My Favorite Thanksgiving Recipes!

With Thanksgiving a few days away, I thought it would be nice if I shared with you all my favorite holiday recipes for dishes I will be serving at my Thanksgiving dinner this year! If you are looking for a new recipe or some inspiration for meal planning, hopefully this will help you discover a new dish!

Appetizers

Since I am hosting Thanksgiving dinner this year for my family, I like to have snacks and appetizers out before dinner for people to munch on while they watch tv and chat! My husband has requested shrimp cocktail this year as well as a plate of his favorite cured meats to go along with the baked brie I will be making as a hot appetizer. Baked brie is one of our favorites and I love it because its super easy to make, but it presents very, very well. This is the sort of appetizer that’s great to bring along to parties because you can prepare it ahead of time and once you arrive at the party you can heat it up in the oven for a few minutes!

Baked Brie

Ingredients

• 1 piece of frozen puff pasty (thawed)
• 1 package of brie cheese, round
• 1/4 cup of preserves (apricot or raspberry work very nicely, but use whatever preserves you prefer, you can also omit this if you don’t like preserves!)

Directions

Preheat your oven to 425. Lightly grease a baking sheet and place your thawed puff pastry upon it. In the center, place your brie (removed from packaging) and top with preserves (optional). Wrap the pastry up around your brie working in a single direction until the brie is covered completely by the pastry, ensuring there are no holes or cracks for cheese to spill out of. Bake in oven for 20-25 minutes until the pastry is fluffy and browned. Make sure to keep an eye on the cheese to make sure it’s not melting out of the pastry excessively (a little spillage is okay, but if rivers are flowing out, remove it immediately!) Let cheese stand 5 minutes once removed from the oven and then serve with your choice of crackers!

Side Dishes

For me, a great Thanksgiving meal is made by the side dishes! Although I am hosting a small gathering of family, I still like to have lots of options! We will have the traditional mashed potatoes, a salad, rolls of course, but two of our favorite sides are always Corn Bread Pudding and Sausage Stuffing!

Corn Bread Pudding

Ingredients

• 2 sticks of melted butter
• 2 eggs beaten
• 1 16oz can of corn (do not drain)
• 1 16oz can of creamed corn
• 8oz sour cream
• 1 box of Jiffy corn bread mix
• 2 Tbsp sugar

Directions

Combine all ingredients adding the bread mix last, into a large mixing bowl. Bake in greased bowl or pan at 350 for 1 hour to 1 hour 15 minutes. Should be a light golden brown on top. Let the pudding rest for 5-10 minutes after removing from the oven!

Sausage Stuffing

Ingredients

• 1 16oz package of Jimmy Dean sausage (in the log style or use equivalent in Italian sausage style of your choice. I prefer the Jimmy Dean Sage Sausage, but that is just personal preference!)
• 1 Tbsp Olive Oil
• 1 Box of Stovetop Stuffing (or whichever stuffing recipe you prefer)
• Additional Ingredients on stuffing mix box or your preferred style of stuffing!

Directions

In a large pan on the stove, heat oil and distribute on the pan on medium. Place sausage in the pan of heated oil and begin to break it up with a wooden spoon or similar utensil until the sausage is in crumbled, bite size pieces. Cook sausage until browned, drain excess oil and move sausage to the side while preparing your stuffing mix. Prepare stuffing as directed. Once stuffing is cooled, incorporate the cooked sausage and transfer to the serving dish of your choice.

The Turkey

If I had to venture a guess, I would say that Turkey is probably the most popular type of meat served on Thanksgiving, however, I have been to several Thanksgiving dinners where it was served alongside a ham or even lamb. I will only be serving one meat option on Thanksgiving, because, let’s be honest, its hard enough to get one meat right on Thanksgiving and turkey is a difficult bird to master! I, however, believe I make one of the best turkeys… ever! I’m just gonna say it, my turkeys are good! They are super moist, filled with flavor and golden browned by the time they exit the oven! I think this has to do with the awesome recipe I developed based off this Alton Brown recipe!

Ingredients

• 1 frozen Turkey (size doesn’t matter folks, but a rule of thumb is 2 lbs per person you’re feeding. I have made this recipe with a 16 lb turkey to a 23 lb turkey and they have all turned out great!)
• 1-2 Apples
• 1-2 Onions
• Cinnamon (I prefer ground)
• A few cups of water
• 1-2 Cups of Apple Cider or Apple Juice
• Sage (packaged seasoning is fine!)
• Rosemary (again, stick to the stuff you have in your cupboard unless you really want fresh!)
• A bulb of garlic
• 1 stick of butter

Directions

Now, I just want to warn you, that for me, this is one of those recipes that is all about judgement calls. I don’t believe you can go wrong with anything except the cooking time, but just do what feels right!

2-4 Days before cooking, take your turkey out of the freezer and let it defrost in your fridge (the larger the turkey, the more time it needs, 4 days would play it safe, 3 is probably average, 2 days and I would worry about having some frozen innards still!

Day of cooking: Preheat your oven to 500 and make sure the racks of your oven are properly positioned to fit your turkey (there is nothing worse than having to mess with those once they are hot!) Remove the thawed turkey and place it in a completely clean sink (very important that your sink be as clean as possible and I would work with the turkey inside a large container of some sort as well)! Remove the turkey from the packaging and remove the neck and other misc innards from the cavity (if you have plans for those innards, put them aside, if not, toss them)! Rinse out the cavity with cool water to make sure there is no bits of ice or slush in there!

Place the turkey on a roasting rack that’s sitting inside a roasting pan. In a microwavable bowl, place an apple or two (chopped up), an onion (also chopped) mixed with a good amount of cinnamon and some apple juice/cider. This part is all eyeballing it! I like to make more than I think I need, because, trust me, this mixture will not go to waste, so maybe a good estimate is to make about 3-5 cups of this mixture! Cook it in the microwave for 5 minutes and you will start to smell all those lovely aromatics brewing together (that smell is what your turkey is going to taste like once this is all done)! Once that mixture is out of the microwave, spoon out the chunks of apple and onion into the cavity of the bird. Add additional apple and onion slices to fill the cavity if necessary!

Coat the skin of the turkey well with the canola oil. Take apart your bulb of garlic and skin each clove of garlic. Take your butter and cut it into multiple pieces. Then take a small knife and begin to cut deep slits strategically all over the bird. This part requires some thinking on your behalf as to where best to place these slits, because inside each slit you are going to place a pad of butter and a piece of garlic, which will then melt and soak into the meat of the bird. I probably make 1-2 slits on the legs, 1-2 on the wings, and 4-6 around the breast.

The last thing I do before I put the turkey into the oven is I like to put some water and a little bit of the aromatics liquid in the bottom of the pan (about an inch of liquid) along with any excess apples and onions I have chopped up already, and then I cover the turkey and the pan completely with aluminum foil!

Put this into the oven at 500 for 30 minutes.

When the 30 minutes is up, remove the turkey and the aluminum foil (gently, because you are going to put it back on loosely after this) and using the liquid from the aromatics mixture, baste the turkey! I also like to use a flavor injector to actually inject this juice mixture into the meat of the turkey as well, all over!

Lower the temperature on the oven to 350, recover the bird with foil, loosely, and put it back into the oven for the remainder of the cooking time! According to Alton Brown a 14-16 lb turkey needs 2- 2.5 hours of cooking time additional, but double-check that with the size of your turkey against this turkey cooking time-table (you can never be too careful)!

For the remainder of the time the turkey cooks, I like to remove it from the oven every 45 minutes to baste it and flavor inject it with the aromatics liquid! I do not count the time out of the oven as cooking time, I set my timer after the turkey is back in the oven! Also, as a note, during the last 30 minutes or so of cooking, I remove the foil from the bird completely, so that it can get that nice brown color and a crispy skin. You may notice that the skin of your bird may have lighter patches around areas that were sliced for the butter and garlic, and this is normal. You may also get streaking from the aromatics mixture because the skin of the turkey really only browns in areas that lack moisture, and you have been basting yours to keep the meat juicy.

Once the turkey is completely cooked and either the thermometer in the turkey has popped or your own food thermometer (always preferable) indicates an internal temperature of 161 for the turkey, you can remove it from the oven and let is rest for 15 minutes before carving.

I hope you have enjoyed reading about my favorite Thanksgiving recipes! Like I said, I will be making all these items and more this year! I would love to know what your favorite family recipes are and what you will be cooking up this Thanksgiving, so feel free to leave me a comment below! Also, if you use any of these recipes, I would love it if you took a picture and sent it to me on Instagram or Twitter! Happy cooking!

xoxo,

This article was first published on Strange & Charmed on November 10th, 2014 and is being reposted as part of my Holiday Prep Hiatus! For the months of November & December I will be recycling some vintage S&C content that you may have missed in order to give myself some extra time to finalize projects and spend time with my family during the holiday season. All reposted content will be marked as such. I hope you enjoy this blast from the past blog post!