“I am making a big arugula salad for Thanksgiving. Every year, everybody at The New York Times Food section sits down and figures out what’s our Thanksgiving plan this year? What are we going to do? And every year, this is a lively debate, let’s call it that, between the editor, Sam Sifton and myself. He says, ‘No salad on the table.’ And I say, ‘What, are you kidding? Of course there has to be salad on the table.’ With all that rich, brown food, you really need something bright and green to lighten things up. In my house, we eat a lot of salad, especially Dahlia, my daughter, she’s just — she’s all about the salad. I need the juice of an entire lemon in this dressing, and I’m going to show you my lemon trick: O.K., so you see how I’ve quartered it? Take out the seeds, then I can just squeeze it directly into the blender. Gotcha. You can get a lot of juice that way. I have the garlic, the salt and the lemon juice in the blender and I’m going to let that sit for five minutes. What that does is it dissolves the salt, so you get better distribution, and also, it mellows out the garlic a little bit so it’s not quite as sharp. Dahlia is a 10-year-old girl who likes nothing better than a giant bowl of salad, but she thinks she doesn’t like anchovy. However, I’m going to sneak just a couple of them in this dressing. They’re going to be mashed up. She’s not even going to know they’re there.” “I love anchovy on a turkey. I love it in a salad. Melissa really brought me into the world of the anchovy.” [blender whirring] “So the reason I’m tossing with my hands is it’s much gentler on the lettuce, and that way, you really get the dressing well distributed without bruising it. The thing about salad is no matter how big it is, it always gets eaten. At least in our house.”