Well, the shopping is done and I have begun cooking for our family Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday. We generally cook the same dishes every year with one or two different dishes added as an experiment. This year we will have the usual turkey, dressing, ham, sweet potatoes, squash casserole, sweet and sour green beans, mashed potatoes and giblet gravy, homemade rolls, blueberry/cream cheese pies, chocolate chess pies and an apple/cranberry casserole that goes great with the dressing. I cook WAY too much food, but we love the leftovers and the turkey carcass will be used to make soup and broth. The ham bone will be added to season some dried beans and all will be delicious.
Today I made our dressing. I like to make it early and freeze it so that there is a little less work for me on Thanksgiving morning. I make a cornbread dressing that is delicious! I save scraps of cornbread, biscuits or homemade breads in the freezer and use them in my dressing. Today, however, there were no bread scraps, so I made two large pans of corn bread. I had turkey broth in the freezer and added in a quart of chick broth to it. I grate a little carrot, a whole onion and one or two stalks of celery in my blender and cook it in the broth. My kids don't like to see any vegetables in the dressing!!
When the veggies are done I break up the corn bread in a huge dishpan and pour the veggie/broth mixture over it. I mix that up well adding in two cans of cream of chicken soup, three eggs, salt and pepper and a little more broth or water to make it a little soupy. I then pour the dressing into my greased casserole dish, cover and freeze. I always make enough for two pans of dressing as there are generally pot luck dinners to attend and I like just pulling it out to thaw and baking it for a great meal.
Tomorrow I hope to make the squash and apple/cranberry casseroles. The chocolate chess pies can also be made ahead of time and frozen. I will post more recipes tomorrow.
So, what are you having for Thanksgiving dinner? Will it be the traditional turkey and dressing or do you do a non-traditional meal? Do you have a new recipe that you would like to share? I would love to try out some new ones. Please post!
2 comments:
Sounds good! We had our Thanksgiving dinner yesterday due to several schedule conflicts later in the week. Hope ya'll have a great Thanksgiving.
We have pretty much the same menu, but this is the first year we've been able to talk my grandmother into letting us help with the cooking! She usually does it all herself and we just show up!
This year I'm taking an asparagus casserole. Not everyone likes it, but those of us who do are REALLY excited about it!
Your menu sounds great. I'd love to have the recipe for your apple-cranberry casserole!
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