Sometimes my mother makes stuffed mushrooms. She has a recipe she found decades ago in one of the local papers that is to die for. I would crawl on my belly across shards of broken glass to eat these things.
This year should be interesting to observe how Maggie (our new kitten) will behave. So far she has no shame about hopping up on the table while we’re eating and helping herself. And she’ll eat anything. (Except, of course, dry cat food!)
You think that’s weird, I’ve heard that in many Italian families they’ll serve spaghetti and meatballs, ziti, and lasagna along with the traditional turkey and stuffing and taters and other starches. I can’t wrap my brain around that, much less my stomach.
All this talk about spaghetti, and sauer kraut, and weird squashes, and Miracle Whip (pass the Dukes, please)… Now I understand why this Thanksgiving thread is in the Pit!
I’m one of the world’s biggest food snobs. I eat fancy cheese, shop at the farmer’s market and drive for hours to have corn-fungus enchiladas in rose petal sauce (yum!). But not on Thanksgiving.
Our spread: Turkey, gravy, home made stuffing, home made mashed potatoes, frozen peas and onions, plate of pickles and olives, canned cranberry sauce, heat’n’serve rolls (my favorite part), and two pies from the store. Occasionally the gourmet uncle brings rum pudding or stewed onions.
And it’s awesome. Perhaps it’s just because in my family frozen veggies are a step up from the canned we usually get, and any sort of big meal is rare. But I think mostly it’s the presence of family and the memories of having the same meal together year afte year that makes it for me.
Not quite it, but my Italian father-in-law insists upon serving ravioli with some kind of sauce when he hosts Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. Stranger yet, he insists that nothing else go out on the table first - it’s the ravioli as the “primi piatti” (and yes, he calls it that) alone… and then everything else gets brought out after we’re done eating the ravioli and is passed around. It feels like he was planning on having everything go out in formal courses, but then after the ravioli says “screw it” and brings everything out at once - except it happens that way each time, intentionally.
His idea of “traditional” Christmas Eve dinner is linguini with clam sauce. Ugh…
My Family . . . well most of them are gone now, but when we had the immediate family Thanksgivings they were something. . .
Both Mom and Dad were amazing cooks in their own right, so when they teamed up? Divinity.
Turkey, Capon, Bird of some sort, with sage stuffing. STUFFING, not dressing - 20 years of that and not a single stomach burble. Stuffing is not the antichrist, and dressing is not the same. . .
Baked Potatos, Sweet Potatoes - nothing fancy, just good tubers cooked well, with butter, salt and pepper. . .
Peas, with bacon and onions
Cranberry Sauce - Cranberries, sugar, water and orange zest - still one of my favorites.
A big Salad.
Homemade pumpkin pies and a mincemeat pies, made the night before. To this day, I make a mincemeat pie every year for myself. And if I’m the only one who cares to eat it, then FINE BY ME, damnit.
God I miss it. . . Any dinner anywhere else is just. . . disappointing.
Still I’ve got a question for youz all:
I accept that my family is strange - an Italian mother and a Father born in '25 who grew up on a farm in Minnesota during the 20’s leads to a pallate that’s excentric by modern standards, but we /never/ had gravy. EVER. Pan Drippings is what we had, and I’m still-and-forever-will-be horribly addicted to them. Many’s the time I’d take a hunk of bread and go over the dish the pork roast, country ribs, chicken, or turkey roasted in to get the last bits of concentrated flavor. It’s always seemed a travesty to me to mix in milk, flour, stock, arrowroot, or any combination to mar or dull the exquisite flavor of drippings.
Am I alone?
On the sauerkraut (sorry about not making the distinction). I know it sounds nasty but I heard about people eating gravy over kraut on a radio cooking program. Feeling adventurous (or foolhardy), I tried the combination out one Thanksgiving. My family was grossed out and thought I was nuts for doing it but I actually liked it (granted, YMMV).
(However, I did develope swallowing problems not long after that but I’m fairly sure they weren’t related.)
Mincemeat does SO have meat in it.
Not that you can’t find “mincemeat” without meat in it, but the recipe I’m looking at right now, from the Fannie Farmer cookbook, starts out with: 4 lbs chopped lean beef and 2 lbs chopped beef suet.
And the whole point of mincemeat pie is the brandy hard sauce.
That’s just gross. Is the radio even cooked?
The worst thing about Thanksgiving is TURKEY. It has no flavor, no matter who makes it and what they inject into it. And I agree with the OP, about no meat in the stuffing/dressing, that also goes for oysters. Can you hear me Mom?
Can I gripe about the year I spent all that time making those durned fancy bouche noel cakes, only to find grandma had cooked us all some Stouffer’s frozen lasagna for T-Day?
We all do a big (planned) pot-luck now with everyone bringing the dish they like or make best. It’s a great time for sampling dishes such as greenbean casserole that hasn’t been eaten since last year and for finding out if anyone has changed their minds about liking the sweet pickles on the relish tray over the past year. And, yes, great grandma is definately bringing one of those mysterious jello creations- I think it’ll be a pink one this year.
Should be fun!
Oh horse hooey, as someone else said, you’ve never had mine. First of all, not only do I not use stovetop (shudder), I dont’ even use the bread cubes in a bag type.
I buy a few bags of bread, then I spread them out a piece at a time to dry. All over the counters, nice Oroweat “Healthnut” bread. Then I chop them all into cubes once they’re good and dried. My stuffing has chopped onions, celery and olives, and spices like sage and summer savory.
Sometimes I use it to stuff the bird, sometimes just as a side dish. Last year I didn’t use bread stuffing for the turkey. I roasted it in apricot brandy with dried apricots, green apples and pears as stuffing. Only one problem, there was only enough left from a 25 pound bird for a few sandwiches the next day.
I thought maybe sometime I’d try one with blackberry brandy, and stuff the bird with blackberries, raspberries and cranberries, and maybe some hazelnuts and other ingredients to “hold it together”. Though I had no trouble with the other fruits.
Rolls? Heck, I make homemade BISCUITS. Though I do have those bake and serve ones too. I have to use frozen veggies, since we get crap for produce up here.
And I HAVE to make the stupid sweet potato cassarole thingie (though I save regular fresh ones to bake for me) as my little sister insists upon having it.
We’re the only ones here this year, so I probably won’t be cooking. Sniff, I’ll miss it, I’ve been doing it for the whole family since my grandma left Alaska in the 80s. (she taught me how to make the biscuits), but with only the two of us, we’ll likely end up going out for steak or something.
Yikes, I could have sworn I put a smiley in there.
Sorry about that, it was a friendly kidding “horse hooey” honest!
CanvasShoes, as a stuffing lover, I must say that I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
(really, try that variation - it sounds great!)
You’re apologizing for saying “horse hooey”, and yet you make no apologies for putting olives in stuffing?
Haven’t read anything about turkey soup yet. The only reason to actually roast a turkey is to have the ingredients to make soup out of the carcass. I understand a lot of folks don’t like it, so you all can air freight me the carcasses that’ll just go to waste, rather than being transformed into the food of the gods. I remember as a kid, my grandmother would have the soup bubbling on the stove at about the time the desserts hit the dining table. Next day, a few tablespoons of rice or small pasta cooked in this most sublime concoction, would be a real treat. The extra would go into the freezer, to await the next time the desire for some real comfort food was too much to resist. Any takers out there? Am I the only turkey soup lover?
No. Don’t knock it til you’ve tried it. Of course, it could just be that you don’t like olives?
At any rate, they’re black olives, finely minced, I use one small tin of them, gives the stuffing a “richer” flavor. It’s not like there are a billion whole olives overwhelming the stuffing. And I do actually make two batches, one without olives, since my former boyfriend/stillbest friend doesn’t like them either.
And newsletter? ummmm…errrr, I don’t have one. I’ve been cooking in the same way my grandmother did since I was about 14 way back in the coughcough70scoughcough. Most of my stuff isn’t written down.
Unless I’m baking. Baking definitely needs exact measurements. But even then, if I’ve made something a time or two, I just do it from memory.
The fruit “stuffing” was fairly simple. I cut the fruit up into fairly good sized pieces, 1/2 to 1/4 (depending upon how big the pear or apple is) for the apples and pears. Then I lightly tossed it with a bit of cinnamon, nutmeg and a light coating of apricot brandy.
That way, they don’t turn to mush when the turkey is done. As for the brandy, I don’t use just brandy for the roasting process, I think that might be too strong a flavor. I cut it about halfway with water. I believe that I used 2 cups of brandy, and the same for the water (sorry, I didn’t measure, just poured and eyeballed it). You don’t want the turkey swimming in it, but you want enough on the bottom to keep things moist, then, and then, after the turkey is just before the browning phase, you want to baste it frequently.
Some people don’t care too much for the taste of fruit with meat though. My mom and sister weren’t terribly crazy about the fruit stuffing, while everyone else loved it. But they said it wasn’t anything wrong with it, just their personal taste. So, that’s why I make the bread stuffing as a side dish.
If the idea of fruit brandy sounds icky, bourbon, beer, any decent alcohol will do as a moistener. Beer is especially good. I like to use an expensive dark beer. If it’s beer, I don’t cut it with water. I use about a quart of beer per turkey of approximately 18 to 25 pounds.
Beer lends turkey an especially rich moist flavor. Hope that helps!
You’re not alone, quiltguy. The husband, in what could only have been a moment of temporary insanity, suggested grilled turkey breast cutlets instead of our traditional roasted turkey breast, because it would be less meat (it’s just the two of us this year) and less hassle.
I vetoed that right quick. The soup, man! Think about the soup!
I usually do either a soup or a gumbo with the carcass. I try not to waste any part of the bird.
Turkey?
Turkey?
Turkey is for common people.
Goose.
Yeah baby…
That is what should be mandatory.