happy to just eat stuffing for Thanksgiving. That's all I want to eat. So honestly, maybe your answer is just make stuffing and pre-freeze it and bake it off and call it a day. So finally, Cecilia, you have pie crust anxiety. Let me help you. The main thing that you want to think about is keeping everything cold. Also give yourself time. So do not be making your pie crust on Thursday. Do not even be making it on Wednesday. You could make it on Tuesday. You could make it on Monday. You could make it on Sunday and freeze it. Just work ahead to give yourself sort of less stress. You want everything to be cold. And by cold, I mean freezing cold. So I take all of my tools and I put them in the freezer. I take the mixing bowl. If you're using a food processor, your food processor bowl and blade, anything that's going to touch, you know, even like I'll measure out my flour and put it in a metal bowl and put that bowl of flour in the freezer. And the reason you're doing this is because when you make a butter pie crust, the heat from your hands or the ambient heat in the room is going to start raising the temperature of the butter. And once the butter gets above melting point, it will separate into water and fat and milk solids. And you don't want that to happen during the making of your pie crust. Because when water touches flour, gluten starts forming. And gluten is what makes a pie crust chewy and tough, not flaky and light and tender. It's sort of like you're doing everything in your power to avoid introducing water until the last possible moment. Because you do need a little bit of water to help bring the dough together. But first, you're trying to break up the butter into irregular pieces that are about frozen pea-sized and then I'll spread them out on a single layer on a plate and I'll put that plate in the freezer for 10 minutes, 15 minutes. I'll measure my flour. If I have like any sort of leavener or salt, sugar, whatever, my dry ingredients into a bowl, put that into the freezer. And then often you'll use ice water to bring together a dough. Some recipes have a little bit of vinegar and or vodka and vinegar is said to help tenderize the dough And vodka is kind of this genius thing to use instead of water in that last step of bringing your dough together because even though it's liquid, you're having alcohol interact with the flour and that doesn produce gluten So you end up with a much more tender dough So I wrote a recipe that I sort of worked with my friend Aaron Hyman on for many years I have his ratios for flour and butter and I added a little vinegar and a little vodka to his recipe, and that's in salt, fat, acid, heat, and we can link to that. But really the key is you want to handle the dough as little as possible, and it might feel more crumbly than you're comfortable with, but once it rests, The water will distribute itself throughout the dough and it will be workable. So those are my tips. And you want to remember all of this about keeping everything nice and cold when you then return to rolling out your dough. You don't want to work in a very hot kitchen. If you notice the dough getting too soft, maybe take a break and put it back in the fridge or the freezer. But truly, there's nothing to be scared of. You're going to be great. And even like a not perfect homemade pie is pretty freaking good. Agreed. If you're a fan of home cooking and the way it's all put together, but like me, you wish it had a little less Rishi in it, let me recommend Rishi's other podcast, The Brilliant and Magical Song Exploder. Rishi's the host, but he cuts himself entirely out of the interviews he does with amazing musicians like Janelle Monae, Robin, Fleetwood Mac, U2, and more. So you just hear them talking about the creative process behind the making of one of their songs. I was actually a fan of Song Exploder way before Rishi and I became friends. Two of my favorite episodes are the ones with Solange and Sylvan Esso. The show is so carefully and thoughtfully made, and it's just really inspiring for anyone who creates things. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. I just thought of another question that we got that also goes with this idea of something different. Hi, Samin and Rishi. My name is Katie, and I'm calling you from Portland, Oregon. I'm curious what you would suggest as a vegetarian main dish replacing the traditional turkey my brother has been vegetarian for over 20 years and we've cooked him tofurkey so many times but it's just not that good and we all really like the idea of the main dish being something that we can all eat there's just five of us adults and a couple kids so we don't need a huge big spread but we want to be able to all eat it together a couple factors I'd love for you to think about I have a new baby and I really don't want to spend my entire day cooking, but I'm in charge of cooking and I hate mushrooms. So please don't make me cook them. Bone points to you if you can also please a couple picky little kids. Thanks so much. Wow. The picky kids, they're all set. Yeah, just give the kids rolls. They're fine. I had imagined one thing. I don't know if it's feasible or maybe it's already a dish, but I was thinking about the lasagna. Yeah. There's the pastry thing that's called milfoy. Yes. Could you do that, but like with the sort of ratatouille kind of ingredients that you've talked about? I think you're basically talking about a moussaka. Let me see. Like a vegetarian moussaka? What I was imagining was a giant spanakopita. We have kukukopita in my book, which we could do. But I also think I like your idea of like an eggplant copita. So let's see what we got here. Something that just feels like when you take out a slice of it, it's like, oh my God, you know, it's like one of those Great British Bake Off showstopper cakes where it has lots of layers. And so it feels like a really big investment to have to eat it. I like your vision, Rishi. And I think the way you're describing it, it makes me think of sort of a Boreca's or like savory flaky pastries. There's all sorts of different ones. I just remember the first time I learned about Boreca, It was watching a YouTube video of like the grandma coming over from the old country. And they were making this amazing pastry that they were stretching out until it was like as thin as cheesecloth. Like you could see through it. It was so beautiful. And so they'll roll it up into a long tube and then sort of like put that tube in a pan or a pie dish as a spiral. You cut slices of it, but it's really beautiful from above. And so you do not need to make your own phyllo pastry. for this, you can absolutely use store-bought phyllo pastry, which for me is like one of my favorite store-bought hacks. I mean, it's not even a hack because making phyllo pastry is nearly impossible to do at home, but it's just one of my favorite sort of things that I always have in the freezer because it's a very amazing shortcut to so many great, both sweet and savory pies and dishes and flaky dishes. The main thing to remember when you're working with phyllo dough is that because it's so thin, it will dry out super, super quickly. And once it dries out, it means that you can't roll it or fold it without it breaking. So you have to keep all of the pieces of phyllo that you're not using covered with a damp cloth. And then you have to work quickly once it's uncovered and make sure to brush it very generously with either butter or if you're vegan, some sort of oil just to keep it like sort of hydrated, you know, moisturized. So it will be pliable as you're working with it. And that also means you should be ready with all of the filling before you start working with your dough. So let's talk about the filling. A simpler way to do it too, if you didn't want to do this complicated like roll and spiral is you could just layer it into a pie dish or a nine by 13 pan. I would do like several layers of phyllo on the bottom, each one with fat in between. So I like to use melted butter or ghee. But again, if you're vegan, you could use a neutral oil or olive oil. And then layer with filling. You could do a second layer of dough if you wanted more filling. And when I say dough, I mean six to seven sheets of phyllo per layer because it's so thin, you need several sheets of it to sort of have anything substantial to bite into later. I generally make my pies with just phyllo on the bottom and the top and a nice like something you can sink your teeth into in the middle. So the classic is a spanakopita, which is a mixture of spinach and dill and feta cheese and maybe a little bit of egg. But here we're talking eggplant, right? I think it's a great idea. What I would like to do, if I was making this up in my own house, is I would char the whole eggplant. So you can do that if you have a gas stove, you just stick your eggplant directly over the gas burner and char them on all sides until the skin is all charred and the eggplant itself has steamed all the way through and is all the way cooked. So that takes about 12 to 15 minutes per eggplant. You know, you're just standing there turning it. If you don't have a gas burner, you can do this in your broiler. You could do it over a gas grill outside, or if you had a charcoal grill, you could literally just set the eggplant in the coals. That's the most delicious because it gets the smokiest. That's how you make baba ganoush. And then you will let your eggplant cool. You peel and discard the skin. and the stem and then you can mash. And I wouldn't actually over mash the eggplant pulp, but I would drain it a little bit and get a little bit of the juice out. So it's not too, what's the word? McGloopy? McGloopy? Wow, callback. McCallback. And then this is where the fun comes in because now you get to flavor it however you want to flavor it. So I don't know. I wouldn't try to force too much Thanksgiving flavor into eggplant. I don't think they're like naturally friends necessarily. Am I way off base in just even considering an eggplant, a Thanksgiving-y kind of ingredient? I would not say it's seasonally aligned, but we live in a modern world where you can buy an eggplant at the store. Yeah. What I like about it for vegetarians is that it does have like a hardiness to it, like a, if you will, a meatiness to it. And there are plenty of other delicious ways to flavor it. You know, like certainly I would add sort of some pounded or grated raw garlic. I would add maybe a little chili flake, some lemon juice, some, of course, salt. You could add, if you're eating cheese, some big crumbles of feta cheese in there. And then of course, like some herbs. So I would add mint and parsley and I would make a huge, beautiful sort of like thick layer of this eggplant filling. And then if you wanted to, you could also put some sautéed greens in, some spinach or chard, and then more phyllo on top. And it's important when you're baking a phyllo dish to pre-score the phyllo because it'll crumble later if you're going to score. So that's why like baklava and all those things come out with the diamonds already, you know, like out of the oven. Once it's cooked, it's going to be too brittle. So that's one thought. But also if you wanted to make a phyllo pastry that was a little more Thanksgiving-y, you could, guess what? Use a roasted squash. Sorry. It is the flavor of the season. We may have answered this question from Annie. So this year, my husband and I will be flying from San Diego to the Bay Area on Thanksgiving morning. And we'll be having our meal just a few hours after we arrive. I love to cook and I want to be able to contribute to our meal. But I also don't like feeling stressed and short on time. So even on years past, when we've done this flight, I have pre-made components and put them in deli containers and took them through TSA with me just so I could save time once we arrived. So my question is, is there a dish that you would recommend that's low stress, that's quick, also super delicious, that also isn't a salad, or maybe something I can make ahead and bring on the plane with me just so I can still contribute to our meal, even though I'm only getting there a few hours beforehand? Could she bring a sweet potato lasagna through TSA? I think you could totally put a sweet potato lasagna through the x-ray scanner. I think it would pass. I really do. As long as it's not too McLoopy. Yeah, exactly. You really have to be careful about not being too much of a liquid. But I definitely think you could pre-make a lasagna or any of these baked dishes that we're talking about. And frankly, you could bake off one of these copitas or barecas in the morning because they're wonderful at room temperature and you could bring that already baked off. I wouldn't bother with that sort of par-baked or frozen. that will travel well, you know, as long as your dish is covered and you keep it horizontal the whole way. But as you were saying, maybe not low stress. Yeah. I mean, low stress to me is more along the lines of like the bread pudding or the panade or the baked stuffing or something like that. But the beauty of the lasagna too, is you can make it as far in advance as you want. You pull it out of the freezer the day before, and then you just travel with it still in its defrosting state. And then when you arrive at the house, as long as there's oven space and time available to you, it just goes straight into the oven. That's the other thing to think about is the oven's often at a premium on Thanksgiving because everyone's baking their turkey, baking their pies, baking all their things. So I would say coordinate with your host, which is another vote for one of the kopitas and one of the phyllo dough pastries that you can bake off at your own house in the morning and travel with. A thing that you could make ahead of time, and it doesn't matter if it's room temperature. It's a cookie. A hundred percent you could just make a cookie. In fact, maybe you could get an idea from this question we got from Aubrey. Hi, Rishi and Samin. My name is Aubrey. I am in Arizona. The other day I didn't have brown rice for my lunch. So I went out and I got a sandwich and a cookie at Wildflower. And I took the, it was a pumpkin spiced cookie and I brought it home to split into four pieces with my husband and my kiddos. And we could not believe how good this cookie was. It was a pumpkin spice cookie. It had flavored icing on top. And normally I don't like that hard cookie icing, but it was really good because it tasted almost pumpkin spicy along with the cookie. And the cookie was soft and delicious and smelled like a pumpkin pie. And we were all raving about it. And I would love a copycat recipe or something if you have ideas on how to make a cookie that tastes like a pie and is soft and melty in your mouth because it was just unbelievable. I was almost mad at it. It was so good. It sounds really good. I'm like on their website right now looking. It's so cute. It looks like a pumpkin, this cookie. Did you already know this? Yes. Wow. You've really done a lot of reporting on this cookie question. Okay. I'm going to do my best here, having not tasted this cookie or seen this cookie. And Rishi and I are sitting here trying to determine if we think there's pumpkin in the cookie or just pumpkin spice flavors. I sort of think there wasn't pumpkin in the cookie. Rishi thinks there was pumpkin in the cookie. If I were to try and make this cookie, I would for sure be turning to the can of Libby's to put into my dough. Because I think a lot of the time when people talk pumpkin spice, there's not actual pumpkin involved. They're just talking about the spice mixture, which is like cinnamon, ginger, allspice, cloves, nutmeg. That's essentially what we think of as pumpkin spice. But you did say it was chewy. So let's say there is some pumpkin in there and that would sort of line up with that. So the way I'm going to think about it is think of a chewy ginger cookie. And essentially we're going to work some pumpkin puree in and maybe leave the molasses out I think that essentially what we going for here And then we want a nice oatmeal cookie glaze is probably the glaze part With some orange food coloring. With some orange food coloring. Because we did Google your cookie and it does look very cute. It's very pumpkin shaped. It's really cute. But I think that's going to be the best shot. Now, one of my favorite ginger cookie recipes comes from Claire Saffitz. Which one of her books is it in? Dessert Person? I think it is in Dessert Person. She introduced me to a technique that I'd never known about before, but I think it's like an old technique where she adds a little bit of vinegar into her cookie batter. And this is something I've since sort of experienced in classic, like old-style British gingerbreads. They are really, really quite dense, but they're super chewy because there's so much acid in the molasses And then there's kind of a lot of baking soda in the thing. And so there's like a chemical reaction that leads to this kind of like aeration that makes this gingerbread super chewy. And I think that's a similar technique to what's happening when you add a little bit of vinegar into a ginger cookie dough. Especially if you're going to leave the molasses out. Especially if you're going to leave the molasses out. And it makes them so like pleasantly chewy. so one way to think about it is use a chewy ginger cookie recipe that we love maybe even Claire Saffitz's and take out some molasses or all of the molasses replace it with pumpkin puree and I think a key here is if you're going to use canned pumpkin puree or if you're going to make your own regardless you need to squeeze it really dry so like put it between paper towels and squeeze it very very dry so you're not just adding like wet gloopy pumpkin puree in. This is really a theme here. We want to avoid McLoopiness. And then with the molasses, you're taking out like quite a lot of sweetness. So I might increase the brown sugar in the cookie a little bit too. And then in terms of your glaze, I got you covered, girl. In glaze? No, I'm just referring to my new cookie book from Von Vreeland. It's called Cookies. He has really good looking iced oatmeal cookies. So good looking that yesterday when we were flipping through it, Ebony and I both stopped and were like, those look so good. So for these ones, he just uses the classic powdered sugar and milk glaze. So you just mix three quarters of powdered sugar and five teaspoons of milk until the icing is completely smooth. And then if you need to, you add a little bit more milk in small increments and then you dip your cooled baked cookies into said glaze and let it set. And if you wanted to make it orange, you could add a little orange food coloring. This is not an answer to Aubrey's exact question, but just thinking about the idea of a Thanksgiving-themed pumpkin cookie. In this book, Cookies, they have these chewy pumpkin chocolate chip bars, which, by the way, does include canned pumpkin puree in the ingredients. And those looked really good, too. That was another page I stepped on. Yeah. You know, it feels like you could travel in the pan that you make it in, save even more work, or you can cut it up in little pieces and, you know, put it in your carry-on bag. Yeah, it kind of looks like a pumpkin blondie with chocolate chips is how I would describe it. And it looked delicious, like so good that I almost got off my sick butt last night and made them, except I didn't have any of the ingredients. I have to put an asterisk on my recommendation of this because for me, I don't know if I can totally endorse the flavor combination of chocolate and pumpkin. You totally can, Rishi. Trust me. There's something about it that doesn't totally gel for me. It's not supposed to gel. It's supposed to set in chewy cookie form. Maybe I haven't had the perfect version. I will tell you where I had it most recently was at our local grocery store when they have... Oh, the free cookie day or whatever? The free cookie day where it's like, if you spend $5, you get a pumpkin chocolate chip cookie. And I had it and it was like, okay. Yeah, I don't know that's the highest form of this. I've definitely had pumpkin bread with chocolate chips in it and I can give that four thumbs up. Okay, all right. Well, maybe I'll make this and then... And my trust in Vaughn is un-something. What's the word when you're like trusting? Un-something is... Un-something. See my comment above about us not being mathematicians. I've really lost like all the brain cells. We've talked a lot about these non-traditional and vegetarian ideas. I just want to go back to a Samin staple. We've talked about it here, of course, but it's Thanksgiving, which means you're going to get this question all over the place. Might as well do it here. This year, my family and my partner's family are meeting and sharing a meal together. Instead of doing a turkey, my sister and I have decided to make the famous buttermilk chicken. And it was a hit last year. Oh, yeah. So now that the number of people has doubled, we have to make four chickens, which then asks the question, should we just do a buttermilk turkey? Or do we just do a whole different protein? and from good things what sauce would be great with the chicken to leave both families talking about for days and what side dish can we assign our brother as a test to be worthy of a spot on the thanksgiving spreadsheet this is so cute oh my god i love you it's funny yesterday when i went to the grocery store to buy the ingredients for my soup and the guy behind me he's like you're the chicken lady i was like i am the chicken lady he's like that's a good chicken i was like it is a good chicken. Like often I can't take a compliment, but the chicken undeniably is just a good chicken. It's still pretty much my favorite chicken. If you want to compliment Samin, just call her chicken lady. Just call me chicken lady. Then I can absorb it just like buttermilk. But I actually think it's not that big of a deal to roast four chickens. It's not any harder to roast four chickens than it is to roast one chicken. But you have to spatchcock four chickens. No, no, the buttermilk chicken's not spatchcocked. Oh, so you only have to spatchcock the turkey? Yeah, the turkey I spatchcocked. And for those who don't know, spatchcocking just means removing the backbone and pressing down on the breastbone. I guess I was just imagining giant chickens. No, no, you could easily fit four chickens into any oven. I would put two per baking sheet and put them on a tray. Would you say that four chickens are less work than one turkey? I do think they're less work. The difference is chicken is not turkey. Chicken is moist in a way that turkey will never be moist, no matter how much buttermilk you put in it. So if you are not clinging to turkey, then do four chickens. Also, do you really need four or is three enough? Three is probably enough. I mean, unless you have 20 people. We don't know how many people. I don't know how many people, but I'm just totally just being like, maybe three is enough. Just making random numbers. But I also think you could absolutely do a small turkey. My thing with turkey is don't go too big. I'd rather even do two small turkeys because a large turkey is just always going to be dry. It's never going to cook evenly. So I think you can totally do four chickens and you should totally do that. But then you have to be mindful of the fact that that takes up your entire oven space. And so everything else either needs to be baked off earlier in the day or be able to be baked off in the 30 minutes while your chickens are resting or not involve your oven or be made at someone else's house and then you just sort of reheat it at your house. But I prefer the chicken to the turkey any day of the week. So my vote is for chicken. And is there a side from good things that you would recommend in a Thanksgiving context to go with the buttermilk chicken? Continuing with the dairy theme of the meal, I think your brother should 100% make the potato gratin. It's a stovetop potato gratin that I learned to make from some old school cook friends. And they learned to make them from a French chef that they worked for in a hotel way back when. And the difference is as opposed to the kind of gratin that's bakes from raw in the oven, this one goes a lot faster because you assemble the whole thing in a cast iron pan and you simmer the potatoes in the milk and cream mixture on the stove until they're all the way tender. And then you just layer with some cheese on top and finish it in the oven to get it browned. So this also helps with your oven budgeting. If you're going to have the oven filled with chickens, you can make the stovetop skillet gratin. And then when you pull the chicken out of the oven and to let it rest before you carve it, you can finish the gratin in the oven. So they're just very simple. I like a good potato dish to be just like potato-y, creamy yumminess. You know, it doesn't need to have like roasted garlic and 500 herbs in it. I just want it to taste really properly seasoned and be really rich and yummy. So I think that would be a great side dish. And as far as sauces go, not to be a broken record, but I do think the appropriate Simeon sauce for Thanksgiving is the fried sage salsa verde, which we can link to. But if you are over that and don't want to make that, you could try the green sauce in the book, which is based on a cilantro salsa from a legendary pizzeria here in Berkeley called the Cheese Board. And it's a spicy green, very bright-flavored green sauce that's very simple to make and would be delicious on that chicken. It's not exactly Thanksgiving flavors on the potato gratin, but I'm sure it would work with many other things on your table. Yeah, I think you talk about grilled corn with the green sauce. It would basically be great with any roasted or sauteed vegetable. It's, I mean, at the cheese board, you dip your pizza in it. It's kind of good for everything. It's great with eggs, great with rice. But I have a little bit of a hard time seeing it work on potato gratin. But who knows? Yeah, think big. I don't think I told you this, but the other day we ordered pizza and I dipped my pizza into the green sauce. Was it delicious? It was great. It was great because normally I do a ranch dressing and we didn't have any and I was too lazy to make some, but we did already have this in the fridge. Awesome. Use that instead. Four thumbs up. Yeah. Well, I hope your family's joining at Thanksgiving goes well. My best of luck to you over four chickens. Heart goes out to your brother and I hope he passes the test and gets to join the spreadsheet. it's funny because i also in past years have had a very complex thanksgiving spreadsheet i love a spreadsheet almost as much as i love eating thanksgiving foods like a thanksgiving spread exactly sheet okay so that's the end of our episode i think samin have you decided are you going to spend thanksgiving with me or not chorizo chorizo we've lost her jury's out jury's out i thought you suddenly had an answer to a question that you just thought of no i said jury's out i can't say you really what like you didn't even offer me any popcorn you told me of a subpar pumpkin cookie like but it's free last question samin have you ever had Thanksgiving where you've just completely said forget it and you're not cooking anything and just ordered in? I've never done that. I would love to. That's a dream is to have the Chinese food and movie Thanksgiving. Could I tempt you into that Thanksgiving? What are you going to order me? Oh, you mentioned Chinese food. I was thinking we could get the salt and pepper tofu from Green Dragon in Eagle Rock, which is one of the best things I've ever eaten. Now my mouth is watering. Yeah, me too. I'm just going to have that tonight. But I'll have it again on Thanksgiving. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Do you like how we have a cooking podcast or we're refusing to cook for Thanksgiving? I'm saying sometimes that's what you got to do. I know. Well, that's it for this episode. We made this episode with the help of Zach McNeese, Mary Dolan, and Amalia Mourinho. And Mamie Rheingold makes our episode artwork. And we're a proud member of Radiotopia, a collective of independent podcasts. You can learn more about all the Radiotopia shows at radiotopia.fm. Our website is homecooking.show, where you can find recipes and transcripts for all our episodes. And for this episode, you'll find all the links that Samin talked about, places where you can donate or volunteer and... Take care of the people around you. Yeah. You can follow Rishi on Instagram at Rishi Hiraway or subscribe to Accept Cookies, his newsletter at rishikesh.substack.com. And you can find Chicken Lady on Instagram at Chow Samin. Bawk, bawk. Subscribe to our newsletter, A Grain of Salt, at chowsameen.substack.com. Stay healthy, eat well, and take care of each other, please. Thank you for listening, and happy Thanksgiving. I'm Samin. And I'm Rishi. And we'll be home cooking. Radiotopia. From PRX.