Turkey Confidential is The Splendid Table’s annual Thanksgiving show. Francis Lam takes calls and comes to the rescue of Thanksgiving cooks, kitchen helpers, and dinner guests during the biggest cooking day of the year.

Guests include chef Kristen Kish, Top Chef’s newest judge, Michigan chef and award-winning writer Abra Berens author of Pulp, A Practical Guide to Cooking with Fruit, Jocelyn Delk Adams of Grandbaby Cakes, and Dan Pelosi aka “GrossyPelosi” the exuberant author of Let’s Eat, 101 Recipes to Fill Your Heart and Home.

Host

Francis Lam
Francis Lam took over the program from long-time host Lynne Rossetto Kasper in January 2018. A regular contributor and frequent guest host on The Splendid Table since 2010, Lam is the former Eat columnist for The New York Times Magazine and is Editor-at-Large at Clarkson Potter, a division within Penguin Random House that is a leader in cookbook publishing. For two seasons, Lam was a regular judge on Bravo’s hit show, Top Chef Masters. An award-winning writer, Lam has written for numerous publications, including Gourmet, Bon Appetít, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach, Saveur, Salon, Men’s Journal, and the Financial Times. He graduated first in his class at the Culinary Institute of America and holds a bachelor’s degree in Asian Studies and Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. He lives with his family in New York City.

Featured Guests

• • Jocelyn Delk, is the founder, author, national television personality and brand ambassador behind the award winning cookbook Grandbaby Cakes and the food website Grandbaby-Cakes.com, which gives her family’s, particularly her grandmother’s, cherished generational recipes her modern spin while preserving their original charm and spirit. Jocelyn is the co-host of the Cooking Channel and Discovery Plus game show, Stab That Cake.

• • Abra Berens, is a Michigan chef, author, and former farmer. Through every recipe written and meal served, she aims to tighten the connection between eaters and growers. She believes we can invest in a stronger, more equitable food system for everyone, from producers to grocers to consumers. She is the author of Ruffage: A Practical Guide to Vegetables, a 2020 Michigan Notable Book winner and James Beard Award nominee, and Grist: A Practical Guide to Cooking Grains, Beans, Seeds, and Legumes, and her latest, Pulp: A Practical Guide to Cooking With Fruit. Her dinners at Granor Farm in Three Oaks, Michigan, made her a James Beard semifinalist for Outstanding Chef: Great Lakes.

• • Kristen Kish, was born in South Korea and adopted into a family in Kentwood, MI. At a young age she showed an affinity for cooking and, prompted by her mother, attended Le Cordon Bleu in Chicago. After culinary school, Kristen spent the next ten years in Boston honing her skills in several high-profile restaurants, ultimately becoming the Chef de Cuisine at a Relais & Chateaux property. From 2012 – 2013, Kristen competed on Bravo’s Top Chef season 10 where she ultimately won the coveted title. She became a permanent host of Top Chef in 2023. Kristen is the author of Kristen Kish Cooking: Recipes and Techniques.

• Dan Pelosi, is the Italian American meatball behind GrossyPelosi, the popular Instagram favorite for all things comfort and food. He hosts The Secret Sauce for Food52 and appears regularly on Good Morning America. He lives in Brooklyn, but you can find him online at @grossypelosi. His latest book is Let’s Eat: 101 Recipes To Fill Your Heart & Home.

From APM Reports

There’s an idea about how children learn to read that’s held sway in schools for more than a generation — even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this special, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It’s an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn’t true and are now reckoning with the consequences — children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

Airs Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 9am

About the Host

Emily Hanford is a senior correspondent and producer for APM Reports, the documentary and investigative reporting group at American Public Media. Her work has appeared on NPR and in The New York Times and other publications. Her reporting on reading has been cited by The New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Yorker, the Brookings Institution and dozens of other publications and organizations.

June 13, 1971, Americans across the country opened their newspapers to the first reports based on classified documents leaked by a government insider, Daniel Ellsberg. Consisting of 7000 pages of top secret documents, the Pentagon Papers revealed in cold, analytical detail how four presidential administrations lied to the American public: the reasons for entering the war, the failures of their policies, the low chances of success, and the reasons for staying the course. But for Ellsberg, the facts were overwhelming, the lies, extraordinary, and the dissonance too deafening for him to simply stay the course, as so many other administration officials had done. 

Host/Producer Charles Sennott

Charles Sennott is the founder and editor-in-chief of The GroundTruth Project, a non-profit journalism organization based at GBH in Boston. A longtime foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe, Sennott began working with Ellsberg in 2019 on the podcast and on a public history project in partnership with the University of Massachusetts, Amherst which has acquired Ellsberg’s papers. Sennott covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the Boston Globe and the Arab Spring for PBS FRONTLINE. He is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Liberal Arts at Boston College where he teaches a seminar titled “Truth: A Short History.”