Mine is a side dish of dollar size cran pancakes.
Dessert. This year it’s pumpkin spice cake with cream cheese frosting and optional pecan topping.
I make especially great mashed potatoes (never lumpy or mealy and always perfectly buttery and seasoned) and I do a great pan-roasted yam dish, squash soup and pumpkin pie and pecan pie and cornbread stuffing…
I’m hungry now.
I’m good at roasting the turkey. Of course, that’s like the easiest thing to to.
Mom makes ‘crap salad’ (AKA 'That green jello salad with the apples and walnuts in it). She got the recipe from one of my aunts, who got it from a magazine in the '50s.
Ingredients:
[ul][li]Lime Jell-O[/li][li]Lemon Jell-O[/li][li]Diced red apples[/li][li]Diced green apples[/li][li]Chopped walnuts[/li][li]Cottage cheese[/li][li]Mayonaise[/ul][/li]Mix the Jell-O per the directions on the box and add everything else. Put it in an oblong baking dish and chill overnight. This salad is lumpy, and it’s a sickly shade of green. But it’s actually rather tasty.
Roasted large squash stuffed with brown and wild rice, onions, walnuts, raisons, garlic, fresh herbs, carrots, corn and dressed with a curry yoghurt
kiffa that sounds so yummy.
Stuffing. I’m the vegetarian so I always make a pan with apples and celery and cranberries in addition to what my family stuffs in the turkey.
I make really good mashed potatoes.
I also can make some butt-kicking pumpkin bread. After you throw the ingredients together, you dump them in a coffee can. Bake, remove, slather with cream cheese.
I make really good cranberry sauce (it’s really easy, actually. And after you learn how to make the real stuff you’ll never go back to using cranberry sauce from a can.) I also make a very good stuffing with green apples, onions, and various spices.
I have 2 dishes that are always requested at Thanksgiving, by my family and by my extended families when we go there for a big feast.
One is a hot fruit dish which is peaches, pears, apricots. pineapple and Queen Anne cherries in a buttery, curried brandy sauce. It’s good with turkey, ham, roast pork or any meat, but especially with all the other goodies of Thanksgiving.
The other is a spinach and artichoke casserole. It is sinful, as it has cream cheese and butter (lots) in it but it is the best combo ot those 2 tastes and most everyone loves it.
This thread is making me very hungry…when’s dinner?
I don’t get to cook much of the dinner because my mom likes to do that herself, but for breakfast I always make a big, homemade sweet bread drizzled with icing.
Receipes, people! We need receipes!
hungry now
Smartini
Would you pretty-pretty-please (with a cherry on top) post that spinach artichoke recipe?
My Thanksgiving specialty is pumpkin chocolate chip muffins. They aren’t fancy, but they are flavorful and satisfying.
I know that I would love a recipe from both According to Pliny and Kiffa.
I usually do dessert: last year for Thanksgiving I made a maple pumpkin cheesecake (I may have gotten the recipe from this board, come to think of it.) and for Christmas I did a caramel pecan chocolate cheesecake.
Brussels sprouts. Don’t you dare laugh either, I can see one or two of you in the back already. My sister-in-law WON’T let me in her house for dinner on T-Day without several pounds of them. Recipe couldn’t be simpler. Steam trimmed and core-removed sprouts for several minutes, until the individual leaves can be separated easily[just press each one between thumb and forefinger, asbestos finger DO help] Pour on a generous amount of browned butter, sprinkle generously with salt and freshly-ground[is there ANY other kind?] black pepper. Toss well.Serve at once. These can even be prepared a few hours prior to serving, just keep the cooked sprouts tightly covered so as to retain warmth. Reheat briefly in a microwave, THEN add the butter, S&P. Folks who ABSOLUTELY hate sprouts, and will under no circumstances even try one, have come to love them prepared this way. It is a lot of work, but worth it. Leftovers, should there be any, reheat very well, again, the microwave is your friend.
I don’t cook but my sister does and my favorite dish of hers is a peppery cheese squash side dish. Delicious… I’ll eat nothing but it, ham, rolls, and pumpkin pie if given the chance.
Too bad she lives 3,000 miles away at the moment. 
Apparently punch. I made the punch last year, and I’ve had multiple family members comment to me that they hope I’m bringing my punch again this year. I’d love to, if I could remember what the hell I put in it (besides Captain Morgan…). I think it was a random, “ooh, this would be good, let’s dump that in too” sort of punch.
I make the gravy every year.
I start out a week or two before Thanksgiving and roast a turkey. I pick off some of the meat and refrigerate or freeze the meaty carcass. Then I make turkey stock with the carcass, leftover meat, celery, onions, carrots and parsley.
The day of, I make a roux of butter and flour, and cook it until the butter is lightly browned and the “floury” smell has cooked away. Then I add the warmed stock and some diced and shredded turkey meat.
Best damn gravy on the planet.