I am temporarily tired of writing about how much Washington sucks. What we need are recipes for Thanksgiving dinner and dessert, and for using leftovers. Here’s our recipe for cranberry sauce:
1 lb. cranberries
2.5 cups of sugar
1 cup water
1.5 cups of pear
1 cup of apple
5 cloves
2 cinnamon sticks
.5 cup of celery
1 cup of raisins
1 cup slivered almonds
Put the cranberries, sugar, and water in a pot and cook on medium heat until the cranberries grow plump and the skins pop. Add the rest of the ingredients except the slivered almonds. Cook until it has the consistency of jelly. Add the almonds. This recipe will fill about five 12 oz. jars.
Our family keeps asking us to bring this to Thanksgiving, so it must be good.
What are some of your favorite dishes?
Is that a Cain reference?
I stole this very recipe several years ago and it is delish!
Since I don’t know how to make it, I always respect those that do know how to make a good mac and cheese.
It’s sad for me to say, but my cobblers are hit or miss, and I don’t get why…but, either I hit it out of the park, or it sucks..no in between.
Bookmark this and you’ll never have a mac n’ cheese problem again.
We need a batch of that to go with the meatballs. Is it Christmas Eve yet?
Silly question. Do you cut the pear in apple in chunks or very small pieces. Fascinating recipe, with celery!
You actually peel and chop the apple and pear. Also too, you should cook the cranberries, sugar and h2o over medium heat in the first step; you should stick with med-low heat for the second step (achieving that “jellylike” consistency.
It’s yummy, with or without the slivered almonds at the end.
Thanks. I’ll try it.
Old School-from the 60’s. But we still drag it out for the holidays:
5 Cup Salad
1 cup mandarin oranges drained
1 cup pineapple chunks drained or fresh
1 cup sweetened coconut
1 cup mini marshmellows
1 cup sour cream
Combine and put in fridge until dinner.
You can throw anything in this–cherries, cranberrys, nuts. it’s versatile. I still love it as I did when I was a kid.
2 1/2 cups sugar? Wow. That’s a bunch.
Here is my recipe for cranberry-orange relish, a very big favorite here:
1 bag cranberry
1 large orange (scrubbed under hot water)
1 cup sugar
Using peeler, peel colored peel off orange into food processor. After colored peel removed, peel off white underpeel and discard (this is bitter and should not be used). Add pulp to food processor, discarding seeds. Add cranberries. Using chopping blade, chop mixture until finely mixed. Add and chop in the sugar. Place in bowl in fridge, for 1-2 days (needs to be made in advance).
Note – no cooking involved.
Tonight it’s spaghetti. The sauce was cooked a week ago, so I’m simply thawing out what I froze. What I do is a variation of a Good Housekeeping cookbook recipe that my mom concocted when I was a kid. Thankfully I remembered to get that recipe from her a few years ago, and I am now trying to pass along that recipe to my kids.
I’m dying for a batch of these, served on slider buns:
Smitten Kitchen chicken meatballs
This one looks like a keeper. I’m trying it tonight.
Well, they were really good, as advertised. Usually do meatball on the stovetop but I think I’ll be baking them from now on
I wish I was home in NOLA for Thanksgiving. The Thanksgiving menu in New Orleans’ lower 9th ward mayb be way different than elsewhere I’d bet…lol.
No green-bean casserole (umm yuck!)
usually on the menu:
Turkey (baked, smoked or fried, if ya really wanna get fancy…cajun-friend turkey is key!)
Baked Ham
Candied Yams
Baked Macaroni
Gumbo (seafood or otherwise)
Cornbread Dressing/Stuffing
Stuffed Bell Peppers (distinctly New Orleanian, made with ground beef, shrimp, bread crumbs and seasoning, no rice or tomato sauce of whatever).
Potato Salad
Sweet Potato Pie (from scratch, and make Sweet Potato Bread with left-over stuffing)
Bread Pudding
Oh and some people like to substitute Red Beans & Rice for Gumbo. Whichever one you feel like making or have the correct ingredients for.
Dark, dreary and damp here so I settled for an easy breezy pot roast- throw a bunch o’stuff in the pan and cook on super low forever. (or 250 for 4 hrs) Been pretty broke so we’re tired of potatoes, gonna boil up a bunch of fluffy noodles to go with it.
This is going to be an interesting holiday for me, trying to rejigger the recipes to go along with my new sodium restricted diet. Pretty much demands everything from scratch.
I think I’m gonna try brining the bird this year. Saw what looks like a good recipe in New York magazine — you only brine it for about 12 hours, and you include all sorts of things other than salt like maple syrup and various spices — sage, garlic etc. Last time I tried brining it was far too salty but I’m hoping this one works better. Anyone want to talk me out of this, I’m listening!
We do a maple syrup brine very year – it has garlic, lemon, and peppercorns in it too. It’s great.
I’m not a good food critic because I’m easy to please. So in these terms, it’d be better to say what I don’t like. There are only a couple of foods that I’d refuse to eat if there was another option: liver, and yogurt. Everything else I can force myself to eat, even if I’m not particularly fond of it. Cranberry sauce is a good example 😛
Oh, and in terms of Thanksgiving? Screw stuffing. It’s so disgusting. It reminds me of vomit, and the texture is just as bad. Doesn’t taste good, either.
My absolute favorite, though? Seeing as it doesn’t happen often, despite my health freakish nature, I love some deep fried turkey. It’s done much faster than baking, and it’s sooo juicy.
I’ve been making this recipe for 2 decades. It gets oats into my children.
Peter’s Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies
1-1/4 cups (2-1/2 sticks) butter, softened
3/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar (I use a granulated brown sugar)
1 XL egg
1 or 2 teaspoons vanilla (your taste)
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 cups rolled oats (old fashioned, uncooked)
1 – 1 ½ cups chocolate chips (or more) I use Calebut chips.
ABOUT 3 DOZEN if you make large cookies; 4 dozen if you make them smaller.
HIGH ALTITUDE ADJUSTMENT: Increase flour to 1-3/4 cups and bake as directed.
I used to live across the street from the OU library, so I’d go there and hang out in the old stacks every now and then and browse through. One day I saw an old book titled Joe, the Wounded Tennis Player, but the title was scuffed so I thought the name was Job, like the biblical character, and that struck me as so odd that I checked it out.
It’s a memoir published in 1945 of a Hollywood reporter (Morton Thompson) who, among other things, grew up in a resort hotel part-time and hung out in the kitchen a lot. Around page 180 or so, he has the most fantastic turkey recipe you’ll ever find. I eventually bought a copy of the book from Alibris.
If you google Morton Thompson black turkey you’ll find several versions of the recipe, but the one as written in the book is highly entertaining reading as well. I’m going to try to cook it this year if I can find all the ingredients–it’s old-style cooking with a lot of seasonings that were more popular 80-100 years ago, with a lot of flavors that I haven’t tasted since I was really little and my grandmothers did the holiday cooking. Either way, it’s a good read.
I’m going to try making pumpkin pie this year, with organic pumpkin. It’ll have a homemade graham cracker crust.
If you don’t watch Drunk Kitchen, you should. Not so much for the recipes, but for the hilarity.
its a florida thanksgiving charlie brown.
escarole soup
lobster
pumpkin pie shakes
thats it….simple…mostly just boiling water, melting butter, using the blender.
followed by a thanksgiving drum circle at the beach with all the other dirty fucking hippies.