Successes:
My turkey was gorgeous. Perfectly browned and smelled like heaven.

1. Delicious gravy. I made the base the weekend before with homemade turkey stock, roasted root veggies put through a food mill, flour and butter. I basted the turkey the day of with butter and Madeira, and added the strained drippings to my gravy base. OMG. The depth of flavor - fantastic. All I added was a pinch of sage, it needed nothing else.
2. I was very happy with my Cooking Light cranberry relish recipe, made with granny smith apple.
3. My turkey and turkey breast were organic, from Whole Foods, fresh, and very good.
4. I make stuffing using whole food bread scraps from their bakeries --- saves me the time of cutting and drying out bread. Great shortcut. I love our stuffing recipe, which is very traditional save for grated carrots (adds sweetness) and cooking in muffin tins (adds crunchy surface area).
5. The mashed potatoes were made in advance, and reheated over a double boiler without incident. Delicious with a little buttermilk thrown in to smooth them out just before serving.

Failures:
1. Not happy that the turkey legs and wings were a touch pink, although I think they were fully cooked.
2. Do tablecloths time-release stains while in storage over the year? I was smart enough to take mine to the drycleaners to have it pressed, but shocked that it had some stains I didn't recall.
3. Dumbest move ever - we are near an artisanal bakery, and I decided to get some pies from them. It is really dumb to spend artisanal prices on a pumpkin pie, which may be the world's easiest dessert to make and it pretty darn hard to screw up (or make special). They make pies in the summer that are absolutely out of this world, from berries that must be hand picked by ferries in the morning dew, and those are "worth it", but I don't know what i was thinking about pumpkin pie! My dog could make one. Maybe oven space...

This post was edited by mtnrdredux on Mon, Dec 1, 14 at 12:56

That's one talented dog! And oven space matters.... An atisanal pie costs less than a secondary kitchen. :)

Gardengrl, my biggest success was the traditional guacamole. I've been making it for decades now. The avocados get the credit, however. The seasoning is the same as always, though I was out of limes and used a lemon. I don't think anyone noticed. :) The avocados were particularly delicious, however, and I had to put the lid on quick before I ate half before we got there. :)

I half invented a vegetable kugel from a totally different kind of a recipe from Canarybird. That was very well received, though being mostly cabbage family, it wasn't what people swoon over.

The peanutbutter popover blondies, which are a cookie recipe of Annie1992's made in a mini-cheesecake tin, were excellent but went largely uneaten because there was a(n unexpected) double decker ice cream torte hogging all the attention.

So I guess that's one unalloyed success, one moderate success that could use some refinement, and one unacknowledged success. I even got all the pans and dishes cleaned before we left the house to go to Thanksgiving dinner, rather than sitting half washed with soapy water in the sink. That's probably my biggest success of all!

>it pretty darn hard to screw up (or make special).

Oh, I managed that this year. I was dining with friends and I was to bring the pie. Since I didn't have any other cooking to do I decided to go ahead and get an organic pie pumpkin and use fresh pumpkin puree instead of canned.

It was the absolute worst pie I ever made, had me dashing out to find a grocery store open late the night before Thanksgiving to grab a can of pumpkin and start over.

It would have been okay, although still less flavorful than the canned, if I'd cut the liquid about in half. But as it was it could have been an eggnog pie, a custard pie,,,,whatever.

When I was in college the food service offered pie that wasn't apple pie or chess pie or pecan pie, just plain pie. That's what it reminded me of. Gah.

ROTFLOL!!!

Even shoofly pie, which is just pie, has a name!

I'm so sorry to hear about your problems with the pie. The pumpkin empanadas, which are the closest to pie I've made with fresh pumpkin, calls for cooking, mashing and straining the pumpkin, emphasis on the straining. :) Then you melt the sugar and spices in the pumpkin liquid, and reduce out all the water. Maybe next time?

I use the canned for cake. :)

Thanks, plllog. I followed Alton Brown's way of creating the puree, roasting, then scooping. I did let it drain a while, which he doesn't mention, but it was very bland.

Maybe I need to do it the way Ma Ingalls did: cut it up and stew it for hours over a low flame, stirring all the while.

Successes: The turkey was just right, moist & flavorful, corn and broccoli casseroles were just like my Mom used to make. The baked sweet potato sauce I made with cranberries, butter, honey etc was a big hit.
Failures: The dressing. It was hideous. I used frozen celery and it gave a strange "off" flavor to the whole dish. I will NEVER do that again. And my time management was not what it used to be, I simply ran out of time to make dessert (blackberry & peach crumble. I despise pumpkin pie, sorry, so have no advice to offer.)
Edie

Hey, Kathy, it's good to see you here again!

The pumpkin cheesecake seemed to be the biggest success here, and LindaC's Cranberry Jezebel is always eaten. Everything turned out fine, nothing burned, it was all good and all eaten.

Except.....and you knew there would be one, that darned cornbread stuffing. It was horrible. I like cornbread, I don't care for stuffing, and I've never made cornbread stuffing until I met Elery. He swears he loves the stuff, and that his Mom always made it, but when I ask if there was sausage in it he says no. So what should I put in it? Dried fruit? Pecans? Only herbs? Whatever, he says. So it tasted like nothing, and was dry and crumbly because he doesn't like "gloppy stuffing". It was cooked outside the turkey because that would keep it "crunchier". So I had a big pan of dried crumbly cornbread that tasted like Styrofoam and had the consistency of those little pieces of playdough that you find a couple days after the grandkids visit. Ugh.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Annie

Successes: The turkey, yam casserole, cranberry sauce and my inside the bird stuffing and at the request of my husband, Stovetop Stuffing.

Failure: The gluten free vegetarian stuffing. The only stuffing I could find that was both vegetarian and gluten free was from Williams and Sonoma.
The box cost $14.99 and with shipping, over $20.00! The funny part is that the recipe wanted you to add chicken stock. I made my own vegetable stock instead. For most recipes they will say this much water, or stock or butter etc.
This one said anywhere from 3 to 3 1/2 cups stock. You were told to do increments of 1/2 cup and keep tasting the (awful BTW... But I love my daughter so I am trying really hard here) crouton. They shouldn't be too crispy or too soggy says the instructions. Seems to me if you got soggy it's too late.
My daughter ate it, knowing what I went through, but later said that we could skip it next year!

Success? Failed?

I don't know.

You judge.

dcarch

Here is a link that might be useful: Turkey

For me personally, the biggest Thanksgiving Day success was my daughter's attempt to recreate the rice stuffing that my Greek grandmother & mother used to make. I blathered on & on about it so many times, that she determined to give it a try. She did a great job of helping me relive some of my fondest childhood memories.

I never knew about bread stuffing until I tried my first Swanson frozen turkey TV dinner. I grew up thinking everyone ate rice stuffing with pine nuts & raisins and flavored with allspice.

My mom used to grind the turkey gizzards and heart and add those to the rice along with sauteed onions & celery, pine nuts, & raisins. To get a meaty flavor without dealing with turkey innards, my daughter used breakfast sausage, and she subbed toasted almonds for the pine nuts.

It was perfect! She made a full casserole for the family dinner and another casserole just for me & my husband. We devoured most of the 2nd casserole in one sitting. It was tasty, and I appreciated her effort to recapture a pleasant food-related memory for me.

annie1992, Here is how my family makes cornbread dressing (we don't stuff anything). I apologize for the recipe not being a "recipe," but we just don't have one. It is passed down and you just learn how to do it.

Make a 10 -12" skillet of cornbread. Best to use a cast iron skillet that is really hot when you pour in the cornbread batter so you get a nice brown crust on the bottom. DO NOT PUT SUGAR IN YOUR CORNBREAD (oh, that sentence right there will start an online war - but trust me, no sugar!). After the cornbread is baked and cool enough to handle, break it into tiny pieces. We used a food processor at Little Sister's this year. I think you can do as well with your hands.

Add a couple of biscuits leftover from breakfast, broken into tiny pieces. You did make biscuits for breakfast, didn't you?

FINELY chop a small onion, 2-3 stalks of celery, and half a bundle of green onions. Toss in a small amount of sage or poultry seasoning. Mom doesn't like sage, so we use poultry seasoning.

Then put all in a container and stir it (LS uses a gallon ziploc bag to store it). Refrigerate until the next day. You don't have to make it the day ahead, but the flavors meld better.

The day you are serving your dressing: Put your cornbread mixture in a very large bowl. Lightly beat 4 - 6 eggs and add to cornbread mixture. Then add chicken or turkey broth (canned, boxed, homemade) until the cornbread mixture is soupy - about like cake batter. Pour into a huge casserole dish that you have greased in some fashion.

Bake at 350 until the dressing is set and brown and crispy around the edges. That will take at least 30 minutes.

Serve with gravy.

Good luck. Let me know if you try it again.

Successes:

Leftovers- this is the first year that I did not have an obscene amount of food leftover I usually have between 25-30 ppl and enough food leftover that I could have fed 60. Not this year, I had the perfect amount left.

Mac and cheese - I've never made it before and just picked a random crock pot recipe for it. I stupidly cooked the noodles the night before thinking that's what the recipe said. I instead did it right before mealtime on the stovetop. It got tons of compliments. Very creamy but did not heat well in the microwave the next day.

Staying calm- I usually am in freak out mode until dinner with so much to do. I told myself just to relax this year and I did.

Failures: Spanakopita my first year making it for my non Greek side of the family. It came out wonderfully unfortunately my guests never knew that because I served it cold. I baked it the morning of and generally enjoy a spanakopita more room temp then hot. I figured it would stay at least somewhat warm but it was cold and does not taste good that way.

New York strip roast - tasted fine but I let it rest too long before serving so it was a little overdone. Next year I'm taking a cue from dcarch and trying sous vide. I have dh learning how to build me one right now.

Dishwasher : not really a failure but it took me like 5 hours to get one load done. 1st I forgot to hit the start button, which I realized an hour later. Then my father opened the door mid cycle. I assumed it would automatically restart but that did not happen and it took me another hour to realize it

Note to self: Effort put into cooking a full frontal feast for 4 is NOT worth the effort. Exhaustion over rides enjoyment. Then....they decline taking any leftovers. We've been processing/vacuum sealing/freezing the leftovers for days.

Too much work, not enough hands. I'm getting too old for this. Should have had kids lol.

All three of us overcooked our individual turkeys! Mom had the main one for the family. Sister took hers to another dinner and then came to ours for dessert. Mine was because I never get enough (since I have to share with all our siblings). My success is that I did what I did last year-I cut the breast off before cooking the bottom half. I save it for the turkey roulade (Ina Garten's recipe) at Christmas. Everyone said, good thing you're making that, because it's a good recipe and turkey was a dud this year!

seagrass, we do the opposite at our house. We each say, now, what would you like from mine before I leave? And then we use mom's bowls that we bring back no later than Christmas. Or it's frozen for Christmas.

Ellendi, that is hilarious! Oh, the things we do to make our loved ones happy!

Hi Annie, sorry to hear about your cornbread stuffing too...looks like quite a few of us were "stuffing challenged" this year. LOL!

Effort put into cooking a full frontal feast for 4 is NOT worth the effort.

I learned that lesson, too, a few years ago. Two days of cooking and they eat in 20 minutes and leave the table.

Now, if just we regulars, and we see each other every day at dinner, I take us out to a nice restaurant for a nice meal, usually on the waterfront. That way we are "forced" to spend time talking to each other. Much more satisfying and nothing to clean up.

My turkey, organic, free range, fresh, was a failure this year - 10 1/2 pounds is just too small - no meat to speak of, though it was well cooked and looked great.

Everything else, including the company was great.

For the past few years we have gone out to a fantastic small restaurant for Thanksgiving. I cook a turkey breast and a few favorites so we have left overs but I haven't planned a full meal in a while.

I guess the secret is out about our favorite restaurant because when I called to make reservations they had a four page waiting list! I enjoyed cooking but agree that it is a little disheartening to cook for two days and have the meal be over in less than 30 minutes.

Loved our minimally processed fresh turkey. I will never buy a butterball turkey breast again.

Overall I was happy with most everything. Pancetta Sage Butter on and in the turkey was excellent. Italian stuffing was also excellent. Made fresh mashed potatoes using my new food mill. Great texture. Excellent Sweet Potato with Carmelized Onions from Ann T. Pies worked and I am thankful to those who responded to me on going from freezer to over with the pyrex pie plates. Only flop was the flourless chocolate cake. It tased great but totally fell apart and was not a texture I was expecting.

Successes: I achieved mashed potato redemption!!! I had been banished years ago from making them for family events because one year they came out gluey.

Failure: I made waaayyyy too many mashed potatoes.

You can read about it on my blog, The Booberry Blog.

Here is a link that might be useful: The Booberry Blog: Mashed Potato Redemption

Annie, I make a corn bread stuffing using half cornbread and half bread cubes. And other than that, I make it the same way I do my regular bread stuffing. Onions and celery sauteed in butter. Seasoned with sage and thyme, salt, lots of pepper and chicken broth to moisten. NO eggs. And I bake the corn bread the day before and cut it into cubes and allow it to dry out over night.

The first time I had cornbread stuffing we were living in Grand Rapids and it was made by a friend from Alabama. I've loved it ever since.

~Ann

Tried a new recipe for hot dinner rolls; they were not good - recipe will go in the trash.

Following are three recipes that were the stars:

Canal House's Cranberry-Port Gelée

Adapted very slightly from Canal House Cooks Every Day (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2012) Genius Recipes

1 cup port (or red wine or Madeira)
1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon juniper berries
10 black peppercorns
1 12-ounce bag fresh cranberries (about 4 cups -- frozen can be substituted)

Put the port, sugar, juniper berries, and peppercorns into a heavy saucepan and bring to a boil over medium-high heat.

Add the cranberries and return to a boil. Reduce the heat to low and simmer until the cranberries burst and are very soft, about 10 minutes more.

Strain the sauce into a bowl through a fine-mesh sieve, pushing the solids through the screen with a rubber spatula. Stir the thin and thick portions of the strained gelée together.

Transfer to a pretty serving bowl. (A funnel or liquid measuring cup with a spout can be useful for transferring without splashing the sides.)

Cover and refrigerate. It will firm up within a few hours, or can be made several days ahead.

Creamed Onion Gratin

2 medium yellow onions, cored and quartered lengthwise
1/4 cup olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
2 tbsp. unsalted butter
2 tbsp. flour
1 cup heavy cream
1/4 cup dry white wine (I used a Riesling)
Freshly grated nutmeg, to taste
1/2 cup finely grated parmesan
3 oz. Gorgonzola, crumbled
1/4 tsp. paprika

Heat oven to 350°. Toss onions with oil in a 9″ × 11″ baking dish and season with salt and pepper. Bake, stirring occasionally, until soft and lightly browned, about 1 hour; set aside. Heat oven to broil.

Heat butter in a 2-qt. saucepan over medium-high heat; add flour, and cook, stirring, until smooth, about 1 minute. Add cream and wine, and cook, stirring, until thickened, about 5 minutes. Season sauce with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

Pour sauce evenly over onions. Sprinkle with parmesan, dot with Gorgonzola, and sprinkle with paprika; broil until cheese is melted and golden brown on top, about 2 minutes. Serves 6 - 8

Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Capers and Lemony Browned Butter
adapted from All About Roasting: A New Approach to a Classic Art by Molly Stevens

1 pound Brussels sprouts, trimmed
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 teaspoon mustard seeds, yellow or brown
2 tablespoons capers, drained
1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice, plus more if needed

Position a rack in the center of the oven and heat to 425 degrees (400 degrees convection). If desired, line a heavy-duty rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper.

Depending on their size, cut the Brussels sprouts in halves or quarters; you want them to be small enough to be bite-sized. Place in a large bowl and toss with the olive oil and salt and pepper to taste. Arrange the sprouts in a single layer on the baking sheet. Don’t worry if some of the leaves fall off. Include these when roasting; they will crisp up, adding a nice crunch to the dish.

Slide the Brussels sprouts into the oven and roast, turning once or twice with a metal spatula to promote even cooking, until the sprouts are tender throughout and smaller bits or leaves that have fallen off are browned and crunchy, 20 to 25 minutes. Test for doneness by piercing a sprout with the tip of a paring knife, but to be sure, nab one off the baking sheet, let it cool slightly, and taste; it should be tender and sweet.

As the sprouts roast, melt the butter in a small skillet or heavy saucepan (it should be no more than 6 inches across or the butter will burn). Cook over medium heat until the butter is melted. Add the mustard seeds, increase the heat to medium-high, and cook, watching the pan carefully and swirling frequently, until the butter begins to foam and turns golden brown, about 2 minutes. Add the capers and lemon juice "the butter will sizzle" and immediately remove from the heat. Season with salt and pepper to taste and keep warm until the Brussels sprouts are ready.

Transfer the Brussels sprouts to a serving dish and add the browned butter. Toss to coat. Taste for salt, pepper, and lemon and serve immediately. Makes four servings

I have been having a lot of health problems the past three months so decided to order a turkey dinner from Von's (Safeway)
That part was the failure.....except for the cranberry sauce.
The dressing was cornbread dressing and was disgusting.....but I added Italian sausage, lots of sage, onions and celery. It was edible but barely. The gravy didn't help much. The mashed potatoes....yuck. But I was able to make some fairly decent potato soup the next day.
The successes were the things I made with our CSA box.....Brussels sprouts, leeks, carrots and green beans. And the rutabegas we got at the market. The store bought pumpkin pie was OK.
I decided the woman at the grocery store who was picking up her meal must have been an awful cook. She said the turkey dinners were very good and maybe even better than homemade.
Lesson learned.

bbstx and Ann T, I can't have the biscuits or the bread in the stuffing, remember, Amanda is celiac and can't have it. I definitely didn't add enough stock to make it soupy, so that probably was the problem.

I did make the cornbread the day before and it had no sugar. I cubed it and left it sit on the counter to dry out the night before.Having never had cornbread stuffing I really was kind of shooting in the dark. Elery was no help, he just kept saying he was sure it would be fine. IT wasn't, it was disgusting. I made it for him once before, but could not find the recipe, and he insisted no sausage and not "gloppy", so there you go.

This morning I added an egg and some buttermilk to some of the leftovers and fried it like a pancake. Elery ate those and said they were good. I still thought it was disgusting.

The stuffing had cornbread, turkey stock, onions, celery, sage, thyme, marjoram and salt and pepper. I did add two eggs and sautéed the vegetables in a whole stick of butter. It was still dry, crumbly and bland.

Will I do it again? Probably, only because I'm stubborn.

Seagrass, it's good to see you again, even if it was too much work to make a turkey dinner for 4. I don't think even I would do an entire dinner for 4 people. Well, yeah, I would, but it does seem kind of like an awful lot of prep and clean up for 4 people to have a turkey dinner.

Happy Thanksgiving anyway. And, now on to Christmas, LOL. But first, I had a turkey sandwich for supper!

Annie

annie, next time, try not drying out your cornbread. I have never eaten bread dressing, so I can't compare the two. I suppose I would say that the texture of Mom's dressing is similar to a very dense muffin. It isn't dry, and it isn't soupy. It can be cut into servings and will hold its shape.

LS (Little Sister) can't stand her MIL's dressing. It is runny - when you put it on your plate it spreads out. LS says it is like it is still uncooked. DBIL's family thinks ours is dry. tomayto/tomahto
It is all a matter of what you are accustomed to.

I'm lucky to be from the West, where there aren't rules about these things, but, for the record, I don't want sugar in either my cornbread or my iced tea!

Annie, I don't think this is the direction you want to go, but my memory of "good" cornbread dressing (something I haven't tried to make) is peppery and savory and is made in a super sized cast iron frying pan full of sausage fat. Like enough so that it has appreciable depth. A sofrito is made in the grease, with additional herbs, aromatics and seasoning, then the rendered crumbled sausage and the dried crumbled cornbread (hoecakes?) are added. I keep thinking it should have eggs but I think that's a Jewish thing, not a pork fat thing, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't have them. :) Stock or thin gravy (turkey juice), to wet. Baked until good and crunchy on the edges.

Bbstx, I find that remarkable! That you haven't had bread dressing. It seems ubiquitous!

My stuffing failures haven't been for Thanksgiving--it's matzah stuffing--but they've been epic. I follow my mother's instructions for the oh so yummy stuff and it's just bad. I've given up making stuffing. **** Oh, crud! **** I think I just figured it out, thinking about the cornbread. I use a different brand of matzah than my mother always did and it may just not soften up the same way. I wonder if I floated it in a schmaltzy sofrito, like the yummy cornbread dressing...maybe add some chicken sausage...

Maybe I'll try it for New Year's...

nope, sorry, plllog, not ubiquitous in the South. Even the school cafeteria, notorious for its awful food, made cornbread dressing. It wasn't great, but it was pretty good. Of course, most of the time that I've eaten dressing has been at a holiday, so I was home (my parents', my in-laws', or my sister's) and all of the dressing has been the same.

I've also never had cornbread dressing with sausage in it even though it sounds good. My former MIL would occasionally put oysters in half the pan. YUM!!!

Note to self: Effort put into cooking a full frontal feast for 4 is NOT worth the effort. Exhaustion over rides enjoyment. Then....they decline taking any leftovers. We've been processing/vacuum sealing/freezing the leftovers for days.

Too much work, not enough hands. I'm getting too old for this. Should have had kids

^^^^^That. Although make it seven and everyone took home a plate. One brought Tupperware. I froze some things but tomorrow the rest gets thrown out.
I want to go out next year, or go to someone else's house and bring a pie.....

Thanks for the advice I got here about the second turkey my sister requested I bring as a backup. My son cooked it in a roasting pan in the oven Wednesday while I was at work - the Nesco roaster arrived that evening. We put it outside to do the burn off thing - after 3 hours thought it still smelled a bit, but brought it in anyway. I took all the turkey off the bone, put it in a smaller roasting pan that would fit in the fridg, and poured the turkey broth over it. Thanksgiving day we carted the turkey in the Nesco, mashed potatoes in a crock pot, my daughter's pumpkin pie, and my son's apple pie to my sister's. The turkey worked out great re-heating in the Nesco, but we never got to it - turns out one turkey was just enough for 20 people! Initially my son was disappointed that he went to the trouble of roasting his very first bird and no one ate it, but we all got to take home leftovers, which everyone appreciated, so it was still worth it. Ended up with way too many desserts - glad to see my daughter's pumpkin pie was totally eaten, and a store bought pumpkin pie & sweet potato pie brought by other guests were barely touched. Still don't know where to store that Nesco! And I thought it still had a bit of a smell at my sister's house, but no one said anything about it.

Annie - I really cooked the traditional T-day meal for 3 of us. My BIL is an Englishman and doesn't like turkey (or Thanksgiving!). Next year all the work will be on them. After we finish our dinner at his house, he takes the entire turkey and puts it in the garbage. Nothing saved. No stock made. He can't stand the smell of it. So I waited until he left to make mine last weekend.

No soup for you!

Arrrghhhh. Seagrass, that's horrible. No soup, indeed. Heck, leftovers are my favorite part, I think!

I just read an internet article that said England is embracing Thanksgiving as a holiday, for the same reasons I love it. No cards, no decorations, no gifts. Just eat and be thankful, it's perfect. (grin)

You know, if turkeys weren't so big, I'd have it more often. You can buy the breasts (not my favorite part), but I seldom see the legs and thighs (which ARE my favorite part). If I could buy a package of turkey thighs or leg quarters, I'd have turkey regularly.

Happy Thanksgiving anyway, even with no stock. (sigh)

Annie