Here’s a word to the wise: When you go home for the holidays next week, get there a couple of days early and bring along one of these magazines. They can only help.
Bon Appétit’s November issue deserves kudos for being stuffed with 42 pages of Thanksgiving tips, from how to prepare a succulent bird to how to drum up a savory plate of fresh side dishes. Those looking for the tried-and-true and perhaps a few novel gobble-worthy entrees won’t be disappointed. However, it does come up short in one feature, which all-too briefly discusses carving knives, giving just the prices rather than discussing the utility of various carvers. Elsewhere, the glossy does its best to justify shelling out $63 for a gravy ladle or, worse, $70 for a salad-tossing set.
Gourmet’s special holiday print issue serves it up right. There are no boring articles in the now all-digital mag about life on the farm, no interviews with self-promoting chefs. There is nothing but page after page of holiday deliciousness offered up through pictures and recipes. It’s pure, unadulterated food porn, and we thank the editors for that. We also thank them for not shoving a giant turkey dinner down our throats, as most foodie mags are wont to do this time of year. Instead, we get interesting takes on potato latkes, Brussels sprouts and even deviled eggs, which are marinated in pickle juice to give them a pretty, purple hue. There are also plenty of cocktail recipes — a must for this time of year. A big concern is whether the recipes will hold up to the test at home. We noticed, for example, that the apple pie recipe didn’t specify what type of apples to use, and as any pie maker knows, not just any apple will work. It’s a pretty major oversight — one that could leave Gourmet readers serving apple sauce with a crust for Christmas.
Saveur exists to remind us that food is all about culture, and there is no better time than Thanksgiving to make that point. How better to point out the multicultural fabric of America than the story of the Mexican immigrants who spice the turkey with a chile rub? There are plenty of traditional Turkey day recipes here, too. Better yet, Saveur also lets you dream of roaming the streets of Paris to find mouthwatering Moroccan tagines. That’s something worth leaving home for.
Even if you’re no bon vivant, Food + Wine will lure you to gluttony (or at least the thought of it) with its sumptuous shots of pneumatic beer-brined turkeys. We love its deconstructed food features, which give a new spin on old Thanksgiving ingredients: butternut squash tart, cranberry custard tart or pumpkin pie bread pudding anyone? Our only regret is that we’re not at the Napa Valley ranch home of “farmer to the stars” Lee Hudson this holiday.
Kid Rock has said many shocking things over the years, but he may have topped them all in telling The New Yorker why he endorsed Mitt Romney for president. “Romney strikes me as super f–kin’ honest,” Rock said — an assertion that many of his staunch backers wouldn’t exactly insist upon. Meanwhile, editor David Remnick prods Obama to tackle global warming once and for all, noting that even the Pentagon acknowledges it. But he fails to mention that even worrywart scientists are unsure whether it can be reversed.
New York’s John Heilemann gives Kid Rock’s potty mouth a run for its money as he writes that Obama’s second-term goal is “getting s–t done — and not just any s–t, but big s–t, the kind of s–t that scholars will scrutinize with care and ideally marvel at.” We’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether that’s silly, shocking or merely scatological. Elsewhere, a piece on the post-Sandy mess notes Mayor Bloomberg suffers from an “empathy deficit” as he faces a costly cleanup. “If he doesn’t think an issue is important, he doesn’t think it should be important to anyone else, either.”
Time delivers a post-election issue on tight deadlines that is not only thick but pithy. Most rags have been content with charging that Romney lost because Republicans are out of touch with women and minorities. But writer Michael Grunwald goes a step further to warn that the GOP will “double down on a losing strategy” because it’s “superglued to the past.” These are words that conservatives may not like to hear, but the wise ones will have to listen if they’re serious about 2016.
Last week, Newsweek did a bang-up job delivering the news, despite the fact that its Manhattan offices had been flooded and without power. But this week, it looks more banged-up itself, with its same-old panel of columnists jawboning disjointedly. Increasingly, we wonder: what is the point of pseudo-conservative Harvard blowhard Niall Ferguson, whose August cover story “Hit the Road, Barack” didn’t jibe too well with the subsequent pro-Obama cover story? “I endorsed John Kerry in 2004 in a fit of frustration” over Iraq and the budget crisis, he writes, evoking the image of an ass rather than an elephant.