- Smoked Turkey
- Mushroom and Gruyere Potato Gratin (Recipe!)
- Rustic Herb Stuffing
- Homemade Cranberry Sauce
- Chipotle Sweet Potatoes
- Roasted Asparagus
- Gravy
- Caesar Salad
- Dinner Rolls
- Sweet Potato Pie
- Classic Chex Mix for snacking
- Wine, Jim Beam Devil's Cut (this stuff is awesome) and plenty of beer for drinking
Wait! Before we start, step one of cooking a big feast is coffee. Lots of my favorite espresso: Cafe' Bustelo, made in my $2 Ikea brewer. My day started at 10 am with a cup of this.
Also, Chex Mix. Cooks need snacks, too!
Smoked Turkey - This turned out to be a GREAT idea. Smoked turkey is technically already cooked, so we only had to pop it in the oven for about 2 hours to heat it. The turkey turned out juicy, slightly pink from the smoke (not from undercooking) and had a deep, smokey flavor that went well with the spices on the outside. Some people may say this is cheating, but we wanted to focus our efforts on the sides and we got a good deal on the turkey anyway. This opened up the oven for cooking other items and we ended up having a relatively calm day cooking! If you're hosting your first Thanksgiving and don't want to have the traditional FREAK-OUT that comes along with doing all that cooking, going with a trustworthy, pre-cooked bird is the way to go. Don't worry, just don't blog about it and you'll still get all the credit!
[BNK Tip: choose dishes that can be prepped a few hours in advance, you'll need a break between all the cooking to have a drink, enjoy yourself and stay calm. The cooking process should be fun, especially since it comprises most of the day! Don't forget to schedule your oven time in advance so you don't end up with too many dishes needing to cook at the same time with different temperatures.]
Mushroom and Gruyere Potato Gratin - [Recipe here!] We chose dishes that had a "do-ahead" step. Both our gratin and our stuffing could have 75% of the prep done about 4-12 hours in advance, so we could wake up, clean a bit, make the first few steps of each dish, then go to lunch and resume cooking when it was time for everything to go in the oven. This recipe came from a Bon Appetit magazine. For the gratin, we started with 10 cups of mushrooms. This is what happens when you run out of space on your counter and have 10 cups of mushrooms to prep:
Since I had plenty of mushrooms, I used only the caps. The stems snap right off if you wiggle them. If you want to use the whole mushroom, though, go ahead. To keep track of the mushrooms in my bowl, for every cup I dropped in, I perched an unused mushroom stem on the edge of the bowl.
Now that I look at the photo above, 10 cups of mushrooms sure felt like a lot more than they look. Oh, and don't forget to use a dry measurement cup, not a cup for liquid measurements. You can see mine in the top of the image below. [BNK Tip: Go ahead and wash those mushrooms clean. Many cookbooks will tell you to lovingly brush the dirt off with a paper towel, but I have no patience for this and prefer dirt-free food. Just wash 'em! If you're worried about them soaking up the water and the flavor being altered, then watch Alton Brown's episode on mushrooms.You can sort of see the pool of water on the cutting board in the image below. If the water is on the cutting board, you know where it isn't? In the mushrooms.]
The mushrooms are sauteed with some leek and onion. You can tell the leek is ready when it starts to brown a tiny bit and turns a wilted, darker shade of green. Celery can be added if you're into that kind of thing. [BNK Tip: If you can't find leeks, dice yellow onion and rinse with water as a substitute. You're just looking for a mild onion flavor.]
[BNK Tip: When you slice the potatoes in advance, keep the slices submerged in a bowl of water to keep them from turning brown.]
After cooking some potato slices in cream and layering them with the mushroom-leek mixture and some gruyere, bake and you get this:
This dish was the biggest hit.
Rustic Herb Stuffing - Simple dish. Cube bread into a little tower:
Chop up some herbs; In our case we used parsley, sage and thyme from our thyme plant.
Delicious herbs (and scallion) cook in delicious butter:
Add swiss chard to the pan. If you can't find it, substitute kale (like we did). You can see the kale when first added in the first image, then the second image shows it all cooked down in the pan. Use plenty of greens as they will wilt to almost nothing.
The green mixture gets added to the bread, along with chicken stock, parmesan and eggs. The dish was good, but I think I'll add plenty of cheese and cube the bread smaller next time.
Homemade Cranberry Sauce - There really is no reason to buy cranberry sauce anymore. Homemade is simple and much more tart (which is delicious). Literally cook water, sugar and fresh cranberries until they look like sauce. You can Google the measurements.
Chipotle Sweet Potatoes - This is a recipe I've made before. Chipotle peppers are found canned in adobo sauce in the grocery. Just steam cubed sweet potato (2-4 of them) for about 20 minutes, add 1 chopped chipotle pepper and a tablespoon of the sauce from the can, some honey or agave nectar and salt to taste.
Roasted Asparagus - This is so easy. Buy asparagus, snap them in half by hand. The stalk will naturally break where the asparagus becomes woody and unappetizing. Discard the fatter bottom ends and keep the tips. Toss in olive oil, salt and pepper. Lay flat on a baking sheet and roast under the broiler on the high setting. Keep an eye on it and shake the pan every couple of minutes to rotate. Do this until they start to brown.
Gravy - We went with store-bought here only because smoked turkey won't really give off much juice.
Caesar Salad - You can buy a salad kit or just get some romaine, dressing and croutons. You can make your own croutons by cubing a loaf of bread, seasoning with olive oil (or melted butter), parmesan and Italian herbs, and baking in a 300 degree oven 10-15 minutes.
Dinner Rolls - We used store-bought to save oven space. My original plan was for homemade southern biscuits.
Sweet Potato Pie - Also store-bought. I'm not so good with pie crusts.
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Looks like everyone had a great time and loved the food! Check back soon for more recipes!
Happy cooking!
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