When the holidays come around, what entrees and side dishes are you, personally, responsible for making? (Any unique recipes would be welcome, too.)
My cranberry sauce always makes a hit. I double the recipe I submitted here.
https://www.copymethat.com/r/4izV7RzH1/eddies-famous-cranberry-sauce/
If my wife wants cookies (for whatever), Pecan Butter Balls à la burpo, is my cross to bear. They are yummy as all get out.
I am usually in charge of making the chevre/rosemary mashed potatoes, but this year I was in charge of brining the turkey, and carving it. It worked out quite well.
My secret for great mashed potatoes: Run them through a potato ricer before mashing. Smoooooooooth!
My parents are getting older, so these days, I’m responsible for pretty much everything. My mother makes her sweet potato casserole because I refuse to have anything to do with it, and I do more or less everything else.
My father still carves the turkey, but I cook it and get it set up for him.
However, traditionally, I was (and still am) in charge of making the gravy.
My wife was born in South America so not only did Thanksgiving play no part in her family’s traditions but she was “omg colonialist holidays” before it was cool. She said early on that she would happily participate in a family dinner that day but she wasn’t going to spearhead the efforts. So I do the turkey and the bulk of the sides and prep and she’ll make a side she’d like to have with it.
On the flip side, her family always did a nice Christmas Eve dinner which wasn’t as big a deal for me so it’s reversed there with her prepping a fancy dinner that night and me being mainly on the consumption end of the bargain.
In our family, we eat traditional Southern Baptist dinner-on-the-grounds type glop that I am not recommending to y’all. Just wanted to make that clear.
My assignment is to make the cauliflower salad, which consists of lettuce shreds, riced cauliflower, bacon bits, mayonnaise, sugar, parmesan shreds, and walnuts. It turns out different every year because there aren’t proper measurements for the ingredients. This year I didn’t use near enough sugar.
Nobody in my wife’s family can cook worth a damn so over the years we’ve become responsible for an ever increasing portion of the holiday meal – Thanksgiving and Christmas have, by my MIL’s decree, the exact same menu.
Anyway, I cook the turkey and the stuffing (well, dressing), I do the cranberry sauce, my wife cooks the pies (except for the chocolate pie, which her sister does – Jell-o pudding in a store bought Oreo crust), we usually do a fried rice side dish, and if my wife is feeling particularly insubordinate that year she’ll make a homemade mac & cheese.
Everything we bring is homemade except, on occasion, the stuffing. Sometimes I’ll cheap it out and get Stove Top. I’m not a huge fan but it’s better than anything her family can make from scratch so they all love it.
My MIL makes the mashed potatoes, potato salad (both she and my FIL have lost their sense of taste so her potato salad has enough mustard in it to make it inedible) , and this revolting garbage that resembles school paste (dry noodles packed into a crock pot with just enough broth from cooking the ham added to make them damp. Then cooked for ~2 hours until the resulting goo has the consistency of peanut butter. ::shudder:: ). My FIL boils a ham, and various other people bring the green bean casserole, the mashed sweet potatoes, and the salad.
Last year they did the Thanksgiving ritual as usual. We decided to stay home and do a meal with just us and our kids because, you know, plague. Apparently there was much grumbling about how “selfish” we were because half the Thanksgiving meal wasn’t provided.
This year I had an epiphany: the whole turkey prep and cook procedure is too big of a pain in the ass as I get older and sleeping in on my day off is becoming increasingly valuable. MIL decrees that Thanksgiving / Christmas dinner be at 1pm, so I usually have to have the bird in the oven by 7. For Christmas I might get a couple of turkey breasts and just cook them on the Weber grill.
If we do anything (and I always hope we don’t) I’m in charge of wine.
For Christmas, the traditional English roast beef & Yorkshire pudding dinner my Grandma used to make. This is my holiday feast meal, not Thanksgiving, when I usually eat a pretty normal portion. The English roast & Yorkshire pudding dinner is miles better than turkey in my opinion. These days my sister and I make it on alternate years, and this year is my turn.
I will do it all- the roast beef, the roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, gravy, and mashed rutabaga (Swedes) for the veg.
Seems like forever since I’ve been to a holiday dinner that I didn’t prepare myself; probably on the order of ten years or more. I usually make everything but the cranberry sauce, which is my wife’s specialty.
I’m in charge of the meat (turkey and/or ham), carrots, mashed potatoes, and the green bean casserole if we have it. My wife and I tag-team the sweet potatoes - I boil and peel them, she does the final glaze and bake. She does the cranberries and the stuffing and the pies. My stepdaughter brings a corn pudding.
Me too - and while there is cranberry sauce because my husband likes it, I don’t, so that comes out of a can.
I’m responsible for being the expendable crew member. I don’t actually have a red shirt, but my only acceptable response to anything is, “aye, aye!” So I’m simultaneously responsible for nothing and everything.
When it’s a family dinner, my partner and I typically provide most, often all, the meal. Our place is too small to hold everyone. One set of relatives can’t cook (well, BIL can grill great) and the other is competent but more or less limited to The Greatest Hits of The Sixties, sans Jello molds (which I actually like). So we prep and transport whatever we’re all eating, except if it’s turkey. The cooking relatives can put a turkey in just fine, the others require me to be beamed down to actually put the bird in the oven because “it’s icky.” BIL can do it fine, but often has to work on weekends and holidays. Because I’m petty, I will note this is the SIL who has literally shown up to dinners provided by others with a hockey bag full of Tupperware to take home leftovers, while providing no food herself. And she then “requests” we make turkey pies for her with anything that doesn’t fit into the hockey bag. And keeps the pie plates until she wants more pie. It is mostly amusing, except when I’m having a bad week.
Boiled pearl onions in cream sauce.
Well, this year I couldn’t find any. Went to two supermarkets, could not find the onions, not fresh, not frozen, not pre-made in the deli. Do people not like this anymore? (I tried buying regular white onions, chopping them into chunks and cooking them, but they just turned into a soggy mess, so gave up and tossed them out. You have to have the little ones that telescope when you bite them.)
I cook both meals in entirety. I’ll drop my most requested recipe, which disappears anywhere I take it, and which is crazy easy and calls for cans and boxes. I don’t add the cheese.
Comfort manager and cook. Most of it, in fact. I don’t mind. All of those who did the honors years ago are now gone, so it is my turn. Others clean the house for me, though.
My two signature dishes are pies. For Passover, i make a lemon angel pie. It is similar to a pavlova, with a meringue crust (baked in a pie shell), filled with lemon cream and topped with whipped cream. The lemon cream is home made lemon curd folded into whipped cream. “It’s all air”. It’s a lot of work, but soooo good.
I usually also do Madhur Jaffrey’s barbeque leg of lamb.
For Thanksgiving i make a spiced apple-cranberry pie with a fancy lattice crust. Spices are allspice, cardamom, nutmeg, mace, and a touch of clove. Filling is about 12oz cranberries, and 36oz cubed apples. Cranberries are lighter than apples, so by volume it’s only a little more than half apple.
TG:
It varies depending on where I’m eating. If I’m not hosting, I usually contribute pies or cranberry sauce. This year I made six pies for eight people, and two cranberry sauces (one whole-berry cooked and gelled concoction, and a raw berry/orange/sugar “relish” that just gets a quick spin in the food processor.) These all get made in advance.
If I’m cooking, which I’ve only done a few times, I make pretty much everything, delegating occasionally. I’ve been enjoying turkey after a day or so in the immersion circulator, finished under the broiler.
I haven’t experienced a recurring Christmas menu yet. Last year I pulled half the bagged Thanksgiving turkey out of the freezer. Not sure the plan this year.
Mac & cheese, always and forever.
mmm
Usually bread, since I have 2 vintage but working bread machines and an oven. But this year, I didn’t have any gatherings to attend, so I made 5 different loaves of bread anyway and donated them to the local Feed My People organization in time for Thanksgiving.
It would have been 6, but one machine broke down before I was finished. I hope FMP will forgive me.