Anyone celebrating Thanksgiving (or equivalent) want to share recipes?

[Introversion]

We’re hosting a small gathering at our house tomorrow. I’ve gotten lazy, so we’re buying a turkey meal and reheating it, with the exceptions of desserts and bread stuffing.

Am making:

Cranberry Chiffon Pie

A cranberry twist on classic chiffon pie with a rye short crust.

www.kingarthurbaking.com

Cinnamon Apple Layer Cake

This Cinnamon Apple Layer Cake is incredibly moist, made with fresh apples and has the most amazing apple filling! It's the perfect fall cake!

www.lifeloveandsugar.com

Grandma's Thanksgiving Turkey Stuffing {Family Recipe}

My Grandma's Thanksgiving Turkey Stuffing has stood the test of time. This buttery, savory, melt-in-your-mouth stuffing is the best stuffing recipe around!

www.tastesoflizzyt.com

I didn’t make the cranberry-chiffon recipe’s rye crust, opting for a standard crust instead. I really suck at making pastry pie crusts. Don’t do it often enough to get good, don’t know why I keep trying. Made one last night, intending to use it for the cranberry chiffon recipe, but it was so darned ugly that I decided to put a pumpkin pie in it instead. Who cares what a pumpkin pie looks like? Used a commercial frozen crust instead for the cranberry chiffon.

Cranberry chiffon pie: New recipe. Cooked the cranberry/orange curd last night. Oooooh, really nice. Cooked meringue and mixed with the curd. I suck at meringue too. Poured the filling into the pie shell to refrigerate overnight. Will sugar some cranberries tonight, and whip some cream, and finish decorating it.

Pumpkin pie: Nothing special. We just use the recipe on a can of pumpkin. Tastes good. Hard to screw up.

Cinnamon-apple cake: New recipe. Making the cake layers today. Will make the filling and frosting tomorrow morning, and assemble. I really hope this one is as good as it sounds and looks.

Bread stuffing: New recipe. I made a trial-run of this a couple weeks ago. Glad I did; it was insanely over-salted. Added a local jalapeno/chilpotle sausage to the recipe, because why not? Aside from too much salt, it was very nice: Moist, flavorful. I’ll cube up some commercial French bread today and dry them in the oven, will make the recipe tomorrow.

 

[mrsmig]

I'm trying out what looks to be a fairly simple recipe: bacon and puff pastry twists. There are a hundred million variations out there but it basically involves cutting a thawed puff pastry sheet into strips, laying a piece of bacon on each strip, twisting them together and baking. It's just my husband and me so I offer appetizers through the day until the big meal around 3-4 PM. The bacon twists will be first up, along with mini bagels with cream cheese and lox.

I made my pie crust yesterday, which will become our dessert of tart cherry pie tomorrow (I'm proud of the cherries, which came from our own little pie cherry tree). The crust recipe fought with me last week when I made a chicken pot pie (it was frustratingly dry and crumbly to work with, although it tasted good), This time I tried freezing the butter and grating that into the flour instead of cutting it in. I liked the results, but the dough still seemed too dry. I added a little bit more water, a few drops at a time, before forming it into discs and putting it in the refrigerator to chill. Seemed a little easier to handle, so I'm hoping it'll be more manageable when I roll it out tomorrow morning.

 

[Maryn]

I'm a low-effort baker, but I tried a new holiday recipe yesterday and it came out great. And so easy I have it memorized and don't even have to look it up.

Crustless Cranberry Pie

1 cup white all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1 cup fresh cranberries*
1/2 c. chopped walnuts or pecans
1/2 c. butter, melted (1 stick)
2 eggs, beaten
1 tsp. almond extract

Preheat oven to 350F. Spray a nine-inch pie plate or ovenproof skillet with non-stick spray.

In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, sugar, and salt. Add cranberries and nuts, then stir to coat. Some of the berries may resist coating, but it seems to have little impact on the results.

Add melted butter, beaten eggs, and almond extract. Stir well to mix, making sure there are no pockets of dry ingredients but that the flour-sugar mixture is fully blended in.

Scrape into prepared pie plate and smooth to make more or less level. Bake 40-50 minutes, until center is fully set and a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. (For me, it took 40 minutes using a ceramic pie plate.)

Serve warm. Could be topped with ice cream, but doesn't need it.

*Wisconsin produces more cranberries than Massachusetts, for the record.

 

[RedRajah]

Making these...

Milk Bread Yeast Rolls: Yeah, I Made This!

About 10 years ago there was a PBS reality show, Frontier House, where a bunch of modern day Americans were taken out to Montana to live as frontiers-people did in the 1880s. And other than the guy who built a house from the ground up for his bride, the woman I remember best was a baker. If...

dailywaffle.com

and this...

Pumpkin Chiffon Pie with Gingersnap Pecan Crust

www.epicurious.com

 

[Stytch]

All my family recipes come off the back of the box/label. But my husband will be trying his hand at his late mother's pastry. In this region, pastry is thin flat dough pieces boiled in broth and cream of chicken soup. It's not fancy, but he wouldn't do a holiday without it. After a couple decades I'm a lukewarm fan.

 

[Woollybear]

Our must-make Thanksgiving dish is scalloped potatoes. The recipe is long and not online, but involves multiple types of cheese and nutmeg and it is so yummy.

We usually make the traditional sides--cranberry sauce and brussels sprouts and oftentimes a pie. The bird is unlikely to be turkey. It's not unusual for us to make pheasant, which I prefer to turkey. The trick with pheasant is bacon or bacon fat since pheasants are lean.

 

[CMBright]

Growing up, Thanksgiving wasn't the same without corn pudding (two cans of creamed corn, egg and a sleeve of crushed saltine crackers) and green bean casserole (two cans of french cut green beans, a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup, and a container of fried onions). The normal sides of mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy and pumpkin pie with whipped cream at the end were also to be had.

Well, Mom always had cranberry sauce and mashed rutabaga, but I never quite got either enough to be enticed enough to try.

 

[lizmonster]

I really need a "yum" emoji for this thread.

 

[Chris P]

For T'giving itself, it's just a few of us so I'm making Bacon Wrapped Lavender Chicken. It's a tried and true winner, and by making only as much as you need you don't have 20 pounds of leftover bird to try to foist off on people.

My experiment for this year will be Pecan Praline Blondies, where you make the pecan pralines separately then add them to the pan instead of mixing in the pecans like you would walnut to brownies. It usually takes me two or three times with a new recipe, particularly a multiple step one, before I'm really happy with the results. Could be interesting!

 

[ChaseJxyz]

I made these broccoli ricotta hot honey toasts and roasted brussel sprouts for dinner parties, and my roommate asked for the recipes, so I think she's gonna make one of them. She's also going to try to make "thanksgiving samosas" but I don't know if she has a recipe for that.

 

[Chris P]

This is a great/horrible thread to read when it's lunchtime. I want them all. Right now.

 

[J.W.]

Hansel and Gretel Pie

Leave a trail of candy through the haunted woods to your house. When two kids show up, preferable a boy and girl, trick them into a pie pan and shove it in the oven. I like to add carrots, potatoes, and some chicken broth so the kids don’t get dry.

 

[RedRajah]

Hubby's making this for himself.

Garlic-Herb Baked Turkey Breast Tenderloin - Fed & Fit

This roasted turkey breast tenderloin is easy to prepare + made super flavorful with a brown sugar, apple cider vinegar, and herb marinade!

fedandfit.com

Me, I'm just rubbing down a couple turkey legs and a thigh with cumin, garlic, ancho & salt.

 

[Chris P]

Hansel and Gretel Pie

Leave a trail of candy through the haunted woods to your house. When two kids show up, preferable a boy and girl, trick them into a pie pan and shove it in the oven. I like to add carrots, potatoes, and some chicken broth so the kids don’t get dry.

I prefer my pies with four and twenty blackbirds. They go well with my pocket full of rye.

 

[mrsmig]

I made these broccoli ricotta hot honey toasts and roasted brussel sprouts for dinner parties, and my roommate asked for the recipes, so I think she's gonna make one of them. She's also going to try to make "thanksgiving samosas" but I don't know if she has a recipe for that.

I'm marking those broccoli goodies to try another time - maybe as an appetizer when I have the family over for our pre-holiday meal.

 

[Introversion]

Cranberry chiffon pie:

Was okay. Interesting combination, of orange and sweetened cranberry. I can understand why some reviews said it was hard to place the flavor. Almost raspberry-like.

Pumpkin pie:

My crust was a nightmare. The shame! Unclean! Eat the filling, bin the rest.

Cinnamon-apple cake:

Diabetic’s death! Nice moist cake layers, but the caramel-apple sauce between them and the frosting as followed were far, far too sweet for me. Will cheerfully let Liz and The Kid finish it off. If I made it again I’d cut the frosting sugar by a lot. Liz has leftover sauce for ice cream.

Bread stuffing:

Darn it, still too salty! Next time will use unsalted butter instead to saute the onions & celery, or a mix of salted & unsalted.

Anyone love/like/hate what they cooked or baked?

 

[mrsmig]

My turkey finished roasting far too quickly, so I had to scramble to get the sides finished and I think they suffered as a result. My garlic-parm mashed potatoes needed more garlic and more salt, and my green beans with pancetta were sort of bland. I opted to steam them and give them just a squirt of fresh lemon juice before serving (my attempt at a healthier side), but they really needed a bit of fat - butter or drippings from the pancetta.

The bacon-puff pastry twists were a bit overwhelming for my taste (too greasy), but the Spousal Unit loved them. I might try them again, but I think I'd make them skinnier, or sub out prosciutto for the bacon. On the upside, my pie crust came out great. There's something to be said for freezing the butter and grating it into the flour.

 

[Introversion]

I’ll bet prosciutto would be nice!

And I’m going to try the frozen butter trick next time.

 

[Chris P]

Anyone love/like/hate what they cooked or baked?

Due to travel, I've so far only made walnut brownies for the in-laws and their workers (opening day at the Christmas tree farm). First time doing them from scratch! They're getting rave reviews, but to me the walnuts have a fishy taste (did I roast them too long? Or not long enough? Or were they just fishy walnuts?). Not being familiar with the in-laws's oven they were just starting to burn on the very edge before they were done in the middle. Okay, okay, I'm my own worst critic.

I love the frozen butter idea! Now I need to find a pie to bake....

 

[MaryMumsy]

Because it was just of us I didn't do all the usual hoo-ha. I had roasted a small turkey at Easter and had one side of the breast in the freezer. Chunked it up in a sour cream mushroom sauce with farfalle pasta (as a sub for noodles).
I was jealous when texting with my brother in Utah. He had two turkeys in the ovens, ho-hum. But it was his breakfast! One quarter of a mince pie, my favorite pie in the world.

MM

 

[Introversion]

Made stock from turkey & veggie leftovers today. Made turkey-vegetable noodle soup for dinner with that. A spare potato and sweet potato went into the soup, yum.