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I thought it might be fun to share our Thanksgiving menus and/or exchange recipes, hints, and suggestions. Also, I'm looking for a good lemon cake or cookie recipe from scratch. So many of the ones I've found online begin with "1 box of lemon cake mix." That's not a recipe.
This is Aerin's first family Thanksgiving and my mother and grandmother are coming, as well as my in-laws. I have most of my menu planned and my centerpieces, as well, but I'm still undecided on a few of the side dishes.
Salad: Martha's Vineyard
Soup: Butternut Squash or Pumpkin
Bread: Sweet rolls, pumpkin bread with honey butter, biscuits
Tom Turkey: Stuffed with apples, onions, and celery, fresh herbs tucked under the skin, basted with pounds of butter
Gravy: Yes
Dressing: Not sure, probably cornbread
Potatos: Sweet potatos cooked with bourbon (makes for a very mellow holiday) and possibly rosemary mashed potatos
Greens: probably Green Beans Almondine
Cranberries: Chutney made with orange liquor and canned jellied cranberry sauce (a family tradition)
Dessert: Pumpkin pie with graham cracker crust and pecan tarts .
Centerpiece: squashes filled with fall flowers surrounded with gourds on a glass cake plate and pumpkin topiaries
posted
What a great idea! I love Thanksgiving. Mmmmmm!
We're keeping it small this year, because most of our family is going to various out-of-town locations to be with friends or family, but due to my husband's work schedule, we can't accompany any them. We might have a friend and his mom over, though. They don't have any family in the area, and they cooked for us last year, so we owe them one.
Here's what I have planned:
-Salad: Romaine with grapes and gorgonzola, raspberry vinaigrette dressing, topped with walnuts. Mmmmm! So good! -Bread: Corn bread, my great-granny's recipe. I need to find it so I can post it here. It's so great when it's hot with honey on top! -Turkey breast -Onion-raisin-walnut stuffing, also a great-granny recipe. -I'm sure we'll have gravy of some kind. Hubby loves it - I like cranberry sauce on my Thanksgiving food, personally. -Cranberry sauce - just the plain old jellied kind. I adore it. Low-brow me. -Potatoes - Definitely russet potatoes mashed with heavy cream and garlic. That's all ya need! I might push for some sweet potato mash this year, too. My husband is slowly learning to like sweet potatoes. -Greens: Fresh, steamed green beans. The bomb. I might have to try 'em almondine this year. -Dessert: My own pumpkin pie recipe, made with actual, factual pumpkins! You can still find them at this time of year, but just barely, and you have to store them outside where the squirrels can't get them until you're ready to cook them. Most pumpkin pie mix is made with spaghetti squash, not pumpkins. The taste is subtly different. Oh, yes, and fresh whipped cream on top.
All this thinking about Thanksgiving feasting...It's a good thing I'm cooking a turkey breast with cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes for dinner tonight! Hubby's office moved last week and he has a much longer commute now, so I agreed to make all dinners during week days. I'm secretly enjoying being so domestic. Post recipes, everybody! I need them now! :lol:
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Seriously, I am really jonesing for some lemon cookies. The super-moist, frosted kind. Anyone?
Posts: 3037 | Registered: Jan 2002
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I like Stovetop, too. My dad threw a fit one year so I made stuffing from scratch. The next year I made Stovetop with extra low-sodium chicken broth in it, and he said, "This stuffing is even better than last year's!"
I didn't say anything... Well, maybe "Thank you."
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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(Oh, but salad is very important at our Thanksgiving dinner! We usually have Orange Tossed Salad, if not that then spinach salad with strawberries. Everyone would be appalled if we didn't have a green salad!)
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My sister is hosting and cooking this year. We rotate around between the kids for both Thanksgiving and Christmas, and there are three kids, so each of us gets a complete break one out of every three years.
I know she's brining the bird using Alton Brown's recipe, and she's making the horrid green bean casserole cause Dad and my SIL like it. Beyond that, I have no idea what's on the menu.
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quote:Originally posted by Mrs.M: Macadamia nuts? Do they go in the crust?
They pretty much ARE the crust, along with some butter and stuff. They're the basis of the shortbread-like crust, yes. And then you also put them on top; when they're ground (which is what you do to them) they become buttery and melt somehow into a topping (because of their high oil content, probably.) My dad keeps a nut-grinder around for just this purpose.
Now I'm craving lemon bars with from-the-tree Meyers lemons and macadamia nuts, and my dad's tree stopped producing a month ago. Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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I love horrid green-bean casserole! And lowbrow canned jellied cranberry sauce. My poor mother, who has always made whole-berry cranberry sauce from scratch, was highly offended when as a child I asked for the kind of cranberry sauce they had in the school cafeteria. ;-)
However, I'm not lowbrow enough to like any kind of sweet potatoes and marshmallow combination. I actually really love just plain old baked sweet potatoes (baked to death till they're mushy) with butter on them.
These orange-praline sweet potatoes are really delicious, though. I think that's the same recipe I use, although mine calls for brandy (1 tbsp., I think) in with the OJ. I use brandy flavoring since I make these maybe once a year and never use brandy at any other time. And I just bake them rather then peeling, cutting and boiling as the recipe calls for--I think it's much easier.
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ketchupqueen, that lemon cake recipe looks yummy but now you've got me really wanting to make the macadamia lemon bars - will you post a recipe?
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I'm so bummed. A month or two ago my friend from Hawaii asked me if I wanted anything from there. I told her no, then said wait, yeah -- soy sauce (shoyu, as she calls it). Once years ago when we were roommates she came home w/ a jug of it that was so much better than what I could get at the grocery store.
So anyway, she called yesterday and asked if I ever got the package. I said no--and she said she sent it a long time ago, and I think she sent it priority so it should have arrived.
And *sob* the box had macadamia nuts and chocolate covered macadamias in it too. (and these other things I can't remember the name of--when I said I didn't know what they were, she said, "you know, they are sour and made of dried plums and you never liked them." Gee, thanks! ;-)
She can't imagine why it didn't get here. I can. Her handwriting is like chicken scratch. It really is indecipherable sometimes. I think I'll tell her to make out computer labels from now on!
I feel bad, I'm sure it was an expensive box (although somehow she has a macadamia nut connection and doesn't pay much for them). And now she's on the mainland so I know I won't be getting a replacement. :-(
Anyway, thoughts of macadamia nuts made me remember the lemon bar recipe so I thought I'd be a nudge and bump the thread! Sorry it's such a derail from the original post. But hey, it's even closer to thanksgiving so maybe more people will post cool favorite menu ideas!
(we are such traditionalists -- stuffed turkey or chicken, gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes or butternut squash, cranberry sauce and some kind of green veggie, apple and pumpkin pie--it rarely varies. Oh, and stuffing is Bell's made w/ sauteed onions, celery, and giblet broth.)
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My husband made a really yummy pumpkin toffee cheesecake last week. It was great, I'm hoping he'll do an encore performance next week!
Posts: 697 | Registered: Nov 2005
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The canned cranberry sauce has no place on my table, but I do make a wonderful cooked cranberry compote, that has no sugar in in.
To one bag of fresh cranberries, add one orange, peeled, de-seeded, and chopped roughly (or a couple of peeled clementines, sections cut in half), and a small can of crushed pineapple with its juice. Cook over medium high heat until the cranberries pop. Stop at this point, turn off the heat and give a gentle stir.
It is so fresh-tasting and tart. If you are the kind of barbarian who requires it to taste like candy, sweeten it as much as you like with white sugar or orange marmalade.
This is just the way Mommy makes it. Anything else is just not right.
Posts: 10397 | Registered: Jun 2005
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posted
Does anyone have a good recipe for carrots? I'm definitely making Thanksgiving dinner with my roommates, and Matt only eats simple carbs and familiar vegetables. So, carrots it is. Any good ideas for what to do with them?
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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Thanksgiving has really sneaked up on me this year. I've been ultra busy at work (well not really AT work, because I've been traveling a lot) and I was sick for a while too, so I haven't been thinking about it. I realized yesterday that it's next week and panicked for a moment.
I've never particularly liked cranberrys, except in baked goods, so I eschew cranberry sauce unless I have "unfamily" company, which I won't this year. I also don't like orange sweet potatoes (I've mentioned my anti-orange food bias here before, so I won't rehash that).
My sweet baboo likes sweet potatoes though, so I'm going to compromise and make Okinawan sweet potatoes (they're purple, not orange) with apples and dried cranberries, so I'll kill my two unfavorite birds with one dish as it were.
Since it's just gonna be me, two of my girls and my BF this year, I'm not going to make whole pies. I bought some little tart pans and I'll make individual pies. Historically, I've cooked for at least 10 people every year, and frequently more like 20-30, so it's a real shift for me to have so few on the holiday. We'll have a small turkey and the trimmings, which is fine, but what I really miss about having a large crowd (at least food-wise, there's LOTS that I miss) is the appetizers and dips that I always like to make. I end up throwing a lot of food away when I try to do that on a small scale. Posts: 2069 | Registered: May 2001
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Katharina, will Matt eat onions? I love carrots sliced into sticks, and slow cooked with onion slices in tons of butter until soft or even caramelized. Yumm. Add some soy sauce if you want for an extra flavor in there, but they are sweet and delicious as is and don't really even need salt other than what's in the butter, as far as I'm concerned.
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No, he doesn't like onions. They are too spicy, I think. He'll eat them if pressured, but he'd rather not. Since he's the reason we are having carrots, I guess I'd better not put them in.
I must say, that sounds fabulous though.
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Steam baby carrots until they're just soft enough to stab with a fork (3-5 minutes). They're tasty plain, or toss with a little honey-butter. Or butter and chopped fresh rosemary.
Posts: 9866 | Registered: Apr 2002
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As far as lemon cake/cookies/bars go, try substitute unsweetened lilikoi juice (also called passion fruit juice) if you can find it. It's sooo much better than lemon.
I get plenty lilikoi here and just have to extract the juice, which I freeze for later usually, but I understand that it's available in 'ethnic' stores on the mainland.
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posted
I have a fantastic recipe for carrots cooked with apple cider. I can't remember if there's mustard (powdered) in it or not - I have several carrot recipes. I'll look it up and post it in the next couple of days.
Ela, I vaguely remembered your thread, but I never look threads up, so I was lazy and started a new one. Sorry.
maui babe, I find it is much more time-consuming to make tarts. I always make pecan tarts or tartlets for a taste of home (GA) and it takes forever to hollow out the shells. The pumpkin pie always goes much faster for me. Do you have an easy tart recipe?
Posts: 3037 | Registered: Jan 2002
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MRs M, I'm not sure if this is kind of lemon biscuit you wanted, but I saw this online and thought it looked good:
Lemon and almond biscuits
160 g softened butter 1 cup sugar 1 large egg zest from 3 lemons 1 tablespoon lemon juice 6 tablespoons almond meal a few drops pure almond essence, to taste 1.5 cups plain flour
Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the egg, lemon zest, juice, almond meal and almond essence, and beat well. Add the flour in four lots, beating well between each addition. Cover the bowl and chill in the fridge for 1.5 to 2 hours. The dough should now be quite firm. Using a teaspoon and your fingers, form small balls about 2 cm in diameter. Place them about 5 cm apart on a lined baking tray, then flatten them with the flat of two fingers until they are about 0.5 cm thick. Make sure there is room for the biscuits to spread a little as they bake. Bake at 180C for 10-15 minutes, or until golden around the edge. Transfer them to wire racks. They will crisp up as they cool.
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: Does anyone have a good recipe for carrots?
Tsimmis!
Peel carrots and slice into rounds (or use the pre-peeled baby carrots), and peel orange sweet potatoes and cut into chunks. You should have about an equal amount of each, but proportions are not at all important. You can even eliminate the sweet potatoes completely. This goes in a pot with prunes (there is a big pitted vs unpitted debate. I like the pits in, but then you've got to spit them out when you are eating this. Some people --stepmother, for instance -- find this to be completely wrong). Use about 1/4 to 1/3 the amount of prunes as vegetables. Douse nicely with cinnamon, and pour in orange juice, about halfway up the level of the vegetables. Bring to a boil, then cover and let simmer, for a long time. As the vegetables soften, uncover. As the orange juice reduces, add more. The final result is very soft carrots and sweet potatoes, melting prunes, in a moist pasty consistency.
Depending on your kitchen and menu, you may have more oven room than stovetop room. In that case, pour the entire recipe into a baking pan, cover well with foil, and bake it along with the turkey. When all goes soft, uncover to allow the juice to reduce some, but with this method, you won't be needing to add more juice.
And as long as you've got tsimmis going on your Thanksgiving table, you might as well have potato kugel as well. Hey, use an Empire brand kosher turkey! They are soooo good and (I hope I'm not giving out the secret handshake) pre-brined.
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Sadly, Matt doesn't like sweet potatoes or anything sweet with the carrots. I've suggested variations on those already and they were nixed.
Hmm...we do have some fresh rosemary in the fridge. I'm not sure if he likes spices. But last night I suggested some carrots with dill and he said he likes pickles so carrots and pickles would be fine.
hey...I'm starting to wonder if he's teasing me.
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Okay, I looked it up. I don't think it would work because he doesn't like mayonnaise. When he orders a cheeseburger, he gets them plain - just bun, meat, and cheese. No condiments. He also doesn't like French restaurants.
He's very sweet and he would have some of whatever was put in front of him. I think what's happening here is he wants plain rolls, mashed potatoes, and baked carrots and I want to play. I think I'll have to make plain carrots and then something like fennel shallots with prosciutto for the other guests to eat to balance it out.
posted
Katharina, your plan sounds like a good one. You can always make some plain carrots and then dress up the rest of them for everyone else!
I was once in love with a man who hated onions. When he broke my heart, one of the things on my "Pro" list was that now I didn't have to alter my entire cooking style for the rest of my life--I mean, it's almost like what do I make that doesn't have onions in it!
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crust: 1 stick (1/2 cup) butter, softened 1/4 cup powdered sugar 1 cup all purpose flour 1/4 cup freshly, coarsely ground roasted, unsalted macadamias (grind in a hand grinder or smash with a hammer in a bag or process in a food processor very gently; do not use an electric grinder as they powder the nuts too finely.)
filling: 1 cup granulated sugar 2 eggs 2 Tbs. fresh lemon juice 2 tsp. fresh zested lemon peel (peel and juice from a Meyers lemon are preferable) 1/2 tsp. salt 1 tsp. baking powder 2-3 Tbs. ground macadamias
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 deg. F (325 for dark pan.)
Mix crust ingredients in order listed-- hand mixing is fine. Press into 8 inch square metal baking pan, making a 1/2 to 1 inch ridge around sides. Bake 20 minutes (until golden brown). Remove from oven, press sides and bottom flat.
Beat eggs into sugar, using eggbeater or hand mixer. Add all other ingredients except nuts. Beat until fluffy. Pour into shell, sprinkle nuts evenly on top to cover. Bake 20-25 minutes, until custard-firm in center. Remove from oven, cool at least 1/2 hour (will stiffen/thicken a bit as it cools.) Slice into 5 by 4 or 5 rows to get small squares (make them any bigger and they can be too rich.)
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Uprooted, you ask for my recipe and when I finally post it, you don't even look? *sniffs* Last time I go to all that trouble for you. Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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All that research, but I didn't end up making carrots at all.
Matt got horribly, horribly sick the day before Thanksgiving. As in, he was throwing up for twelve hours. Thanksgiving Day he spent in bed, reading The Cider House Rules and eating jell-o. Poor Matt. Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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Uh oh, I'm in big trouble now, looks like -- so sorry, ketchupqueen!! But I will absolutely be saving this recipe and making it and I'll let you know when I do. thank you!
Yikes, katharina, no fun for Matt. Did you still have Thanksgiving w/ your friends? How'd it go?
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We might have a friend and his mom over, though. They don't have any family in the area, and they cooked for us last year, so we owe them one. ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
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Now I'm craving lemon bars with from-the-tree Meyers lemons and macadamia nuts, and my dad's tree stopped producing a month ago. ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
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