For over 10 years, Antoni Porowski has been the cooking expert on Netflix's Queer Eye, so it's only right that he should be the man HELLO! asks for advice on cooking during the holiday season, including Thanksgiving and Christmas. And his number one tip? "Don't start reinventing the wheel," a simple five–word sentence that is easy to remember. "Lean into what is already in your arsenal," he says, adding: "Do that on your downtime a few weeks leading up if you want to tweak something."
"I'll speak for myself only, but the holidays can bring up a lot of feelings, a lot of them positive but a lot of them can be anxiety-inducing, so figure out how to make your life easier," says the home cook turned TV personality. "Make the thing that you've made 100 times that you can do with your eyes closed."
However, ever the optimist, the 41-year-old added: "That said, when there is an opportunity to try something unique, have it be the appetizer or the amuse bouche, or something for when guests arrive that doesn't put too much pressure on you." Raised in Canada in what he calls a "very Polish household," he maintains those family traditions even now that he lives in New York City.
On Christmas Eve they would celebrate Wigilia, also known as Polish Christmas Eve, which features fish as the main dish alongside 11 other dishes to represent the 12 months of the year or the 12 apostles: "It's a whole bunch of seafood, and that's typically how we went about it in my house; there were no less than, I'm not even kidding, five varieties of pickled herring!"
© NETFLIX"As life changed, I was spending more time away from my family, and being with people who are American, I adopted a lot of their customs," he says. "But where my life is at now, I've reimplemented some of those Polish dishes to bring back my history and nostalgia."
Antoni has now partnered with Carnation for the brand's Red Carpet Recipe Collection, a limited-edition line of cooking and dining accessories designed to give your most special holiday recipes the star treatment. Canadian Thanksgiving took place on October 13, and the week prior Antoni and his partner Zacharias Niedzwiecki joined friends for a Friendsgiving for which he cooked "my only red carpet recipe, a golden turmeric root vegetable pot pie, using Carnation instead of traditional milk".
© Jon CospitoQueer Eye will come to an end this December as the 10th season will be the final. Antoni – along with Jonathan Van Ness, Tan France, Karamo Brown and Bobby Berk, and later Jeremiah Brent – has been invited to the life of everyday heroes over the years, forging relationships with people who need a lifestyle makeover but who also often have different beliefs from them, leading to moments of honest and emotional social commentary.
Aside from the relationships he has formed with his castmates, known as the Fab Five, Antoni tells HELLO! that the thing he will miss the most will be the "people" who are on set all day, every day.
"There is a lot of pressure to get the job done and lean into compelling storytelling and be authentic, but we've been doing this for the past 10 plus seasons and there are people on production who were PAs on season one and now they are producers, or people who have grown into head camera operators from being assistants," he says.
"It's a family that we've been able to grow and nurture that has changed yet in some ways has stayed the same, which is not unlike our biological families in many ways as well, and that's what I'm going to miss the most."
