Thanksgiving
2220 recipes found
Nutmeg-Maple Cream Pie
This pie is a delicious twist on a custard standby, and it is exceedingly easy, a humble yet grandly flavored addition to any celebration. Don't let making your own pie crust intimidate you: our pie guide has everything you need to know.
Creamy Goat Cheese, Bacon and Date Dip
This appetizer is like a bacon-wrapped date in dip form — and every bit as luxe, sweet and simultaneously smoky as that sounds. Here, as you swipe crusty bread through the smooth cheese, you’ll gather chunks of bacon and a bit of date, toffee-like from a quick fry in the meaty fat. You could embellish further, with nuts, chile or honey, or you could sip Champagne and dig in just as merrily — with friends hovering nearby for their turn.
Crispy Feta With Lemon
When heat touches feta, its exterior crisps while its interior becomes surprisingly creamy and soft. Turning it into a dazzling appetizer takes very little: Dust the cheese with cornstarch and sesame seeds, sauté it in butter, then finish it with a squeeze of lemon. You can perch it atop a cracker, or eat it on its own, in awe of the sum of so few parts.
Apple Green-Chile Pie With Cheddar Crust
In this savory-sweet treat, apples are layered with roasted green chilies, made savory with Cheddar cheese in the crust and sprinkled with a streusel topping of walnuts and brown sugar. (Don't let making your own pie crust intimidate you: our pie guide has everything you need to know.)
Figs Stuffed With Goat Cheese
Here's a super-simple appetizer. Fresh figs are halved and stuffed with any creamy, flavorful cheese. A good blue works, but creamy goat cheese, drizzled with balsamic vinegar, is even more crowd-pleasing.
Lemony Whipped Feta With Charred Scallions
A spin in the food processor and a little olive oil and cream cheese take feta from crumbly and coarse to airy and spreadable. Whipped feta is wonderful on its own, but for a smoky sweetness that makes it special, flavor the dip with scallions that have been blackened in the oven. Serve with pita chips or buttery crackers, and if you’re an overachiever, top the dip with charred cherry tomatoes and a drizzle of honey.
Caramelized Corn With Fresh Mint
This is an invincible weapon in the culinary arsenal: whole corn kernels, simply tossed in a hot skillet of melted butter, and showered with fresh mint when they start to pop and turn brown. It's sweet and savory all at once. And it's divine.
Stuffed Mushrooms With Panko and Pecorino
These flavorful stuffed mushrooms come together quickly, which makes them great for entertaining. Crunchy panko bread crumbs, instead of the traditional sort, are combined with salty cheese, parsley and garlic, then spooned into mushroom caps and baked until crisp and golden. You can assemble them through Step 2 a few days in advance and pop them into the oven minutes before guests arrive. Pro tip: Don’t throw away the mushroom stems. Freeze them to add to your next pot of stock for unbeatable richness.
Cassis Manhattan
With a rye-bourbon split and just enough slightly herbal crème de cassis to sweeten without overpowering, this manhattan variation is spirit-forward, with layered notes of sugar and spice. If you prefer to keep the drink to one type of whiskey, opt for rye and leave out the bourbon. The cocktail will be slightly more spice-forward and boozier in feel. Whatever you do, let the cherry garnish sit until the very end of the drink for an especially flavorful final snack.
Glazed Carrots With Miso and Sesame
Miso and sesame add nutty warmth to a buttery dish of glazed carrots that’s delicious warm or at room temperature. Bunched carrots with their tops intact are always fresher than the type packed in cellophane, so look for those, or young, slender carrots. You can choose a rainbow bunch, if you wish, but orange or yellow carrots are also just fine.
Cauliflower Piccata
Piccata sauce — that buttery, briny combination of lemon, butter and capers, silky in texture and tart in flavor — is not just for chicken or swordfish. It’s also a zesty anchor for roasted vegetables. Here, cauliflower is roasted at high heat, which concentrates the flavor, adds nuttiness and encourages caramelization, before being doused with the sauce. Chickpeas make this a fuller vegetarian meal, but leave them out if you’d rather. Piccata dishes are often served with long pasta, which tangle with the tangy sauce, but this one is also great alongside rice or tender-crisp vegetables like blistered green beans. While you are at it, try this sauce with sweet butternut squash, charred broccoli, earthy roasted carrots, golden wedges of cabbage or crispy slices of tofu. To get vegetarian recipes like this one delivered to your inbox, sign up for The Veggie newsletter.
Warm Olives with Za'atar
Roasted Broccoli With Almonds and Cardamom (Malai Broccoli)
This recipe comes from the British cookbook author Meera Sodha, who adapted it from a dish she tasted in Goa, India. It's a smart, simple technique that turns the broccoli crisp and creamy at the same time: charred florets with a lick of thick nutmeg-spiced sauce baked into every nook and cranny. Ms. Sodha uses a mix of cream cheese, yogurt and ground almonds. Don't be afraid to get messy and use your hands to thoroughly coat the broccoli in the sauce; it pays off later.
Sour Cream and Roasted Red Onion Dip
Here’s how to make onion dip without standing near the stove for an eternity, waiting for onions to caramelize: Roast rings of onion in the oven with the teeniest bit of sugar for 40 minutes for effortlessly faux-caramelized onions. Red onions are naturally a bit sweeter and mellower than white ones, especially when they get brown and slouchy, but lemon juice, chives and raw garlic will perk them right up. The creaminess — what we’re here for — comes from three sources: sour cream, mayonnaise and Greek yogurt, a nice counter to the crisp potato chips you'll, of course, serve it with.
Shrimp-Stuffed Mirlitons
The mirliton is a pale green squash with an end puckered up like a toothless granny. They are native to Louisiana, but if you grew up eating from certain Latin American culinary canons, you might know them as chayote. In New Orleans, mirliton stuffed with shrimp is a dish both common and fancy. The chef David Guas, who grew up in Louisiana and now runs the Bayou Bakery in Washington, D.C., ate this version at his Granny Lilly’s holiday table in Amite, La. His recipe is a version of her original, but with a touch of heat from cayenne pepper as influenced by Justin Wilson, a relative who had a long-running cooking show on New Orleans public television that he punctuated with the tagline “I guaranteeeeee!” Use the freshest shrimp you can find. Something from the Gulf of Mexico would lend authenticity. And be careful scooping the flesh from the mirlitons. The skin is thin and can break easily.
Creamed Red And White Pearl Onions With Bacon
This recipe came to The Times in 2003 from Barbara Lynch, the owner and chef of No. 9 Park in Boston. It is incredibly rich, and remarkably good. If you don't have time to blanch and peel the onions, feel free to use frozen pearl onions in a pinch.
Maple-Roasted Squash With Sage and Lime for Two
Slathered with a mildly spicy maple glaze, chunks of winter squash are roasted until velvety soft and browned at the edges, then brightened with lime and fresh sage just before serving. Unless you’re using a squash variety with a particularly thick rind, you don’t need to peel the squash before roasting. The skins of butternut or delicata roast up wonderfully crisp, adding texture to each bite.
Tepary Beans With Chile-Agave Glaze
The small tepary beans that grow in the harsh, dry American Southwest are an heirloom variety that has been cultivated and harvested wild by countless generations of Native people in the region. The Diné (more commonly known as the Navajo) seed savers even protected them during the Long Walk of 1864, a brutal forced march to eastern New Mexico, hiding the beans in their clothing. This is an amazing bean that can withstand and even prosper in the most extreme heat and drought. The white variety I use here is slightly sweet and nutty, while the brown variety has an earthier flavor. The combination of white and brown tepary beans is both visual and flavorful, but you could also simply use 2 cups of one variety of tepary bean. Top the beans with roasted turnips and winter squash for a satisfying vegan meal, or pair them with bison pot roast, roast turkey or other meat.
French Onion Stuffing
Golden caramelized onions and mushrooms are the building blocks of this vegetarian stuffing inspired by French onion soup. The onions take some time to cook, but the meltingly tender result brings rich sweetness to the dish. Mushrooms are added for their texture, and mushroom broth reinforces the stuffing with more depth. An initial steam helps soften the big mound of raw onions to make caramelizing them easier and faster. The onions can be cooked the day before (through Step 3) and refrigerated, then rewarmed before using.
Homemade Green Bean Casserole
If you think you don’t like green bean casserole, withhold judgment until you’ve tried this entirely from-scratch version. It has all the classic elements of the Thanksgiving favorite, but its base is a mushroom gravy amped up with red-wine vinegar, red-pepper flakes and fresh thyme rather than a can of soup. If you don’t want to fry the onions yourself (we understand), you can always substitute 1 1/2 cups store-bought fried onions or even crispier fried shallots.
Parmesan Smashed Potatoes
My friend Antonia Bellanca taught me this old fashioned recipe, which I featured in “The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook” (Clarkson Potter, 1999). These are simple, flavorful and come together quickly. Use an electric mixer and don’t peel the potatoes!
Fatty ’Cue Brussels Sprouts
Adapted from the Fatty ’Cue restaurant in Brooklyn, this is a recipe that matches the flavors of southeast Asia to ones of New England. Sweet, smoky, fiery, crisp, soft — it’s a dish that could become a new Thanksgiving tradition, or just spice up a meal on a blustery evening.
Celery Salad With Apples and Blue Cheese
Celery is perhaps at its best in salad: Its flavor is at its brightest and its crunch is unapologetically assertive. Celery root complements the chopped stalks, apples add sweetness and blue cheese — celery’s classic cohort — provides punch. Flavorful enough to stand on its own, this salad isn’t so striking that it doesn’t play well with others. Celery salad makes a welcome addition to the Thanksgiving table, particularly since the crunchy salad ingredients are strong enough to stay sturdy if refrigerated overnight.
Pan de Jamón (Venezuelan Ham Bread)
This recipe for the traditional Venezuelan Christmas bread comes from Martha Beltrán in Austin, Tex., who brought the recipe with her when she moved to the United States and now considers it essential to her family's Thanksgiving feast. Ms. Beltrán always starts the bread the day before she serves it, laminating it with butter three times before rolling it up with ham, bacon, olives and pimentos. The process can be long, but the dough can be left in the fridge for a flexible and forgiving amount of time, even overnight. When the finished loaves are sliced, each piece reveals a festive butter-slicked swirl.