We are an openly nosy bunch over here, and we are also usually hungry, too. So we thought we’d share what we’re cooking for the upcoming winter holiday nonstop eat-parties, and of course we want to know what you’re working on, too.
Sarah: This year, as we’re preparing to move next month and are therefore going through the strange holding pattern that is showing a house, I’m not cooking Thanksgiving. But we’re not traveling or going out either. For me, Thanksgiving is a day of elastic waist pants and, unless I’m out walking the dogs, no shoes. So we’re having our Thanksgiving catered by Fairway Markets, and I’m very excited about this. All I have to do is roast the turkey, which is no big deal.
I can share what I usually make: we deep fry a turkey, and I spend yet another year trying to recreate the family stuffing recipe and adapt it for the slow cooker. The recipe was never written down, but it involves roasted chestnuts and a shit-ton of butter.
One new recipe that is much-loved is the Serious Eats recipe for Salted Chocolate Pecan Pie. I was never a pecan pie fan until I tried this one. It’s so incredibly good, and so incredibly messy. I wasn’t going to make it this year because of the sticky mess factor, but I might have to anyway because now I want to eat some.
Elyse: I can’t cook. At all.
Seriously, when we get together for the holidays I walk into the kitchen and say “Can I help with anything?” and my mom says “Oh, no, sweetie, I have it under control. Just sit down and keep me company.” Then my sister shows up 10 minutes later and my mom is all, “Oh thank the lord, can you start making…” It’s bad. I even sliced open my hand opening a can of yams one year.
This year my family is doing a non-traditional Thanksgiving, which is fine by me. If the weather holds (it’s Wisconsin, it probably won’t), we’ll be grilling steaks and having baked potatoes. If it doesn’t, we’re making two different types of chili. As usual I am not cooking, but I am assisting my sister, the hostess for this year, by buying groceries and keeping everyone out of the kitchen.
We make three different kinds of cookies around Christmas (I’m allowed to decorate and use cookie cutters). We make my Swedish grandmother’s sugar cookies and we use her super old, super cool cookie stamps on those. We make my husband’s family’s cutout cookies which involve a shit ton of whipping cream. We also make something called “spritz” cookies. I’m not sure if spritz is a name or not, but they involve–for realsies–a cookie gun.
Amanda:
Since I’m still that age where I’m a barely functioning adult, most of my holiday cooking duties revolve around peeling and chopping things, and generally being my mother’s lackey in the kitchen. This year, I’m not going home for Thanksgiving, which is strange. I’m going to be having it with my roommate and her aunt since she just moved to the area, but it’s thrown off my holiday equilibrium because their holiday cooking traditions aren’t necessarily my holiday cooking traditions. And anything I suggest making is already being made.
So I’m having a little bit of a freakout without any sort of concrete plan right now. My family also fries their turkey, which if you’ve had a fried turkey, you never want to go back to oven turkeys ever again. I will most likely cry about missing out on that turkey this year.
That being said, I want to talk about stuffing. I used to hate stuffing. HATE IT. It was mushy and gross and I was not a fan. That was until I had my grandfather’s stuffing. It was perfectly crispy on the outside and so moist (Sorry, “moist” haters!) on the inside. It had flavor and any family members trying to get the last spoonful would be tossed into the Thunderdome.
My grandfather passed away suddenly a couple months ago, but I’d really love to share his recipe with everyone. We tend to double it since we’re animals. We also usually have my vegetarian aunt visiting, so we’ll make a portion without the sausage and replace the chicken broth with water.
Amanda’s Grandfather’s Thunderdome Stuffing
1 bag of Pepperidge Farm herb stuffing or any other bag stuffing – needs to be in chunks, not ground into a fine dust.
1 pound ground mild or hot sausage
1/2 cup chicken broth
8 tablespoons butter
1 1/2 cup finely chopped onion
1 cup finely chopped celery
2 eggs
salt & pepper (add to taste)
Brown sausage with onion and celery. Once done, drain. Take all ingredients listed and mix together very well.
Put in baking dish (or aluminum disposable pan). Cook at 375 degrees for about 1 1/2 hours or longer. Depends on how crisp you want the top layer to be.
RHG:
I haven’t been with my family on Thanksgiving for 12 years (they’re in Minnesota, I’m in Boston, and I fly home for Christmas, and plane tickets are expensive, yo), and I’ve been at various friends and chosen family dinner that entire time. Sometimes I help cook, sometimes I bring the wine, but the real meal where I take over the kitchen is Christmas.
I’ve been cooking Christmas dinner for five years now, ever since the Christmas a blizzard kept my mom in Wyoming. My sister ran up to me (having landed during a lull in that same blizzard, and it was a scary landing) and said, “TELL ME YOU KNOW HOW TO MAKE THE SWEDISH MEATBALLS LIKE MOM DOES” and I did, and she flung her arms around my neck and said “THANK GOD CHRISTMAS ISN’T RUINED.”
Now, you may be thinking that I’m about to give you a family Swedish meatball recipe. I’m not, because we get our mix from the local Scandinavian Supply Store. This year, I was chatting with my mom about dinner, and she said she wanted some kind of potato, and I was like “but I already was planning on barley risotto” and she made a, “Well, I guess that’s okay” noise which if you listened to the podcast Elyse and I did on midwesternisms, you know that it is not okay at all.
So I guess we’re having potatoes.
Sarah: Here!
RHG: SARAH. What did we tell you about Velveeta.
WHAT DID WE SAY.
Sarah: *cackles*
CarrieS:
We had Thanksgiving early with my family last weekend, and then we have it again with my husband’s family. For the latter, we give thanks to Marie Callender’s. For the former, I’m in charge of pies. It’s a lot of pressure, because McGowan women are insane and we all base our worth and the worth of others on baking. Swear to god, if one of us became President of the World, the others would say, “Oh, she’s so wonderful, we are so proud, but you know maybe she should roll her pie crust a little thinner.”
Having witnessed the annual pie meltdown again this year, the Bitches have put me on pie probation and I have informed my family that they can make their own pies from here on out and I will make cookies. My cookies are great.
Sarah, RedHeadedGirl, Elyse & Amanda: You don’t understand. She got up in the middle of the night to make another pie. We had to do something.
Carrie: Luckily this year I went out in a blaze of glory by mastering my nemesis, Sour Cream Raisin Pie.
Sarah, RedHeadedGirl, Elyse & Amanda: AT THREE IN THE MORNING.
Carrie: Details.
Anyway.
It looks easy. Don’t be fooled! McGowan women have wept over this pie for many generations! But oh, wow, it is so good.
Crust:
Hey! You don’t have to roll it out! This will make you complacent and you’ll put in too much oil or not enough. CONCENTRATE.
1 ½ cups flour
1 ½ teaspoons sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
½ cup oil
2 Tbsp milk
Mix it up, dump it in the pie pan, and press it out with your fingers until it looks like pie crust. Bake for 10 min at 425. No, you can’t buy a premade crust, are you crazy? Your great-grandmother would roll in her grave!
Filling
You will think that you can assemble these ingredients one at a time but you are wrong. Once the sour cream goes in the pan, you cannot stop stirring. So have everything lined up ahead of time. Also, get a book that you can hold in one hand while you stir with the other, because you will be here for a long time.
Our ancestresses did not tell us what heat to use so I adjust as I go along. Too hot and it burns; too low and nothing happens. I usually go for medium-low.
1 ½ cups sour cream. Scald one cup, then add the rest. Stir continuously.
2 egg yolks – add one at a time.
Dry ingredients – dump them all in at once.
Here are the dry ingredients:
1 cup sugar
½ tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp cloves
¼ tsp nutmeg
4 Tablespoons flour
Once that’s mixed in add ½ cup raisins.
Stir until thick, remove from heat, and dump into pie crust and cool.
I regret that I haven’t timed this process, but it takes forever. There’s also no magic way to tell that the mixture is thick enough. Make it as thick as you can stand to make it because it will firm as it cools but only so much. Knowing when to stop is the most stressful part of this procedure.
Pour the mix into the pan. It will look ugly. Don’t worry – you are about to cover the whole thing with whipped cream and it will taste divine. Let it cool.
Cover with homemade whipped cream. One time I brought over Cool Whip and my poor mother actually turned pale. Don’t sully the memory of your great-great grandmother with something easy. Real women buy a small carton of heavy whipping cream and then they whip it. It’s our legacy.
Invite me over, because this is really good pie and I’m never making it again.
So what about you? Are you cooking things this year? Are you bringing your marvelous self in elastic waist pants? Got a recipe you love, or a link you want to share? Please do!
We used to have to go to my husband’s grandmother’s house. Now, both sides of my husband’s family is Hungarian-Polish. Both believe that Thanksgiving dinner needs to have Turkey, Kielbasa, Ham, Green Bean Casserole, Sweet Potatoes, and usually Macaroni and Cheese. (Easter dinner is for Pirogies.) And Grandma always had pie. Her favorite pie was Marie Callendar’s Chocolate Silk Pie.
She never remembered to defrost it.
Never.
In the 15 years I went to Thanksgiving dinner at Grandma’s, we never had a defrosted dessert. We’d get to her house, having already eaten one meal, and sit down to eat a second and, right after we said grace, she’d look at my MIL and realize she’d forgotten to get the pie out of the freezer. We ate frozen pie every year.
At her funeral, there were mini-eclairs. Frozen, of course. The caterers were apologizing, saying they’d gotten them out in plenty of time and that had never happened, but we knew it was Grandma’s fault.
I just want to tell everyone who’s afraid of making pie to remember that the crust is only there to keep the good part of the pie from burning onto the pan and doesn’t have to be perfect to do that job.
If you start to roll out the crust and it’s too sticky, scrape it up, add a little more flour, and chill it again. If you start to roll it out and it’s crumbling, scrape it up, add a teaspoon of water, and chill it again. It’s not the end of the world.
I made too-dry crust the other day and was too impatient to fiddle with it, so I scraped the crumbling mess off the counter, threw it in the pie plate, and pressed it to fit. I ended up getting compliments on how amazingly flaky it was. (“What’s your secret?” “Oh, I screwed up.”)
Remember: If it’s not going to give anybody food poisoning, it’s not worth stressing about. Have fun and ENJOY YOUR HOLIDAY.
I’m making our traditional Thanksgiving dinner, with my Bourbon Chocolate Pecan Pie for dessert. This year I’m making a second pie in a gluten-free pie shell, which I’ll pop in the freezer for when our almost-son-in-law comes to visit.
On Wednesday I’ll hit the farmers market (early) and pick fresh local veggies from there for the sides. I imagine there will be sweet potatoes, green beans and squashes in the line-up.
@Darlene Marshall, I wish our farmer’s market was still open! They close up shop around here before Halloween. I’ll trade you some of my Bourbon Pumpkin Pie with Cinnamon Whipped Cream for your Bourbon Chocolate Pecan. I read your post and my mouth started watering. The baby bro is allergic so I never get pecan pie.
@Ren – first all how come none of the women (or men – but pie is a very matriarchy thing for us) who talked about pie crust in my family never told me to chill it first? Wheyey?
also – your advice is THE BEST.
My darling sons have delightful long term girlfriends (WHY NO MARRIAGES, I SAY!) so I am still doing holiday dinners. (I want a daughter-in-law and grandkids and to stop all the cooking while others watch TV.) Beyond my personal gripes, I’m cooking a turkey breast AND a ham this year for friends and family. AND, my made-from-scratch mushroom soup from Julie Childs’ recipe. AND, homemade bread rolls. and, and, you see why I want some other women in this family so I can retire. BUT…..After all, Thanksgiving is all about the FOOD and FAMILY.
making the entire meal for our family of 5
Thanks to everyone with the idea of cooking stuffing in a slow cooker!
I’ve been able to make and roll pie crusts since my mid-teens, but I suggest that Thanksgiving is not the time to learn. Buy the lovely frozen Pillsbury pie crusts, they are quite good.
The “unusual” food that was always on my mother’s Thanksgiving table is tabbouli. Such a refreshing choice with all the heavier flavors, and easily made a day ahead.
@Joy, I feel your pain. I remember the year my Mom, SIL and BFF all stood around me in the kitchen talking and laughing and having a gay old time while I did FOUR SINKS FULL of dishes. I had to point out that it would be nice if someone dried a few as I was out of room for clean dishes. And the men folk were, of course, watching football.
Wow, I am not the only one moving this year! I was starting to get depressed about the idea but now I feel like I am in good company and it will be alright. Even if we don’t have a house to go to yet.
Now that my hubby is gone it will be just me and my sons for the holidays. They’re both working on Thanksgiving (happy Early Black Friday) so we’re doing a pork roast with stuffing, Italian style green beans and wild rice and maybe an apple crisp. We’re also doing a Thanksgiving potluck at work the day before so I’m bringing squash casserole and there may be some of that left.
We have a standing tradition of cookies for Christmas which we hand out to neighbors as well as for ourselves; we ALWAYS have to have my MIL’s sugar cookies and thumbprint cookies every year along with two or three other varieties as well as peppermint bark and brown sugar fudge. But we are having to move this year so I don’t know whether or not that will happen. I do plan on making Grand Marnier White Chocolate Truffles for work gifts; not as complicated as they sound but it makes a ton so there will be plenty. We also had a standing tradition of our kids taking us out to eat on Christmas Eve for our wedding anniversary, but under the circumstances that probably will not happen either. I do always do the Holy Supper on January 6 for Byzantine Christmas; I don’t do the full thing (there’s only three of us; what am I going to do with 12 dishes?) but I do pierogies and butter beans and homemade bread and mushroom soup and we light the candles and do the prayers.
@LML:
One thing I do with stuffing in the slow cooker is put browned turkey wings on top of it under the lid, so the juice from the wings drips into the stuffing to give it more of the “cooked in the bird but safer temperature wise and also there’s more of it” taste.
This weekend, I’ll be starting my holiday prep with baking my fruitcakes. I use the Dark Fruitcake recipe from the Fanny Farmer cookbook with good candied fruit from Fresh Market and fresh, local pecans if I can get them at the farmer’s market. My husband, my Dad, and my neighbor have already asked when the fruitcake will be ready.
We will be celebrating Thanksgiving with friends who have a big house out in the country as we have the last several years. They cook an enormous turkey with dressing and, since we are in the South, bake an enormous ham. Each couple brings a side dish and dessert. It is required that I make my chocolate chip/M&M cookies. My “secret recipe” is from the Ghiradelli semi-sweet morsels bag, with half M&Ms for the chocolate and an added cup of pecans. If we are lucky, the kids and the hostess will not devour them all before dinner! Depending on what we find at our farmer’s market tomorrow, it will be smashed turnips or roasted carrots for our side dish.
I’m hosting an evening Christmas cookie exchange/dessert party this year for our neighborhood association. I plan to find a decent dessert wine and have a cheese and fruit platter, with the samples of the exchange cookies from everyone. I’m looking for a centerpiece dessert recipe and so far am stuck on a Bundt cake that I can decorate, either Gingerbread or Red Velvet. And, yes Elyse, “spritz” is the real name for those buttery cookie treats. I found a recipe for Gingerbread Spritz cookies which will likely be my contribution to the actual cookie exchange. I have to make use of my new OXO cookie gun!
#1) Velveeta is NOT food. Let alone cheese. Had to get that off my chest. I’m better now.
#2) A certain romance author has a holiday cookbook and my recipe for Gloriamarie’s Best Ever Roasted Turkey was selected. Not that that means much as every recipe that was submitted was accepted, I believe.
#3) My gift to all of you and trust me this really is delicious and so easy to make:
Gloriamarie’s Cranberry Chutney
2 C fresh cranberries
2 small tomatoes diced. about two cups. Doesn’t have to be fresh. When I can’t find decent tomatoes this time of year, I’ve used canned and diced or one could spring and pay the big bucks for organically grown tomatoes
3/4 C water
1/2 C raisins
1/4 C chopped onion, any color
1/2 tsp sea salt or 1 t regular table salt
1 C packed brown sugar. If you don’t have any substitute 1 C granulated and 1 T molasses.
1/2 C cider vinegar
1/2 tsp – 1 tsp **each** ground ginger, ground cloves, and black pepper. There is leeway in the measurements depending how fresh are one’s spices and if one chooses, as do I, to grind whole cloves and peppercorns.
In a large saucepan, dump in cranberries, tomatoes, water, raisins, onion, and salt.
Bring to a boil and then simmer till berries pop, about 10-15 minutes.
Stir in everything else and simmer for 35-40 minutes or until it has the consistency of a relish.
Yield: 2 2/3C. Ladle into jars or freezer containers or glass bowls to serve. Refrigerate or freeze until used.
Keeps well in frig. Makes a great sandwich spread for a turkey and gravy sandwich.
We’re going to my brother’s house. I’m providing the fully-cooked, smoked turkey, plus a Fruits of the Forest Pie, an olive oil & orange cake, and an as-yet-undetermined pie. No Gooey Butter Cake or Chocolate Bread Pudding this year.
(Fruits of the Forest filling is awesome. Stew together a mixture of frozen blueberries, cherries & raspberries with fresh apple slices, sugar and a little water. Once it is nice & syrupy, dump it in a pie shell and bake it.)
It’s just me, myself, and I, so I’m following my time-honored tradition and roasting a Cornish hen, with or without a baked potato or rice pilaf for Thanksgiving lunch, and either steamed broccoli or a salad. Oh, I’m also going back to bed after I get home from church that morning. 🙂
Dinner will be homemade pumpkin soup, with toasted pumpkin seeds. From scratch.
I make awesome pumpkin pie. I buy the crust because my crust is even worse than the roll-out kind (though this year I’m going to try a shortbread/tart type crust). I usually follow the pie recipe on the can of pumpkin, except use less of the … I dunno cloves and weird stuff my kids don’t like.
I do make fabulous apple pie. Oatmeal-honey cookie crust, crumble on top, at which point you just need apples, cinnamon, sugar, and some flour to make the apples stick together, because by that point, who actually cares about the apples?
Oh, and we’re eating with friends, so I’m only in charge of pie, rolls, and sparkling cider. My friend is very particular about her turkey and her stuffing and her potatoes and this AND that and some other stuff. So I have it easy 😉
@Phyllis Laatsch, if you don’t mind… I have an Irish friend who makes THE VERY BEST shortbread I’ve ever had in my life. She says the secret is to use 50% margarine and 50% butter. She recommends Kerrygold butter.
Another trick she taught about making shortbread, and I know you are going to use it for the crust and that sounds just awesome, for cookies, is to cut it immediately after taking it out of the oven. If one waits until it cools to cut it, it will shatter.
I’m not a mashed potato fan, but once a year I’ll do ’em; but I use a ricer not a masher. Heat the butter and milk in the microwave b/4 you stir it in. Light, never gummy.
But I am all about roasted brussel sprouts-just cut in half, and yams, peeled and cut about the same size, olive oil onto a baking sheet w/ salt & pepper, roast. Feast! Great w/ home cooked cranberries always add some booze! Rum is nice, a bit of cinnamon stick too.
Thanks for the sour cream raisin pie recipe, always the right time for pie
It’s just my husband, Son the Elder and I this year, so I’m letting Whole Foods cook. We went out the last two years with rather disappointing results, so this year we’re trying WF.
Carrie, I feel your pie pain. It is indeed a sacred trust and must be done perfectly. I have been known to obsess over crust recipes long into the night only to be found the next morning disoriented and mumbling about Vodka vs. ice water as the liquid part. (Vodka works better.) I have a recipe for apple cranberry pie that will make you jump for joy.
Happy Thanksgiving to all!
We live in Hawaii, so Thanksgiving means loading up a disposable roasting tray with a turkey and all the sides and trotting down to the nearest high school Wednesday afternoon, where said feast will be slowly smoked and steamed in the community imu overnight. Pick it up the next morning, and you have smokey, juicy turkey falling off the bone, creamy sweet potatoes (the purple Okinawan kind), a Kabocha squash to make pumpkin haupia pie, luau (taro leaves), and – my favorite – roasted ulu (breadfruit) that has soaked up all the juices from the turkey. By 10 am, Thanksgiving dinner is all packaged up ready to be reheated later that afternoon. Why spend the whole day slaving in the kitchen when you can have the local high school football team do all the work for you?
@Lani:
The fact that the local high school football team slow cooks your Thanksgiving is amazing, second only to ALL THAT FOOD OMG. I’ll be right over.
As the family celiac I have supplies for gluten free pumpkin pie, stuffing, and green bean casserole. That being said I should probably let my mom know what I’m bringing.
It will all be a bit frazzled as I am working out of town till Wednesday, driving an hour and a half home to bake and pre-prep. Cooking the next morning, then driving two hours to my hometown where dinner is in the church basement since we don’t fit in a single house anymore. Last year there were about 30 people at dinner, but we’ve had as many as 40.
I have always loved to cook, then I married a guy who is like SUPER chef! So I rarely cook anymore-with the exception of Thanksgiving dinner. I can’t remember how it started, but it has been this way for about 21 yrs. We have turkey (cooked in the Reynolds bag-a fresh one we get from the butcher), mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, rolls, cranberry jelly from the can (the only way to go!), sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, and a new addition, mac-n -cheese. My daughter isn’t a big mashed potato fan (a fact which makes us think she might have been switched at birth) but loves mac-n-cheese. It is actually very good with turkey!
We order a few pies from Village Inn, the French Silk is my favorite. I figure I do enough cooking, I don’t need to make dessert from scratch 😉
We just had early Thanksgiving with my sister in North Carolina. She is a very good cook, whereas I am not, so I was happy to be relegated to chopping and stirring duty, with a few batches of dishes thrown in. She roasted a whole turkey with cornbread stuffing, made sweet potato casserole, green beans with almonds and bacon, a rice dish with sauteed mango, sage and almonds, and cranberry sauce (plus I had to get a can of Ocean Spray because it’s not Turkey Day without it!). Dessert was pumkin pie with homemade crust (chill the water first!) and sweet potato cheesecake with a sour cream topping. So much yummy food for 3 people! We had leftover sandwiches on our way to a hike in the Blue Ridge mountains the next day – brie, turkey, cranberry sauce and spinach. Sad we couldn’t take any more leftovers with us!
This week we’ll do dinner with the in-laws. Not sure yet what I’m bringing. I’ve made both pumpkin pie and pumpkin cheesecake in the past and neither have been well-received. We got some butternut squash so I may try doing something with that (roasting? What else does one do with squash?). DH’s family is Dominican/Ecuadorian so the traditions are still new and a little different from my Midwestern childhood. There was definitely no ceviche on my holiday tables growing up!