Thanksgiving recipes for one

Let me explain one thing right off the bat: I am, to put it mildly, not domestically inclined. I can cook very basic, straightforward things without too much trouble, but that’s as far as it goes.

I’m going to be doing the Thanksgiving thing by myself this year, which means doing all the cooking myself. Unfortunately, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I have a turkey breast, but I have no idea what to do with it (I know it has to be baked for x amount of time, but that’s not a lot of help.) Does anyone have any tips, recipes, or suggestions for making my turkey breast fit to eat?

Then there’s the cranberry issue. My family has lots of great cranberry recipes, but they’re all for huge amounts, and none of them scale down well. Does anyone have any recipes for very small amounts of cranberry salad?

Maybe you could look into an “oven bag” for the turkey breast. Probably the small size. Easy instructions on the box. For cranberries, why not a can?

Look on the label of the turkey breast, it’ll tell you how long to bake it per pound. Use Stove Top Stuffing or a similar mix. Buy turkey gravy in a jar. Turkey breasts are low fat anyway, so you won’t get enough drippings to make enough gravy. Either bake a potato or two while roasting the turkey, or use mashed potato mix. Or bake sweet potatoes. Get a frozen pumpkin pie, there are some very good ones out there. A slice of pumpkin pie and a cup of coffee makes a very good breakfast, by the way.

Is Doctor J going to be working on Thanksgiving? You can always move the day of the feast to accomodate him, you know.

Roasting a turkey breast: Chop up half a stick of REAL butter. Put turkey in roasting pan on a rack. Dot with butter. The butter will slide off, but you TRIED, dammit. Take a piece of aluminum foil large enough to cover the turkey, and crease it in the middle. Gently drape it over the poultry. Some people swear that you’re supposed to have the shiny side in, some insist it’s shiny side out. It really doesn’t matter. In times like these, you should follow your family’s tradition. Stick it in the oven at the prescibed temperature. You can, if you wish, baste it now and then with the butter (this will give it a nicer color and add a bit of moisture and flavoring). About 45-60 minutes before the bird is supposed to be done, take the foil off and let it brown.

OK, now you have all this leftover turkey meat. When you get tired of sandwiches, make a Very Easy Pot Pie (usually I give this recipe to bachelors, but since you’re a noncook…)

Buy some deep dish frozen pie shells. I have good luck with Pet-Ritz. They come in pairs. Separate the pairs and remove and discard the paper that was between them. Drain a can of regular Veg-All (mixed vegetables). Plop it down in the middle of one pie shell. Spread the veggies out a bit. Sprinkle about a cup of chopped cooked turkey evenly over the veggies. Add about a cup of gravy, again spreading it evenly over the other stuff. If you don’t have any gravy left over, you may use a can of cream of chicken soup, or a can of cream of mushroom soup, undiluted. Remove the second pie crust from the foil pan, and place over the first filled pie crust. It won’t fit, so sort of poke it down. You CAN, if you wish to take the trouble, cut and piece the pie crust so that it will look pretty, but most people don’t want to bother. Make sure that there are cracks or slits in the second pie shell so that steam can escape. Stick this in an oven for about 30-45 minutes at 375 F. It’s done when the crust is dry, flaky, and browned. My oven isn’t well calibrated so I can’t be more specific, sorry.

For turkey casserole, use the same ingredients (turkey, VegAll, gravy or canned soup). Omit pie crusts (duh) and boil about a cup of noodles or pasta. Mix it all together, sprinkle with cheese if you like, stick it in the oven until it’s hot. Very comforting.

No, oddly enough, it’s CCL who has to work on Thanksgiving. I’m actually off for the week, so I’m going to visit my folks in KY.

We both work on Christmas, so at least we’ll be together for (part of) that day.

Dr. J

Eeewwwwww. That stuff’s gross, that’s why not a can. :smiley: Far better to eat Grandma’s recipe at every meal for a week than to eat a single bite of the canned stuff. I appreciate the thought, though.

Thanks for the advice on roasting the turkey breast, Lynn. I’m not overly concerned about gravy and I don’t eat stuffing, so those aren’t really issues, and mashed potatoes fall under the heading of basic, straightforward stuff. All I need is a recipe for cranberry salad, and I’m good to go.

When you make pot pies, I take it you don’t cook your veggies in the broth for a bit before making up the pie? I always thought it gave them a better flavor. (I also consider pot pies basic cooking, but I prefer to use biscuit dough instead of pastry dough.)

Oh, and I’ve got this pumpkin cheesecake recipe that’s a lot like pumpkin pie, but creamier. It makes an even better breakfast. :wink:

For the record, I tend not to be all that great at (or interested in) real food, but I can bake pretty well.

Usually, when I make pot pies, I do cut up and cook the veggies in broth, but I gave you the bachelor version of the recipe. :smiley:

Homemade cranberry sauce couldn’t be simpler to make and should be easy to downsize. You buy a bag of fresh cranberries, decide how much sauce you want (and by the way, most people like the sauce better the second day anyway so you might make more than you need) and then use a 4 to 1 ratio of cranberries to sugar. So if you use 4 cups of cranberries, use 1 cup of sugar. If you use 1 cup of cranberries, use 1/4 cup of sugar. Anyway, put a small amount of grated orange zest and some orange juice into a pot. Add a small amount of water and the sugar. Cook until the sugar is dissolved. Chuck the cranberries in a pot, cook until they pop, usually about 10 minutes. Taste and add more sugar if necessary. Cool and enjoy.

When my husband has to work on Thanksgiving, my sons and I usually go work at the homeless shelter and then have Thanksgiving the following day.

Fresh cranberries freeze really well. So use what you need and stick the rest in a freezer bag for Christmas wassail.

MMmmmmm… Wassail.

And ditto wonder9’s 1 cup cranberries, 1/4 cup sugar. But try mixing in orange marmalade. Real simple and it tastes great.

And remember to cover the cranberries as they cook. They can get messy. I just love food that explodes!

Dark rum. Don’t forget the dark rum. And maybe throw in some dried cherries as well, if there are any lying around.

The rum we’ve got, but what kind of kitchen do you keep that you have dried cherries just lying around?

Buy 'em in a bag. Del Monte also has three flavors of dried cranberries - regular sweetened, orange flavored and cherry flavored. I think they’re called craisens. These come in resealable bags, and are really wonderful sprinkled on a salad with walnuts. Had some last night - yum! They’re with the raisins and dried fruit at your grocers.

Your family recipe for cranberries should be easy enough to scale down – just get out the calculator and half or quarter every ingredient, then prepare the recipe as normal.

Lynn’s advice for the turkey breast is good – I’ll be using it also. My husband wanted a smoked turkey this year, and since my mom and I don’t care for smoked meat, I’ll be preparing an unsmoked turkey breast too.

My favorite after-Thankgiving use for leftover turkey, BTW, is to wack all the leftover turkey into small pieces and stir it into a white sauce. I also dump in any leftover gravy. Then eat it over rice, or leftover mashed potatoes, or biscuits, or toast, or english muffins, or whatever . Yum.

Another variation is to wrap the whole thing in cheesecloth while you cook it. Then when you baste it the basting stuff has something to hold onto, and doesn’t run off as quickly, making the basting more effective. It does have the negative of sometimes tearing off the skin when you do finally remove it though.

Personally though, as a perennial trankgiving alone eater, I make crockpot variation of my grandmas cranberry ham, cause I get like 10 pounds of Turkey if I go to my parents for christmas. :slight_smile:

All their recipes call for gelatin, and for some reason I can never get part of a box of jello to turn out right. I mix the powder before measuring, I use the properly-scaled amount of water, and it still doesn’t get the right consistency–if it even gels within 4 hours. It’s just not something I want to fool with, to be honest.

Yuck – yeah, I’m never had any luck downscaling powdered jello amounts either. If it just calls for a box of jello, could you mix the whole box up according to the box and just measure out a quarter or half of it for the recipe and dump the rest fown the drain?

Best Baked Yams - easy and yummy, the best combination:

Be sure to get the long skinny brown tubers, not the big fat football shaped orange ones. Very little is going to waste, so you can pick portion sizes right there in the produce department.

Wash well and carve off any blemishes. Tear off a sheet of tinfoil big enough to wrap each tuber. Get a handful of soft butter and schmear it all over each tuber, and wrap in foil. Have fun… it’s messy but hey, it’s good for your skin too.

Bake at 350, for about an hour to 75 minutes… serve with more butter, salt and pepper. Prepare it like a baked potato. You can add brown sugar at the table, but it’s really not necessary.

As for the turkey, what I used to do when I was a bachelor was bake the turkey breast on top of a big mound of Stove Top stuffing, made with as much extra water as I could get away with and still keep it stiff enough to stay in a mound.

I just piled it in the middle of the baking pan, and then sit the breast ribs-down on the mound of stuffing. The moisture from the stuffing keeps the turkey from drying out. Cover and bake as recommended, then take off the foil, turn up the oven, and bake another 20 minutes or so until the breast browns, or you’re afraid it’s gonna be turkey jerky, whichever comes first.

The Franco-American canned turkey gravy is passable. Don’t use the dried packages of gravy… those are terrible.

Fry some bacon in the bottom of a saucepan, and then when it’s cooked but not crispy, put in a can of green beans, and simmer a few minutes.

There ya go… Bachelor Thanskgiving: turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, green beans, gravy… add your cranberry creation. (Personally, I don’t get putting that much effort into a condiment, but whatever.)

Then, when you’re done eating your share of the turkey, throw the carcass on the floor and let the cats fight over it…

Thanksgiving is about the only time my boojum begs for table scraps anymore… I think he remembers his kittenhood, when I would put down a turkey breast carcass for him, and he would gnaw on it all day, even though it was bigger than he was!

I bet you can freeze whatever you don’t need of a batch of homemade cranberry sauce. Plus it keeps really well in the fridge. I’ve kept it several weeks with no ill effects. Or you can can it, if you’re feeling ambitious.

I generally add ginger, and sometimes cloves, to mine (in addition to orange zest or orange juice). Good stuff! I keep forgetting how yummy it is, and that I should make it more often.

I’ve cooked lots of cranberry sauce over the years and have never seen a recipe that uses gelatin. Wouldn’t that make something more like a molded salad type thing?

Yeah, it’s not cranberry sauce I’m after, though I’m sure it’s tasty. It’s cranberry salad that both sides of my family have always made.

One side makes a yummy layered thing with cranberries, jello, and walnuts, with a layer of cream cheese and whipped cream. The other side makes something with cranberries, mandarin oranges, and marshmallows, with some gelatin mixed in to hold it together. It’s not molded; the jello’s in shreds and chunks, mixed in with the other stuff.