Thanksgiving - Food, recipes, apps, oh my

As the annual "Eat Yourself into a Coma" day is just a few days away, I always like browsing magazines and websites...and apps this year. Mostly, I like to drool over recipes I'll never make. Gourmet and Bon Appetit were always my faves for looking at recipes and tablescapes. Cook's Country/Cook's Illustrated/America's Test Kitchen is always fun when I am looking for something new (like their Crown Roast of Pork). This year, I downloaded the Bon Appetit Thanksgiving app. The pictures are beautiful. I haven't spent much time reading the recipes...yet.

Anyone have a favorite go to for Thanksgiving?

I'm pretty set in my menu. Still using Joy of Cooking for both the turkey method (no brining, start hot then turn down, baste) and my bread stuffing/dressing. Sometimes I substitute a stuffing from a Moosewood stuffed-squash recipe (with seeds and nuts). Ina Garten for my homemade cranberry sauce. Libby's for my pumpkin pie (though I now make a gluten-free crust and use coconut milk instead of evaporated). No recipe needed for roasted brussels sprouts and baked sweet potatoes :)

Recently I subscribed to the New York Times Cooking Newsletter . . . which seems full of interesting ideas but comes to my inbox a bit too frequently :) Their Thanksgiving page is pretty extensive http://cooking.nytimes.com/thanksgiving

Looking forward to hearing what others are making.

Since I'm a guest this year (every other year, actually), I won't have a hand in the menu, but I'll be elbow deep in the making.

>2 LucindaLibri: Ina Garten has some awesome recipes. Is her cranberry sauce recipe simple?

>3 lesmel:
It's called Cranberry Fruit Conserve (because it contains nuts, which I often leave out), and yes, pretty simple (and delicious!!). You can see the recipe here:
http://barefootcontessa.com/recipes.aspx?RecipeID=1044&S=0

I'm going to try this cranberry salsa recipe. Cilantro makes everything better!

Oh, this fun article uses Google analytics to show which Thanksgiving dishes are unusually popular in each state.

"The researchers didn’t focus on the most popular dish in every state, because that would be “turkey” in all 50 states. They instead looked for the most distinct."

>5 LibraryPerilous: Cilantro *gags*hacks*

We used to have a set menu of family favorites: turkey, sausage dressing, oyster stuffing (that's when I actually put it in the bird, otherwise it is oyster dressing), sliced yams fried in butter, a steamed green veggie, mashed potatoes, gravy and canned cranberry sauce, plus a variety of pies for dessert.

However, this year we deviated since we couldn't all get together anyway. One dinner with part of the family was on Sunday, we had turkey (fixed the way >2 LucindaLibri: does it, mashed potatoes (made by my son), cardamom rolls (made by my daughter), chanterelles with chestnuts (recipe found online when I looked up chanterelles), chanterelle-cheese-spinach pie (made by combining two recipes, one from an online friend, one from the internet), homemade cranberry sauce (used the simple recipe on the fresh cranberry package), kale-bacon-pear salad with cranberry dressing (found in a magazine from a local store called "Something Extra"), corncob jelly (made by my daughter) and cranberry-raisin pie (old recipe found in newspaper years ago). It was a lovely meal.

On the actual day of Thanksgiving, I have to work, and I am expected to serve a turkey and ham dinner to all of our staff (purchased prepared from a local store). So, no cooking for me when I get home, but son and his girlfriend will be baking a ham, husband is going to bake some sort of a yam/sweet potato casserole (he found the recipe online and is being secretive about it). I don't know what else will be served. I will probably be in charge of taking the caps off of the beer bottles or the corks out of the wine.

I love finding a special ingredient, like the chanterelles, and then looking online and in all my cookbooks to find out how to prepare it.

Do you make your own gluten-free crust? And if so, would you mind sharing your recipe? My mother just recently went gluten-free and she was planning on making a gluten-free crust for at least one pie this year. Thanks in advance!

>9 Yervant: I haven't tried it (yet) but the Lard Crust from Beyond Bacon -- almond & coconut flours -- sounds fantastic.

I got this recipe from a colleague at work and I've made it several times. We'll have it again for Christmas this year.

Nantucket Cranberry Pie. Easy and delicious!

Find it here
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/nantucket-cranberry-pie-recipe.html

>6 LibraryPerilous:
That article (or a similar NYT piece) originally claimed that Minnesotans like something called "Grape Salad" . . . I've been here 20 years and have never seen it . . . (The NYT ended up publishing an apology/retraction regarding "#GrapeGate" and now have listed Wild Rice Casserole which is closer :) So, don't believe everything you read in "All The News Fit to Print". We're all baffled at how they came up with "grape salad" together with Minnesota!

>9 Yervant:
Yes, I make my own GF crust. I use Cybele Pascal's recipe from the Allergen-Free Baker's Handbook (though I make several minor modifications because I'm also corn-free so I can't use Ener-G egg replacer). Her recipe is very similar to the one found here: http://www.examiner.com/article/gluten-free-pie-crust-recipe

(Some day soon I'll type up what I do and post it to my blog at http://highlysensitivegirl.com ) The trickiest part is finding the Superfine Brown Rice Flour from Authentic Foods. I can buy it here in the Twin Cities, but when I went to visit my folks I had to mail them my pie crust ingredients so we could have pie while I was there!

I've also used a GF pie crust recipe from Annalise Roberts' Gluten-Free Baking Classics. It contains egg, so if I'm dining with vegans I play it safe and choose the other egg-free recipe. I don't have the book with me right now, but here's a version from her website:
http://www.foodphilosopher.com/assets/docs/090410baking-featured-recipe.cfm#crus...

Good Luck!

P.S. The great thing about GF pie crust is you cannot "overwork" it, which is a good thing, because it tends to fall apart and need to be patched . . . but without gluten you don't really have to worry about it getting too tough.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!!

(My Pumpkin Pie and Cranberry Sauce are done, as are my GF Bread Cubes for dressing. I decided to make stuffed squash rather than a turkey, but bought some turkey thighs to cook up for post-Thanksgiving casseroles.)

I have for the past several years attended a potluck on Thanksgiving day at church. I have a talent for carving the turkey, so rather than cook I plate the centerpiece. I have tremendous success pretty much following the New York Times instructions in this video:

http://www.nytimes.com/video/dining/100000002542844/how-to-carve-a-turkey.html

Just to be sure of myself I reviewed it and several other sources tonight, and I'll be sticking with this one.

Robert

>12 LucindaLibri: Ha! My home state's number one recipe isn't one that anyone I know eats, although I'd at least heard of it. One would suspect that Google oversampled searches from certain parts of each state and this skewed the results. Or perhaps they relied on too small of a sample size. After all, political data miners do that on purpose. There are lots of ways to lie with statistics. :)

I enjoyed scrolling through the recipe lists. I'd never heard of frog eye salad or funeral potatoes. And, as a vegan, I chuckled when Oregon lived up to its stereotype. Maybe I should move to Portland.

>14 LibraryPerilous: They said they eliminated all the very common searches such as turkey, so the results were skewed to the weird. What they looked for was a recipe that was searched for disproportionately in that state, not the most popular searches. Which is good, because even though I lived half my life in Illinois, I have an aversion to any salad with marshmallows or, Gods forbid, "whipped topping" on the ingredient list.

Over the last two decades one of my favorite Thanksgiving treats has been this one we tried on a lark. http://www.npr.org/2006/11/23/4176014/mama-stambergs-cranberry-relish-recipe . Like Susan Stamburg says "It sounds terrible but tastes terrific"

When my wife asked what pie I wanted I pulled out The Frugal Gourmet Cooks American and found that page 319, the bourbon laced Sweet Potato Pie was still marked.

I hope everyone is having a great holiday.