Thanksgiving
2220 recipes found
Cranberry, Raspberry, Pecan Conserve
Mofongo Stuffing
Mofongo, which in its most traditional form is a fried-and-mashed fusion of plantains, pork rinds, garlic and peppers, is essential Puerto Rican food. For this recipe we went to the chef Jose Enrique and asked for a mofongo for the Thanksgiving table, standing at the ready to soak up gravy and meet your turkey on the tip of a fork.
Roasted Potatoes With Figs and Thyme
A fall walk through New York’s Greenmarket with Eleven Madison Park’s chef, Daniel Humm, brought the idea for this unusual dish. Hot black tea lends a deeper flavor to dried figs, which are scattered with potatoes on a pan with thyme and then roasted. The recipe calls for fingerling potatoes, but any waxy potato will do. (And for everything you need to know to make perfect potatoes, visit our potato guide.)
Squash Puree
Lucy Buffett’s Oyster Dressing
Lucy Buffett and her famous brother, Jimmy, grew up in Mobile, Ala., where seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is a key player in the culinary canon. Mr. Buffett went on to a giant career in music. His sister Lucy opened the freewheeling LuLu’s restaurant in Gulf Shores, Ala. When they were children, oyster stuffing was always on the Thanksgiving table. And it still is. “Usually, it’s all gone by the end of the day because the kids go back for thirds and fourths, just digging directly into the pan,” she said. Ms. Buffett likes to use cornbread with a little sugar in it, often relying on a box mix. But any cornbread recipe will do. The best bread is an inexpensive white loaf from the grocery store that will break down into a smooth texture. The oysters don’t have to be from the Gulf of Mexico, but fat Gulf oysters are best for conjuring the brackish low tides and sunsets of the Buffett family youth.
Baby Stuffed Pumpkins
Rainbow Potato Roast
Each different type of potato here has its own distinctive flavor and texture as well as color. Some will roast more quickly than others but it doesn’t matter to me if certain pieces in the mix become very soft. My favorite mix here consists of sweet potato, purple potatoes, fingerlings, Yukon golds and red bliss.
Ginger Butterscotch Sauce
This recipe came to The Times from the pastry chef Pichet Ong, who developed it when he worked at Spice Market and 66 in New York. He served it over a kabocha squash pie with a lime graham cracker crust, but it would go equally well over cheesecake, key lime pie or chess pie. It takes about a half-hour of your time, and will add a buttery note to any dessert.
Puréed Mushroom Soup
Thick and creamy, with no cream, this tastes so much richer than it is. I use a small amount of milk to thin out the soup, but you can also use stock to thin it, if you don’t want to include any dairy.
Grilled Sweet Potato Slices
Pear Kuchen
Emily Elsen and Melissa Elsen, sisters who run the Four & Twenty Blackbirds bakery in Brooklyn, hail from South Dakota, where their family ran a small restaurant. Kuchen, a German cake topped with fruit that is a staple of the state’s Thanksgiving tables, is central to their childhood memories of the holiday. Their recipe, topped with pears, “looks a little different than those traditionally found in local South Dakota church and community cookbooks,” Melissa Elsen wrote in an email, “but it tastes like it does in my memory (with the addition of cardamom).” That cardamom, it turns out, is key to the dish’s success, with citrus and savory notes that are as pleasant as they are unexpected.
Chili-Flavored Pumpkin Soup
Clam and Chouriço Dressing
Massachusetts is the birthplace of the iconic Thanksgiving tableau, the home to Norman Rockwell, whose 1943 painting “Freedom From Want” gives Americans its most enduring vision of the holiday table. It is also home to one of the largest Portuguese-American communities in the United States and the source of one of the nation’s most flavorful hyphenated cuisines. Matthew Jennings, the chef and an owner of the forthcoming Townsman restaurant in Boston, pays homage to that cooking with a New Bedford-style Thanksgiving dressing made with local Massachusetts quahog clams and the Portuguese sausage known as chouriço. Fresh chorizo is an acceptable substitution, but canned clams are not.
Maple-Honey Pecan Pie
Using maple syrup and honey instead of the usual corn syrup in pecan pie makes for a complex and richly flavored confection that’s still wonderfully gooey in the center. This recipe also has double the amount of pecans compared with most recipes, giving it plenty of crunch. You can bake it the day before serving; it keeps very well at room temperature for at least 24 hours. It also freezes reasonably well for up to 3 months, though the crust won’t be quite as flaky.
Salt-Baked Pears
The salt crust encasing these pears — a method most often used with whole fish and some poultry — does what salt always does: It amplifies. In this instance, the sweet, juicy peary-ness of the pear. Ideally, these should be slipped into the oven after pulling out another dish in order to minimize time in the kitchen. As a dinner party dessert, it’s a perfect punctuation mark.
Chocolate Chestnut Cake
This wheat-free chocolate cake with the earthy flavor of chestnuts is surprisingly light. The recipe is a slight adaptation from one in Alice Medrich’s baking book "Flavor Flours." The cake may be baked a day or two in advance of serving.
Raspberry-Mochi Butter Cake With Matcha Glaze
This cake elicits awe on sight, and it’s a delightfully easy stir-and-bake dessert created by Margarita Manzke, the pastry chef and an owner at République, a restaurant and bakery in Los Angeles. Dense and chewy, mochi is a popular Japanese confection made from glutinous, sticky rice. It’s typically formed into pocket-size balls or squares but can also be made into cakes. As the rice flour batter comes together, it may seem gritty, but it will soak up the coconut milk and evaporated milk and soften as it bakes. Unlike many cakes baked with traditional flour, this gluten-free cake is so rich and moist that it’s hard to overbake. For the glaze, matcha powder is combined with confectioners’ sugar and coconut milk, which gives the cake an earthy tone, but you could easily swap in freeze-dried raspberry or strawberry powder.
Maple-Pecan Galette With Fresh Ginger
Like a cross between a giant Danish and a frangipane-filled tart, this not-too-sweet galette is perfect for the holidays and beyond. Maple sugar gives it a warm and toasty note, and fresh ginger and allspice, a delicately spicy nuance. You can substitute other nuts for pecans, and walnuts or slivered almonds would work particularly well. And both the dough and filling can be made a few days ahead. Serve this with whipped cream or ice cream for a sophisticated dessert, then save the leftovers for breakfast the next day. An unadorned slice is fantastic with coffee.
Gumbo’s Daddy With Chicken, Shrimp and Turkey
This recipe, adapted from Gail Jennings of North Carolina, is what her family thinks of as the daddy of all gumbos, a thick mix of leftover roast turkey rounded out with plump shrimp, chicken wings and collard greens. Ms. Jennings spikes the soup with a mix of curry powder and King’s Pepper, a spice blend that she developed based on a West African recipe. But any chile powder, including cayenne, can be substituted. Add it to taste; Ms. Jennings and her family like it fiery hot, then served over rice to mitigate the burn.
Cold Shrimp With Warm Cocktail Sauce
Salad With Anchovy-Mustard Vinaigrette
Anchovies add a salty depth of flavor to this bright, garlicky salad dressing. Here it’s tossed with radicchio and arugula, but it will work on any full-flavored salad greens. Try it on frisée, spinach or raw baby kale. If you want to make this in a blender, double the quantities so the dressing emulsifies properly. Leftovers will keep in the refrigerator for up to three days.
Praline Baskets With Pumpkin Puree
Stuffing-Stuffed Mushrooms
In this recipe, classic stuffed mushrooms become an excellent vegetarian Thanksgiving appetizer or side dish by replacing Italian bread crumbs with cornbread, and using traditional stuffing flavors like rosemary, celery seeds and poultry seasoning. Two tips for making these extra flavorful: Trim the mushroom caps a bit to provide more surface area for caramelization, and pre-roast them to reduce moisture and prevent them from getting soggy. You can turn these into a main dish by using about eight large portobello mushrooms instead of two-bite cremini mushrooms, and increasing the cooking time accordingly. If you’re lucky enough to have leftover Thanksgiving stuffing, you can use it in place of the cornbread mixture (you’ll need about 4 cups); just add two beaten eggs and grated Gruyère cheese to bind the mixture before piling it onto the mushrooms and roasting.
Vegetable Risotto
Dried mushrooms are reconstituted in hot water. Lettuce and fennel are sweated down in some hot butter in a big, heavy-bottomed pot, then set aside. Onion takes their place, followed by short-grained arborio rice, followed by hot water. Then the cook stirs and stirs, performing the old dance of risotto. (I tried the dish using the stock left by the mushrooms but found it too muddy and dank.) The mushrooms, diced small, go into the pot along with some more water and stirring. Then, at the end, the lettuce and fennel, some Parmesan, a heavy dusting of nutmeg and whatever butter is left. The result is remarkable, particularly in the matter of the lettuce, a mineral thread of flavor above the soft forest floor of the rice.