Thanksgiving Dinner

mamboqueen

mamboqueen

Well-Known Member
I'd love to hear what is on people's menus for Thanksgiving. Or, if you're lucky enough to be having your meal cooked for you, what are some of your favorite dishes?

I need some ideas...getting tired of the same ol' stuff.
 
As in typical Italian family fashion, there is waaaayyyy too much food on thanksgiving w/ my family.

First there's the Antipasto course.... w/ the antipasto salad, the italian cold cut trays, olives, asparagus wrapped in proscuitto, and home made bread.

Then there's the Soup course.... It's home made tortellini soup (and yes, even the tortellinis are made from scratch) and more bread.

Then the main course.... turkey (of course), bread stuffing, hamburger stuffing, spinach casserole, mashed potatos, sweet potatos, butternut squash, marinated mushrooms, green been casserole, cranberry sauce, and sometimes a brocolli casserole.

Next out comes the nuts, fruit, anise, and chocolate. Followed by about 10 different types of home made pies and mince meat patties. Finally if anyone remembers them at this point.....there's still stuffed artichokes.

I think I need to start swearing off thanksgiving! it's waaayyy too much food, it's nuts. Anyone want to come for dinner??? you know there'll be plenty of food, lol :)
 
mamboqueen said:
I'd love to hear what is on people's menus for Thanksgiving. Or, if you're lucky enough to be having your meal cooked for you, what are some of your favorite dishes?

I need some ideas...getting tired of the same ol' stuff.
Click to expand...


what's "the same ol' stuff" for you?
 
My gosh....that is some menu, RID. Sounds really yummy, too. I always find the food tastes better when someone else makes it...even if I follow the exact same recipe.

We usually have a preamble of cheese/crackers, olives, veggies & dip (because the kids prefer raw to whatever the cooked side-dishes are); then turkey (my husband deep-fat fries it...which is great for giving me the oven completely to myself), then mashed potatoes, stuffing, brussel sprout casserole, squash, a fall-ish type salad and cranberry sauce. Sometimes one or two other veggie sides, depending on who comes to dinner. The brussel sprout casserole is one of my favorites, made with mushrooms and cheese..got the recipe from Bon Appetit a couple of years ago.

I usually make homemade cranberry sauce and completely forget about it until dessert time.

For dessert, I usually have homemade cookies for the kids, and a pumpkin cheesecake (or something "fall-ish") for the adults.

Then it's time to crash.
 
Curious as to what the spinach casserole is comprised of. I've had the "usual suspect" with the green bean casserole (with the cream of mushroom soup and those onion ring "things"). Are the marinated mushrooms served cold? My daughter could eat an entire jar of those by herself.
 
Let's see, when I hosted last year we:

smoked a Turkey after rubbing it down with a Moroccan-style spice mixture
made a Burmese green bean salad (has garlic, onions, and peanuts in it)
home-made cranberry sauce flavored with orange and cardamom
pureed cauliflower with garlic and wasabi
mashed sweet potatoes with butter and lime juice (no sweeteners needed)

I'm trying to think what else. That might have been it, I didn't save the menu card from last year so I can't check.

I think I made a chantrelle mushroom bisque as the soup course. And I think dessert last year was chocolate-rum-pecan pie, pumpkin cheesecake, and an apple pie.

This year I'm going to a friend's house. I'm not sure what the menu will be, but we both love to cook so it will probably be very interesting.
 
Menu card? Wow. :cool:

I'll probably go super-traditional, this year, since my twin sister will be back home from France, visiting for the Thanksgiving week. I think she's missing good old-fashioned homestyle cooking. A turkey and a ham. Giblet gravy. Sweet potato something-or-the-other. Scalloped potatoes (not a thanksgiving thing, but one of my faves.) Wild rice. Steamed broccoli with some sort of creamy sauce. Collard greens. Cranberry sauce. Rolls or cornbread. And enough pies to feed a everyone in a (small) developing nation. :lol: If I'm feeling ambitious, I may make homemade ice cream.
 
I know what you mean. I always use the good china and cloth linens and insist on eating in the formal dining room, football notwithstanding.

Same people, same stuff. Just a bit more festive. :wink: :D
 
I make killer garlic mash potatoes...

The family normally does potluck Thanksgiving, everybody brings a dish. It's funny how we all get pigeon holed every year in what we bring. I've done three different potato dishes in the last three years....love to do more, but everybody keeps asking for the same ones.
 
The potato dishes must be good, then. :cool:

Did I ever tell you about my family potluck where everyone, I mean EVERYONE ... brought sweet potatoes? :lol: Can you say disorganized? We had a turkey and ... wait for it ... sweet potatoes. That was it. What a hoot! :lol:
 
I do too. But some green, leafy veggies might've been nice. :wink:

We all had a good laugh out of that one, though. :lol: :cool:
 
Oh, see, my Mom & I decided years ago that having a "healthy" Thanksgiving dinner was just a pointless exercise, so we just have the smallest tokens of that sort of thing.

I think one year I did some kind of pan-friend goat cheese on baby greens thing with a walnut vinagrette. Or maybe I'm confusing that with another dinner party.

When it comes to Thanksgiving, all I REALLY want is some turkey, a hit of cranberry sauce, some sweet potatoes, and chocolate-rum-pecan pie. I could really care less about the rest.
 
Oh MQ, I love to bake/cook, and I baked/cooked last year. My sister is doing it this year, but we always have the same meal. I don't know if you want the recipes or not, but this is what we do!

Turkey (usually 18 pounder, but will have to buy bigger this year for we'll have six more guests)!

Honey Baked Ham for those people that don't like turkey.

Stuffing with lots of gravy!

Green Bean Casserole

Corn

Beans

Seven Layer Salad

We'll have one more salad, usually a fruit salad for the kids.

Rolls

Cranberry Sauce

Cole Slaw or something else like that too!

We'll usually have a bunch of different platters like a vegetable and chip platter for people to snack on since some do come early to help set up the house.

We'll have four different kinds of pies (usually depending on the people and what they all like, and we usually take a survey first just to make sure).

Two birthday cakes since we have a birthday on the 28th and the 31st.

We may have something like Apple Crisp and a side of Vanilla Ice Cream for the kids if they don't like other dessert (it's usually eaten by the adults though lol).

And of course we have our famous desserts like fudge etc. and a load of cookies and chips for everyone.

Plenty of drinks too of all kinds. I swear you would have thought I had just walked down Wal-Mart and bought one of everything (sometimes two like Diet Coke etc. lol). I learned to shop for that early, because one store might have had Pepsi on sale but not Coke while the other had Coke on sale and not Pepsi lol. So, you learn to do stuff like this lol.

Sorry that my post is so long, but you can about imagine that our household looks like a buffet at your favorite restaurant. And yes I had to manage all of this last year lol! I started a couple days before to do so. For instance, I baked the cakes and I made the salads etc. the days before hand. And stuff like corn and beans you know are easy to make the day of (usually I just warm them up a half hour before we eat). So, I'd leave that stuff for the last minute. The worst that I had found was that I didn't have enough platters to put everything on, so I had everyone bring a platter or a bowl of some kind, and that seemed to work out perfectly since some of the stuff I could wait on anyways. And that's all that some could afford to bring (like my sister that was in college etc.), so they felt useful (and I made sure that they would have food in that platter before they left as a thank you)! I must have done alright since I was voted to do it again this time. Thankfully I have cousins coming and a couple new additions to the family, so it has to be at my sisters place, because she has a bigger house than I do lol. Wohoo lol!
 
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