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We’ve talked turkey and swapped recipes, so now it’s time to settle on the menu for Thanksgiving and head out to the grocery store. What will be on your table on Turkey day?
Here’s my menu:
Brined, roasted turkey with giblet gravy
Mom’s Thanksgiving stuffing
Mashed potatoes
Green bean casserole
Sweet potato casserole
Grandma’s Darn Good Salad
Cranberry sauce
Crescent rolls
Pumpkin pie
Apple-Cranberry pie
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On the Fridge Magnet blog, food writer Lindsey Nair writes about home cooking, local restaurants, entertaining and more. Here, you will also find links to restaurant reviews and our weekly food column, Front Burner. Please also check out our database of Southwest Virginia restaurants resturant user reviews and our recipe database.
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I thankfully (no pun intended) head to my parents for dinner. The downside of my hubby working in the kitchen is we don’t see him as much during those must-eat holidays!
My mother is a vegetarian, but we are all allowed to eat meat (thankful again). My father will grill a turkey, my mother will be making a pumpkin roll, bread, mashed potatoes and a broccolli casserole. I am bringing roasted butternut squash and homemade stuffing. My sister is bringing pumpkin pie, and apple pie.
I think that is all, but with the dinner not being ALL of my responsibility, I am not sure. I will be thankful for that…
I thought you weren’t going to do a pumpkin pie this year? Regardless, just park the sweet potato casserole and apple-cranberry pie in front of my plate!!
We usually have: turkey, regular dressing, oyster dressing (yuck.. i still don’t like that stuff… ), green beans with almonds, sweet potato-apple casserole, spinach artichoke casserole, cranberry cobbler, gravy and mashed potatoes (check out pioneer woman’s mashed potatoes… wow.. http://www.thepioneerwomancooks.com) OHHH… and hot yeast rolls… guess i’ll be missing out on those this year! rats!
Kim, a nice lady gave me a jar of canned pie pumpkin the other day. It looks so good that I just have to make a pie out of it for Thanksgiving. And I put the sweet potatoes on the list just for you.
Carrie, those pioneer potatoes look pretty tasty, and low fat!
I make smashed potatoes with unpeeled red potatoes, butter, sour cream, a little milk, fresh rosemary, salt and pepper. I add roasted garlic sometimes too.
Thanksgiving dinner, which I usually cook at my mom’s house is:
Turkey (baked with a butter compound of orange, lemon and fresh herbs)
Stuffing (with apples and sausage)
Smashed Potatoes
Gravy
Asparagus (roasted with olive oil & balsamic vinegar)
Rolls
Orange Cranberry Jello Salad
Pumpkin Cheesecake
I usually make a swiss, scallion, dried cranberry and pecan cheese ball too.
Dang, John, what time is dinner?
Must watch TV for this Thanksgiving
The Food Network’s “Good Eats” on Green Bean Casserole:
AIR TIMES:
November 07, 2007 8:00 PM ET/PT
November 08, 2007 3:00 AM ET/PT
November 15, 2007 8:00 PM ET/PT
November 16, 2007 3:00 AM ET/PT
November 19, 2007 11:00 PM ET/PT
November 20, 2007 2:00 AM ET/PT
November 24, 2007 2:00 PM ET/PT
I am recently married and my husband volunteered us to host Thanksgiving in our home this year. I’m extremely anxious about preparing the meal… especially the turkey. As I’ve never roasted a turkey before, can someone give me a good recipe? Any ideas for sides?
Thanks!!
Autumn, if you can wait until next Wednesday, all your questions will be answered! I am working on a huge online guide of Thanksgiving food information. It will include recipes for grilling, roasting or smoking a turkey as well as tons of recipes for side dishes and leftover turkey. Many of the side recipes came from readers.
John! Your mashed potatoes sound really really good! i never thought to use rosemary in them! I bet that is delicious! Cheeseball sounds great too! You should post that recipe!
I think my favorite fresh herb is rosemary. The smell is just heavenly. And when you pair rosemary and garlic (especially with a little sage) you just can’t go wrong. John, do you use fresh rosemary from your yard or dried rosemary in the mashed potatoes? Whenever I use dried, I worry that it’ll feel like pine needles in my dish.
Carrie, I don’t have a set recipe for the cheeseball, but I mix shredded swiss and mozarella cheese with softened cream cheese and some white pepper. I vary the amount of swiss based upon who its for. I then mix in finely chopped scallions and finely chopped dried cranberries. Toast some pecan pieces and roll the cheeseball in them.
Lindsey, I use fresh rosemary and chop it up very fine.
I’m definitely looking forward to Wednesday! I need all the help I can get!
Deep-fried turkey, turkey gravy, vegetarian gravy, green been casserole, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and egg-custard pie. (I am drooling just thinking about it)
Oh yeah how can I forget?? Stuffing! Probably corn bread stuffing, but I haven’t decided yet. Anybody have any interesting ideas about how to “spice up” the stuffing?? Mine is usually good, but I’m looking for something different this year for a change of pace.
Since your husband volunteered, HE needs to learn how to cook a turkey. Convince him to fry or grill it.
Sides? Yeast rolls, green bean casserole, cream style corn(or corn pudding), rice and gut gravy, corn bread dressing and cranberry relish. Serve an Asti Di Moscata before the meal and a dry riesling with the meal. If they want red, pour a Pinor Noir or Beaujolais nouveau.
Jay, I received several unusual stuffing recipes from readers this year. Some of them will be printed in this Wednesday’s Extra section and others will be available online. One was for sausage-orange stuffing. The other was a family recipe that calls for a sort of Mexican/Santa Fe touch with red and green peppers, corn, etc. Of course, you could always opt for oyster dressing or chestnut dressing, as well.
Henry, great wine suggestions. This year, I’m going with a couple of bottles of Foggy Ridge Serious Cider. I think the dry, apple-champagne flavors will pair nicely with turkey and dressing.
My parents are coming to town for Thanksgiving (which they haven’t done for a while) so the whole family is going to my memaws for Thanksgiving (she hasn’t had the whole family there for a few years.)
Our menu will/usually includes:
Cajun Fried Turkey
Oven Roasted Turkey
Sausage & Apple Stuffing
Corn Pudding
Homemade Bread
Green Bean Casserole
Deviled Eggs
Sweet Potato Casserole
Pumpkin Pie
Cranberry Sauce (I might try homeade this year).
(&hopefully cousin Wendy’s Chicken & Dumplings)
Autumn,
Watch Food Network for Thanksgiving Specials or check out their website. Barefoot Contessa does a roasted turkey covered with a thyme/lemon butter and stuffed with lemon, garlic & onion. (Or KFC & Bojangles will do the fried turkey for you).
Jay,
A few years ago I started adding sausage to my stuffing, everyone loves it. Last year I added apples & walnuts. Another tip also is to saute your onion, celery & apple in the sausage drippings with fresh garlic (a lot) & butter. You will love it.
Thanks for the tips everyone. Sounds like sausage is a favorite.
P.S. Lindsey and everyone:
There’s a great, mouth watering Thanksgiving recipe slideshow in today’s NYT online:
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/11/12/dining/20071114_THANK_SLIDESHOW_index.html
It includes a recipe for brined, smoked turkey.
I have been a little blue thinking about this Thanksgiving because we are going to my in-laws, and even though I normally like my mother-in-law’s cooking, I know I am going to miss some of my favorite dishes because they are not made the way she’s always done it.
She and I are alike in that we insist on doing things our own way in our own kitchens.
I need to find a twelve-step program for kitchen-control freaks.
Anyway, I know what I would like to have for my Thanksgiving menu: lemon-herb roasted turkey, slow-cooked ham and green beans, salad, brown-and-serve rolls and stuffin’ muffins. Pecan pie topped with French vanilla Cool Whip is for dessert.
My mother used to take the stuffing from the bird and put it in muffin tins and bake it while the turkey rested. The muffins would have a delicious crispy crust while the stuffing was still moist on the inside. Absolute heaven. I continued this tradition with the muffin tins, developing the recipe to include my favorite ingredient, mushrooms.
I thought we were the only people in America who baked stuffing into muffins until I read a newsletter from Foodies earlier this week: they revealed my family’s stuffin’ muffin secret! How’d they find out???
Alas, this year there will be no stuffin’ muffins, no green beans cooked all day in the crockpot, and no pecan pie. God, she doesn’t even put mushrooms in the stuffing because she doesn’t like mushrooms. What the…
But there will be some weird, oddly-colored Jello salad with canned mandarin oranges. Oh yeah, Jello salad.
Bitter? Uh, yes, that would be me.
Nona, that stuffin’ muffin idea is really cool! I never thought about something like that. When I bake stuffing in a casserole dish, I do like to get the top nice and golden.
It occurs to me that if your mom usually took the stuffing from the bird and baked it, she could be doubly sure that it would be cooked all the way through for safety reasons, too. Not that our folks really thought about food safety as much as we do these days. Hell, I’ll bet we all used to lick the raw egg batter!!
Used to lick it? >.>
Hey, if the batter looks tasty…
(And I don’t know who my savory counterpart is, but I want to have dinner at your house!)
I’ve always considered the dryness of stuffing to be irrelevant because I am going to pour gravy all over it. We used to make dressing using the “drop biscuit” method which made it really crunchy. Crunchy that is until I poured a whole bunch of gut gravy all over it.
Mom must have been ahead of her time, because even back in the 70s, one reason she did re-bake the stuffing was for food safety. The other was it make the stuffing so darn tasty! A win-win situation.
Even though I was raised to be aware of food safety, I still love to taste batter and I simply cannot resist cookie dough. Forty plus years of eating cookie dough has never had any affect on me except expanding my hips.
And please excuse the woe-is-me tone of my last post. I was having a one-person pity party last night dreaming of my beloved stuffin’ muffins. Who says you can have to wait for Thanksgiving? I am making some this weekend.
Not sure what is on my menu yet. But it likely involves hospital cafeteria food. Hope they are serving something good. NOT…
Nona,
If you find that 12 step program for kitchen control freaks, let me know.. I could use that too! LOL In my kitchen it’s my way or the highway… so I just stay out of everybody elses kitchens! LOL