Damon Lee Fowler

For years, every single Easter I sang in choir for as many as three services and still managed to host a formal lunch for as many as eight people. The menu rarely varied: it began with chilled carrot puree, followed by both a roast leg of lamb and ham, potato gratin, and asparagus—either with Hollandaise or finished "alla parmigiana" (layered with butter and Parmesan cheese and baked).

But then a pandemic, our move to Virginia, and the ugly reality of getting older descended on me, and that Easter lunch has gradually shrunk. This year it was to just the two of us.

But dwindling numbers and stamina weren't the only things that changed. Read More 

Over the more than three decades that I've been teaching and writing about cooking, the biggest challenge has been coming up with fresh ways to talk about coping with our big cook's holiday, Thanksgiving. In all that time, the focus, both in my work and most everyone else's, has been on tackling a feast for a crowd without killing ourselves.

It never occurred to me—or apparently anyone else—that, as challenging as cooking for that crowd might be, it's nothing to the challenge of The Dwindling Thanksgiving Table. That, I had to learn the hard way.

When we moved to Virginia, I happily imagined our dining room table at Thanksgiving, Read More