Thanksgiving dinner ideas

11 years ago

I know this is OT, but I am hosting a thanksgiving dinner party for my friends (as has been tradition for some years now). I am wondering if there are unusual ideas for decorating or types of dishes you guys serve? I am having the traditional stuff like turkey, potatoes, gb casserole, creamed onions, and what not. But I was wondering if you guys have any special ideas you do in your home which I could incorporate to my dinner to spruce things up.

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Comments (8)

mabeldingeldine_gw
11 years ago
Try the Cooking Forum -- there are some talented cooks/artists over there.

Here is a link that might be useful: Cooking Forum
annac54
11 years ago
We usually have a sweet potato casserole with a crunchy pecan topping instead of the marshmallow thing. Also popular is a wild rice dish with mushrooms, almonds, and onions.

Try the holiday forum for decorations. Some wild stuff there, but lots of good ideas you can easily adapt for your own situation.
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I guess Thanksgiving dinner is free this year!
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https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/article_9243bb74-ecfa-11e8-8f73-0f42fb5dada2.html "The Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank is filled these days with people volunteering their time and sorting food donated for the hungry. But what this 170,000-square foot facility on Choctaw Drive doesn't have as the holidays start is food. The situation has gotten bad enough that the charity, which serves an 11-parish area, is putting out public calls for extra help, for extra donations of food, and especially for money to purchase additional food. High-profile disasters, including hurricanes Florence and Michael, as well as the ongoing wildfires in California, have diverted the supply of donated food as well as drawn away cash donations that might ordinarily have gone to help hungry people locally at Thanksgiving and Christmas. “You would ordinarily see all of these shelves full,” said Mike Manning, pointing to two tall, long and nearly empty stretches of metal shelving at the rear of the facility. These shelves is where the the charity normally stores its dry, canned and staple foods. Manning, president and CEO of the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank, said instead he is flush with candy, a relic of the Halloween holiday, pointing to a big box of M&M bags. “We’ve got a lot of candy,” Manning said. “That’s not what we need.” About 30 volunteers, several of them employees of ExxonMobil, were on hand Monday sorting donated canned food. Many people brought their families. The empty shelves are not visible from their work area. Katie Skiles volunteered on Monday with her father Joe and brother, James, but she said she has worked there by herself since she first volunteered more than a year ago. “My parents made me come,” Katie said. “Now I love it.” A senior at Lee High in Baton Rouge, Katie, 17, said she was not aware of the food shortage. She said she might talk to the National Honor Society at her high school about doing a food drive. The warehouse currently has about 1 million pound of food in its inventory, about half of the normal inventory, Manning said. One million pounds of food is also roughly what the food bank distributes each month to its 100-plus member agencies, he said. And to top it all off, this is normally a time of peak inventory, when the food banks stock up in order to have sufficient supply for the early months of the year. “I’ve never see it this bad going into the holidays,” Manning said. Besides recent disasters and the resulting “donor fatigue,” another food supply factor is the shrinking donations over time from commercial grocers who carry less excess inventory than they used to, Manning said. To help restock, the food bank has asked local schools to do special food drives. What would help most, though, are cash donations, which people can donate online on the charity’s website, Manning said. “We are kind of held hostage by the national situation, unless we can get sufficient money to purchase food,” he said. It doesn’t necessarily take much money to help. Manning pointed to palettes full of canned vegetables without labels on them. These cans, when they have commercial labels, cost 70 to 90 cents a can at the store, but without the labels, they cost the food bank between 5 and 10 cents a can. Manning said he’s talking about having a more formal fund drive around New Years to raise money, but he’s been too busy to pull together anything more formal sooner. “We’re in firefighting mode right now,” he said. “We’re just asking for help.”
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Glad you got the girl anyway! I spent my early teens from 11-16 in a small country hotel with a little restaurant where we had a roasted turkey every Sunday. When I was about 12, my mother (who was the cook and pretty well everything else) decided it was time for me to take over doing the Sunday cooking. Well, my first turkey wouldn't exactly grace the pages of any home magazine :-) I had some idea that I should start it roasting breast down to keep it juicy then flip it halfway through cooking to brown the breast. That went about as well as you might imagine. Trying to flip a 20lb turkey with two meat forks was...challenging. By the time I got that sucker over it looked like the victim of an unusually gruesome axe murder. Of course the gravy wouldn't thicken, the potatoes for the mash were slow to cook, as were the veggies. Everyone ordered turkey that lunchtime. I was a wreck, to match the turkey. The next week, having reviewed what went wrong, I cooked a picture perfect roast turkey meal. It looked gorgeous! Unfortunately most of our customers must have been there the previous Sunday, as very few people ordered the turkey :-(
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herbflavor
11 years ago
a few non pumpkin pie lovers around here: one year-a platter of bars,as in lemon bars/date bars/rasberry shortbread/etc.....another year:chocolate whiskey cake....Tried crock pot stuffing once to make things easier on"day of"....this year doing make ahead and freeze corn bread muffin stuffing mix recipe and I'm looking for another make ahead and freeze item as well. I think I'm a little more "on the fence" with regards to pumpkin/mashed potatoes than I used to be, but love the sweet potatoes and stuffing category.I tried to slip the pumpkin into pumpkin bread once-couldn't entice-but that was probably healthier for the others to devour than a whole pumpkin pie left by the pumpkin-averse crowd.Sigh.
Linda
11 years ago
Pinterest.com has lots of great ideas for food, decorating, etc.
beekeeperswife
11 years ago
About a hundred years ago I made a puff pastry cornucopia. I have directions from a magazine I cut out. I googled it for you, here is a link to just one. It is fun and if done right it really looks pretty. You can put rolls in it for dinner. I remember (even though it was a hundred years ago) that the guests were very impressed. Of course that was the year I became the trendsetter when I accidentally cooked the turkey upside down and everyone said it was the best turkey they ever had...who knew it was a good thing and now people actually do it on purpose....sorry, back to the cornucopia.....

Here is a link that might be useful: puff pastry cornucopia
suzanne_sl
11 years ago
My theory is that the only Right way to do Thanksgiving dinner is the way your Mom did it. My mother-in-law made cornbread stuffing with giblets one year. OMG! That is not the way it is done! I never even heard of Green Bean casserole until I was grown, and your mention of creamed onions is the first I've ever head of that, Thanksgiving or otherwise. We generally stick with peas and carrot and celery sticks. As an adult I did contribute a sweet potato casserole to the menu (no marshmallows!) and we added Mince Meat Pie to the menu for my husband, sons, and BIL. I also do an apple pie for those who don't care for either pumpkin or mince. We always have olives, but they frequently appear on the table half gone due to all the snitchers.

A memorable conversation with my daughter many years ago:

DD (watching me make dinner): Why don't you make good dinners like Grandma?
Me: What do you mean? What does Grandma make that's better than this?
DD: You know, turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy.
chicgeek
11 years ago
Oh, that puff pastry cornucopia brought back memories... many years ago when we hosted our "one and only" both sides of the family dinner I made one too and it was quite a hit. I wasn't the most experienced cook then and by the time people started arriving I realized other than the cornucopia the table was bare. I had a bushel of 20 oz. apples, so I cored out a dozen of them and put tea lights in them. I put them in a line down the center of the long table and dimmed the lights. They looked great and the house smelled like baked apples. You would have thought Martha Stewart had swooped in!
camphappy
11 years ago
So this might not be kitchen reno related but I just discovered roasted brussel sprouts. I have never liked brussel sprouts but there is something about roasting them in the oven (salt/pepper/olive oil - 400 degrees x 30 min.) that makes them delicious. Very easy for Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving dinner ideas

Comments (8)

mabeldingeldine_gw

annac54

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