The Kitchen co-host and cookbook author Katie Lee Biegel is rediscovering a love for the holiday season — & sharing the fresh new favorite dish that’s earned a spot on her Thanksgiving menu.
By Erika Janes
Photography by George Chinsee
Comfort
Joy
&
“At least once a year, [I try to do] something that’s out
of my comfort zone because I think it gives you a different sense
of confidence and makes you feel like you can conquer your
fears and move forward in your life.”
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here’s tired, and there’s mom-of-a-toddler tired, and then there’s sick-mom-of-a-sick-
toddler tired. Katie Lee Biegel is the latter. “I don’t think I’ve slept for three weeks,” she says as she walks into the studio for SheKnows’ digital issue cover shoot, bare-faced and dressed for comfort in sneakers, gray yoga pants, and a white half-zip workout top. It’s late October, and the cookbook author, Food Network star, and mom has been under the weather with what was initially thought to be walking pneumonia and was later diagnosed as bronchitis. Then, her 2-year-old daughter, Iris, was hospitalized overnight with RSV — an experience Biegel understandably calls “incredibly scary.”
CREDITS
Creative Direction: Jennifer Ciminillo
Photos: George Chinsee
VP, Video: Reshma Gopaldas
Videographer/Editor: Allie O’Connell
Styling: By Alana Peden and Olivia Marcus
Makeup: Julie Tussey
Hair: Naoko Suzuki
FASHION CREDITS
Gold Tinsel Sweater: Trina Turk
Blue Satin Pants: Trina Turk
Earrings: Zara
Heels: Zara
Mug: Bosmarlin Jumbo Latte Mugs
Tiered Dress: Zimmermann
Boots: Zara
Silver Jumpsuit: Scotch & Soda
Chrome Heels: Aldo
Silver Earrings: Child of Wild
Video:
Sweater: Trina Turk
Plaid Pants: Trina Turk
RETURN TO HOLIDAY ISSUE
Still, you’d never guess she’d been getting anything less than 10 hours of uninterrupted sleep a night when she emerges an hour later, ready to pose and channel some holiday spirit — something that’s not hard to do when she’s sipping cocoa, posing with holiday lights and a faux wreath, and twirling in a festive, tiered red dress that she says gives her serious Loretta Lynn vibes.
“I was living out my West Virginia country girl fantasy in that dress,” she exclaims the next morning, as we’re chatting over Zoom. While there’s never a convenient time for anyone to be sick when you’re a mom, as we speak, Biegel is coming off of a wave of professional success: Her fourth cookbook, It’s Not Complicated, came out in the spring of 2021, and a Hallmark movie adaptation of her 2011 novel Groundswell debuted this past August. She has two weeks before The Kitchen (the Food Network cooking show she’s co-
hosted since 2014) begins filming again, and Thanksgiving, which she’s hosting this year, is a month away. So if ever there was a good time to veg on the couch and watch eight hours of CoComelon with your toddler, this might be it.
In fact, Biegel is curled up on the couch in her Manhattan home; her Pomeranian-Chihuahua rescue pup, Gus, trots in and out of view behind her, and Iris, who Biegel says is “doing so much better now” comes in for a cuddle with her mama. It’s a happy, homey picture of contentment, which is a pretty good way to describe where the 41-year-old is in her life right now.
Home for the Holidays
It’s also a pretty good way to describe how she approaches the holidays. Biegel has fond childhood memories of food-filled celebrations at her grandma’s house in West Virginia, but she recalls having a tinge of holiday blues, too.
“We had all these great family meals, but my parents were divorced,” she says, “so I had a lot of associations of . . . turmoil is not the word, but some sadness — because it was either me having to leave my mom to go be at my dad's or not seeing my dad . . . there was always some sort of back and forth over whose holiday it was.”
That may be one reason why, before her 2018 marriage to television producer Ryan Biegel, before becoming a mom in 2020, and before the pandemic, Biegel reveled in pre-holiday entertaining, but often went on exotic trips rather than spending the actual holidays at home. “If it was Thanksgiving, I was in Morocco or India or going on some wild vacation,” she says.
These days, the holidays hit differently. “Honestly, I feel like I've found a new love for the holidays,” she says, crediting her husband for the happy change. “Ryan is such a traditionalist, so holidays are really big for him. And he's made me come to appreciate [them] a lot more.” It doesn’t hurt that her hubby’s birthday is right after Christmas, she adds, “so we have all of these celebrations — Thanksgiving, Christmas, his birthday, New Year’s — and it's just a really fun, festive time for our family.”
Adding to Biegel’s newfound enjoyment of and excitement for the season is the fact that this year, her toddler daughter is a little more aware of everything. “I feel like this is the first year she's really going to understand what's going on,” Biegel says. “I think this year is going to be really a lot of fun.”
To that end, she’s looking forward to creating family memories beyond the “wonderful little bubble” that was her (and pretty much everyone’s) experience during the past pandemic years. This year, in their new home, the plan is to create new holiday traditions that will carry on. She’ll be hosting Ryan’s family for Thanksgiving, and she’s already excited about their plans. “We're going to the Macy's Parade, we're going to the Radio City Rockettes, we're going to do a
big Chinatown dinner one night. And then Thanksgiving day we'll be here, hanging out cooking all day and eating a big dinner.”
Katie’s Holiday Menu: It’s Not Complicated
Biegel’s holiday menu is deeply rooted in those childhood celebrations at her grandmother’s house, where the decor was simple and the meal was comforting. “It was just about food and family being together,” she recalls. “My grandma was the most amazing cook, and she made it look completely effortless. I don't remember her ever doing anything in advance. She would just wake up the morning of and suddenly this gigantic meal would appear — it was incredible the way that she could do that. She just was like, magic. Ten pounds of mashed potatoes just appeared perfectly on the buffet.”
Now, of course, Biegel knows firsthand that nothing is that effortless, let alone a holiday meal cooked in one oven. But equal to her desire to cook like her grandma is her belief that holiday meals should not be overly complicated. As she told SheKnows after It’s Not Complicated was first published, “I’ve always liked to cook in an uncomplicated manner, and I’ve always liked to entertain and make food that takes really good but doesn’t take a lot of time, so I can have fun.”
“I’ve always liked to cook in an uncomplicated manner,
and I’ve always liked to entertain and make food that tastes
really good but doesn’t take a lot of time, so I can have fun.”
For the holidays, that means editing her menu down to the tried-and-true, doing as much in advance as possible, asking for help, and — Ina Garten would no doubt approve here — serving some store-bought items.
“I remember years ago, the first time I ever hosted Thanksgiving, I tried to make every side dish under the sun,” Biegel recalls. “And I learned that that's totally unnecessary. So edit it and pare it down.”
This year, her Thanksgiving menu includes maple sage turkey, a ton of gravy (“You can never have too much gravy”), cornbread dressing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, her mom’s cranberry relish (a raw dish that she calls a great make-ahead), refrigerator rolls, and one of her new favorite holiday dishes: “I started doing Brussel sprouts as a salad a couple of years ago, and that, to me, was a revelation because it freed up oven space,” she explains. “And I really think the plate needs something that is fresh and crunchy and gives you a little bit of zing.”
As for dessert, she unashamedly admits she’ll be buying something. Hors d’oeuvres will be light, because, as she sees it, “you want everybody to be really hungry for that meal you work so hard on.”
That less-is-more strategy applies to gift-giving as well — Biegel says she and Ryan keep things simple and usually give each other just one gift, and that this year, their gift-giving attention will be more focused on their daughter.
Not Too Comfortable
Motherhood, as it turns out, wasn’t an easy path for Biegel, and she’s been open about her struggles with infertility before giving birth.
“I never expected to have a hard time getting pregnant,” she admits. “I've always been the kind of person where when I decide I'm going to do something, I just do it, I make it happen. So I thought, ‘Okay, we're getting married in September, I'll get pregnant in October…’. And it didn't happen so easily. And I felt a lot of a sense of failure around that.”
Biegel also felt lonely — and upset by messages she was getting on social media from people saying things like, ‘When are you going to get pregnant?’ or ‘Looks like you have a baby bump.’ “It made me feel really bad,” she says, “and that was unusual for me. Because normally I have zero cares when somebody gives me a bad comment on social media. Like, it just flies off me.… But that bothered me. I had a really hard time with it.”
Biegel has nearly one million followers on Instagram, and her feed is filled with gorgeous photos of food and family, behind-the-scenes snapshots of her professional life, and selfies that are both glamorous and silly. It’s incredibly aspirational and yet manages to feel real at the same time. (She’s eating! She’s mugging with friends! She’s makeup-free and cuddling Gus!) But she recalls dealing with a failed round of IVF and thinking, ‘If I feel this bad, what do other people feel like?’ “And I felt like I couldn't be my true self unless I talked about it,” she says. “So I took a picture one morning, wrote a couple of paragraphs about it, and posted it. And I got such an outpouring of support.”
To this day, people still thank her for discussing her fertility struggles and helping remove the shame and stigma surrounding infertility. Biegel hopes the pendulum keeps swinging in the direction of normalizing these discussions — and also hopes that it pushes healthcare in a different direction, although she wasn’t intentionally trying to be a change agent on that April day in 2019. Thinking back on it, she says simply, “I felt a real sense of relief, the minute I pushed that button to post it.”
Still, getting out of her comfort zone is something of a through-line for Biegel. She began working on a novel in 2009 — the same year her first marriage, to Billy Joel, whom she wed in 2004, ended — and explains, “I was going through a hard time in my life, and I started surfing, which was completely out of the box for me. I was afraid of the ocean. And I decided to try something that scared me.”
The experience of learning to surf and writing the novel all those
years ago spurred her to embrace the unknown in other areas of her life, as well, from studying improv to facing her fear of heights by taking a trapeze class.
“Now I’m always looking for something that makes me a little bit uncomfortable,” she says. “At least once a year, [I try to do] something that's out of my comfort zone because I think it gives you a different sense of confidence and makes you feel like you can conquer your fears and move forward in your life.”
Two more experiences that were outside her comfort zone revolved around her novel, Groundswell, which was adapted into a Hallmark movie starring Lacey Chabert. Biegel served as an executive producer and also had a cameo in the film. She says she had given up hope
that the book would make it to the screen, but several years ago, a producer friend brought up the idea of pitching the project to Hallmark, and there was interest. Biegel recalls thinking, ‘Sure, I’ll believe it when I turn on the TV and see it.’ But in May of 2022, she was on a plane to Hawaii to go film the movie. “It was an incredible experience,” she says. “It was just a complete pinch-me moment the entire time.”
Not surprisingly, Biegel hosted a viewing party in the Hamptons, where she’s long spent time, when the movie aired. “We made it a really special night,” she says. “I had 10 friends over and we went for a boat ride and watched the sunset, and then we came home, had a big taco dinner, and watched Groundswell.”
It was the kind of intimate, lower-key entertaining that’s a hallmark (no pun intended) of Biegel’s these days. And while she definitely has
bucket-list items she’s yet to check off — packing up her family and living in Italy for a few months is tops, and she also wants to write a mystery novel — Katie Lee, it’s safe to say, is largely content with life right now. She loves her work on The Kitchen and isn’t looking for “what’s next” in her TV career. She’s learning and evolving, always, but also enjoying the bounty of her life as it is at this moment.
In a few weeks, that will include another intimate dinner, when 13 guests gather at her holiday table. She’s looking forward to it, and not overthinking it. And that, perhaps, is the best advice she has to share for those of us for whom holiday entertaining is a step outside of our own comfort zone. “As long as you've got the people, a good playlist, some good booze, and have a couple good bites to eat, everybody's gonna have fun.”
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Comfort
Joy
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