Holidays

Serving up a Half Baked Harvest feast

As one of eight children, I feel deep kinship with others who come from big families. Bunk beds, hand-me-down clothes, abject chaos at dinnertime — these are the staples of big-family life. Tieghan Gerard, the author of the food blog and cookbook series Half Baked Harvest, is one such kindred spirit. She comes from a family of ten, and began cooking as a tween to help with frenzied mealtimes. She soon started creating her own recipes for a food blog, which became three bestselling cookbooks and a four-million-follower Instagram. Her big-family backstory blends with her wholesome, rustic aesthetic: feeding a crowd, after all, involves creativity, resourcefulness and well-loved tools. I hoped I’d recognize some high-volume cooking tricks in Half Baked Harvest: Super Simple.

harvest

The finest festive fizz

A dinner party without good conversation is like flat Champagne: pretty pointless. It’s like that not-so-funny joke about the inscription on an atheist’s tombstone: “All dressed up and nowhere to go.” Of course at a miserable dinner party you and your glad-rags have reached a destination of sorts, but (as for the late atheists) it’s not the one you were expecting. How to avoid such an infernal disappointment? Jean-Paul Sartre famously felt that hell was other people; all I can say is, that’s no attitude to bring to the table.

champagne
fashion

Fashion, fairies and folklore

In blows the dark of winter, bringing with it partially estranged family members, seemingly endless nights and all those television movies about a big boss lady who gets stranded in a small town for the holidays and learns the true meaning of Christmas by falling in love with a lumberjack. It is not a great time of year. But as every sullen teenager knows, headphones are a great way to escape the gathering and retreat inward. There is an abundance of podcasts about how great the holiday season is — how festive, how rich with tradition and meaning. I get through the holidays with day-drinking and bingeing French television shows while shoving cheese into my face, so these don’t really speak to me.