Hello! This is Meghan McCarron, and you're reading my newsletter, Second Breakfast. If you no longer want to receive it, you can unsubscribe here.

Some parts of Thanksgiving I’m really good at. Turkey, mainly. But being good a turkey is unglamorous because no one gets excited about turkey. As I’ve written elsewhere, it’s just a big chicken. You roast it like a big chicken.

And then, there’s pie. Every year for Thanksgiving, I make pie crust. By the time the pie is ready, I’m already disappointed because it has become clear that, yet again, my crust kind of sucks.

Caveats: Almost any kitchen skill can be learned and mastered with practice. Also, no one needs to make pie crust. No one cares.

AND YET. I care. Every year I start with hope and a new foolproof recipe. Back in Austin, I used to buy fancy lard, since I read it was less temperamental than butter. I’ve frozen the butter and shredded it with a cheese grater, dumped everything on the counter and mushed it together using a very precisely described smear, busted out the cuisinart, used a dough cutter, relied on only the coldest tips of my fingers. I’ve tried the vodka trick, the freezer trick. I’ve tried them all.

Every year my crust slumps or my crimps soften to nothingness. Often, the crust itself is tough.

A person who actually wanted to improve would spend the next 11 months making pies. I bake bread and cakes and cookies instead. But then ever November, I mourn my failures once more.

This year, I think I’ve finally made some progress. Our daycare has a Thanksgiving potluck lunch, and I signed up to make a pie this year, in part to avoid having to make the turkey. (Joke’s on me, I ended up making a pie and a turkey breast).

I chose Sue Li’s apple cream pie from this year’s NYT pie package, in part because she said it was her favorite, and also because it looked pretty but not too challenging.

It came out looking pretty nice! Also I realized that maybe part of my pie failures lie in the fact that the pan I use every year is 10 inches, and every recipe calls for 9 inches. Whoops.

My filling was kind of runny, and my crimps once again evaporated. But my god was it delicious.

In the beginning of November, I wrote a fairly extensive piece about how SNAP works, and how many experts believe it doesn’t reflect how people actually eat. As we move into a season of feasting, I’m thinking a lot about the 40 million Americans whose SNAP benefits were delayed earlier this month.

I also wrote a quick news hit about the first-ever Michelin stars awarded to Boston and Philadelphia. The latter is my home town, and it was fun to get a chance to cover a big moment in the food scene there.

Another thing: I’ve started a new Instagram account called @pastrami_burrito. It’s a Los Angeles eating diary, and a way for me write about my city more often.

Maybe it will become something more? Eh? I’m surprised at how much I’m enjoying working on it so far.

A few things to read to get you through the holiday weekend:

• If you’re a fancier of magic boarding school novels, I really enjoyed Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent

• Devoured this David Byrne profile while drinking my morning coffee earlier this week

• I wonder if skipping the AI summary will become part of the same ethos as, say, shopping at an indie bookstore

• I’m also curious to see if more journalists move to Patreon. It’s been big in the SFF writing world for a long time now

• While working on my SNAP story, I learned about Mollie Orshansky, who spent her life in government determining how to measure poverty

• I looked at this couch ONCE and now it’s following me around Instagram and ugh unfortunately I’m not totally mad about it. Luckily we have no room.

• The 2025 Thanksgiving vibe? Creeping, nameless dread.

Um, on that note. I hope your dread stays far in the background, and that your pies are delicious.

Meghan