Now that one of the biggest food days of the year is behind us, I’m turning to a bevy of winter salads to lighten my caloric load before the next holiday feast. From tangy citrus to crisp endive, our recipes are guaranteed to provide a light and refreshing twist to your next meal.
Photo: Sang An
In my family everyone has their annual Thanksgiving cooking assignments. My father-in-law roasts the turkey, my mother-in-law mixes up the cocktails, and my job is to make the gravy. With holiday must-haves like cranberry sauce, stuffing, mashed potatoes, turkey, green beans, sweet potatoes, gravy, and dinner rolls, there is no shortage of things to prepare.
What dish do you cook for Thanksgiving?
Photo: Romulo A. Yanes
Gravy. It’s the lubricant that makes overcooked turkey palatable, and perfectly cooked turkey that much better. It’s the magical liquid that anoints and unites the potluck of sides from various family and friends that get squished together on your plate.
The fact that the best gravy can only be made after the turkey is removed from the oven, during the 30 or so most stressful minutes of the whole day, when all the accompaniments must be heated and readied for their finishing touches, adds to the angst often associated with this beloved liquid.
But it needn’t be a nerve-racking process. The two best and easiest ways I know to make it involve flour in the form of a roux (a cooked mixture of fat and flour), or a slurry (a smooth mixture of flour and water). A roux-based gravy is made in a saucepan. The slurry-style gravy is made in the roasting pan. Both methods require a large liquid measure. Continue reading
Are you crazy for cranberries? A batch of Cranberry Cream French Toast from V.K. Rees Photography may just be your calling. Fluffy stacks of French toast skip the syrup and are slathered with cashew cream and cranberry sauce. This recipe is also vegan-friendly, as it replaces popular French toast ingredients such as egg and milk with coconut milk and tofu.
Photo: Romulo A. Yanes
Terror for a food editor comes in the form of a phone call or e-mail. Whether it begins timidly, as in “I think there’s a mistake in one of your recipes,” or launches swiftly into an irate tirade, “Don’t you proof these recipes?” your body wastes no time jumping into action. Your stomach grinds your innards like a food processor, while your hands quiver like a barely-set panna cotta.
I went through the agony late last week when, thanks to a reader’s call, I learned of a mistake in the latest Gourmet Holiday Special Edition. And of all the recipes for it to occur in, my luck would have it appear in one of the most popular ones: Caramel Pumpkin Pie.
How did this happen? It’s a story of food styling trumping convenience, the space limitations of print media, my passion for making recipes as user-friendly as possible, and simple human error.
Did you notice how high the fluted crust is on the gorgeous pie above? That’s because it’s baked in a 10-inch metal quiche pan with 2-inch high sides. Do you have one of those in your kitchen? Me neither! The food stylist and art director knew the pan would make a stunner of a pie, but for many of us that pan is the “Oh, sh*!” part of the recipe. If you don’t have it, and there’s no alternative, you’ll turn the page. Continue reading
If you had to blog about one ingredient every day for a year, what would it be?
Either garlic or sugar. I know, two opposite ends of the spectrum, but I love both equally!
I will never eat: a lot of types of meat. Some of it’s for ethical reasons, some of it’s for flavor.
Who would you love to have over for dinner?
Paula Deen, because she loves to laugh and eat!
What’s your go-to quick and easy dinner?
Garlic Brown Sugar Chicken. The one dinner where my two favorite flavors combine.
What’s your favorite restaurant and what do you order there?
In Jacksonville, my favorite restaurant is BB’s. I get the Warm Goat Cheese Salad (with dates, prosciutto, walnuts, and honey) and the Croissant Bread Pudding. It’s divine!
Thanksgiving is days away. Do you have your pumpkin-perfect pie or cake planned, prepped, or already-baked? For those of you just starting to handle Turkey Day dessert, don’t worry, I am right there with you. This year, time is not on my side, so I am going to combine two Thanksgiving classics into one seriously sweet dessert: Pecan Pumpkin Pie.
But my family requires more than one variety of pie on our Thanksgiving table, and since I already have pumpkin and pecan flavors covered, I need a recipe with flexibility and innovation, which is why Pumpkin Ginger Cheesecake Pie is going to be a delicious addition. The gingersnap crust is flavorful and fresh, while swirled pumpkin and cheesecake filling adds eye-catching, post-modern flair.
After the feast, any leftover pumpkin will be put to good use in a Pumpkin Spice Bundt Cake, and extra pecans will star in a killer Bourbon Pumpkin Cheesecake.
What is your favorite recipe for pumpkin cake or pie?
Just because Thanksgiving is still five days away, doesn’t mean we can’t start preparing for one of my personal favorite parts of the year’s biggest feast: the leftovers. Find inspiration for adding creative twists to what’s left from the big bird, mashed potatoes, cranberries, and more with 10 of our top recipes starring Thanksgiving leftovers.
Photo: Sang An
Don’t let all the turkey talk fool you, Thanksgiving is all about the side dishes. And we all know the star of the side show is the stuffing. This bready dish is a must have at any Thanksgiving table. One of the best things about this savory side is that there are so many different ways to prepare it.
What’s your favorite kind of stuffing?
Photo: Courtesy of Williams-Sonoma
How many times has this happened to you? You’ve gathered all the ingredients you need to bake—in my case, I was testing Gina Marie Miraglia Eriquez’s recipe for Gourmet Live’s Thanksgiving apple crostata (insanely delicious, by the way)—when you suddenly realize you don’t have the right-sized pan. The springform pan stashed deep in my cupboard turned out to be a 10-inch, not the 9-inch I needed for the recipe. Arrgghhh!
The closest cookware store to my apartment—where I now test recipes in a real-life kitchen—is Williams-Sonoma, about a 15-minute walk away. I love any excuse to wander around Williams-Sonoma, but bargain is not a word I associate with the place.
The sales clerk shows me the only 9-inch springform she has. This Kaiser LaFormer Plus pan (above) looks nothing like the light-colored and stained metal springform sides and bottoms that once filled a huge drawer in the old Gourmet magazine test kitchen. This new one is heavy, for starters, because it’s commercial grade steel coated with two layers of a non-stick ceramic surface. Heavy is a good thing with springforms, because the flimsy ones bend out of shape easily. And the locking mechanism on the side is serious. No baked good is messing with that lock!
The bottom is different, too. It’s wider, with an extra lip on the outside that makes the pan leak-proof. The Gourmet kitchen staff had a regular problem with butter leaking out of the old springform pans and onto the oven bottoms, causing smoke and a general mess. Continue reading
Thanksgiving is approaching and people are talking, texting, and tweeting turkey! But what about dessert? While pumpkin pie is a notable and traditional choice, have you ever thought about serving carrot cake? Adeline and Lumiere have a recipe for Carrot Cake with White Chocolate Ganache that you just might prefer to pie. Traditional carrot cakes are made with a smooth and tangy cream cheese frosting. Adeline and Lumiere’s version dares to be different. They frost their cake with a beautiful white chocolate ganache.
Photo: Kemp Minifie
Getting a bit tired of kale? Then get into collards! Kale may be the “it” green of the moment, but collards are right behind them, ready to grab the spotlight. They’re both members of the brassica family, that super-healthy group of plants that include broccoli and cabbage. Collards are distinctive for producing large flat leaves that get so big, Adam and Eve would have found them quite useful.
I’m excited about a glossy new collard that’s beginning to appear at farmers markets. The Cascade Glaze Collard is distinctive because the leaves look as though they’ve been polished to a shine with beeswax. It’s unmistakable at the top in the photograph above, and bunches of them really stand out in farmers markets when piled next to regular collards, one leaf of which is in the lower half of the photograph above.
According to Uprising Seeds, the Cascade Glaze Collard may be new to gardeners and growers, but it’s actually an almost 200-year old variety that was resurrected and improved upon by three noteworthy plant breeders: Alan Kapuler, Carol Deppe, and Jeff McCormack. Dr. Kapuler is the co-founder of Seeds of Change and the president of Peace Seeds, a self-described planetary genome pool service, while Carol Deppe, another biologist, is a freelance plant breeder and author of The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times. Jeff McCormack is the founder and previous owner of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.
Although many of us associate collards as the slow-cooked greens of the South, collards can be cooked quickly, in three to four minutes, the way they do it in Brazil. Just roll up the leaves like a cigar, and thinly slice them into fine shreds, then toss them in a hot skillet with olive oil, garlic, or bacon.
This video of how to do it shows me removing the center rib, but these days, I’ve stopped doing that. The stem is not only edible, it also provides a welcome textural contrast to the leaves. And Cascade Glaze Collard stems are particularly juicy. Just roll up the leaves parallel with the rib, and start slicing. I cooked up a bunch last night for dinner, and we loved them. They were sweeter than regular collards, and who’s going to complain about that?
Location: New York, New York
What is the first meal you ever cooked?
I think it was a pancake – a big, fluffy pancake. One of the picture books I loved the most as a child was a series called “Guri and Gura.” (The original is in Japanese but has been translated into several languages, including English.) In one of the books, Guri and Gura (a couple of field mice) find a huge egg. It’s so big they don’t know what to do with it, so they decide to make the biggest pancake ever. They go home and grab a big pan, flour, butter, milk, sugar, a bowl, an eggbeater, two aprons, matches, and a rucksack. The image of this big, yellow, fluffy pancake cooking in the middle of the forest, attracting all the animals nearby, caught my imagination and I kept on obsessing about huge pancakes. I think by the time I was 10 or 11, I was making pancakes for Sunday breakfast while my parents were asleep.
If you had to blog about one ingredient every day for a year, what would it be?
Hard question. Cheese, perhaps. Asian cuisines traditionally don’t use cheese, but otherwise, most dishes benefit from a bit of cheese in (or on) it. Cheese is great for baking as well, I can think of dozens of bread, cookie, and cake recipes using cheese. I could introduce various types of cheese – fresh, blue, smoked, goat, sheep, water buffalo – and probably by the end of the year I would start dabbling in cheese-making myself!
I will never eat:
Offal. I know there are many different recipes using various organs in European cuisines (not to mention Chinese,) but in Japan, organs are considered “unclean” parts of the animal and traditionally not eaten. Having grown up in a Japanese household, I stay away from organs. That said, I do occasionally eat chicken livers if they are cooked very well, but that was a recently-acquired taste for me.
We’ve all been there before: you ring the bell; the relatives open the door. “Happy Thanksgiving!” they cry, as all eyes turn toward the pumpkin pie you offer with outstretched arms. Faces fall, and you just know your hosts are thinking, Not another one! They graciously receive your pumpkin pie and place it among four others.
No one wants to be the fifth-pumpkin-pie guy. That’s why this year I’m reworking my Thanksgiving dessert repertoire. From straightforward to show-stopper, there are plenty of alternative desserts that taste just as sweet. For example, there’s Cranberry Walnut Tart, a trusty little number that comes together much like a pecan pie. Just press the crust into a fluted tart pan with removable bottom, pre-bake, and plop in the filling, a heady mix of brown sugar, corn syrup, cranberries and walnuts. The cranberries and nuts rise to the top during baking, offering tart and earthy counterpoints to the sticky sweet filling. For a more vibrant variation, try Cranberry Eggnog Tart (above), topped with slick cranberry jam. The truly ambitious can make a candied-orange and cranberry compote accompaniment.
What about chocolate? It’s often crowded out of a holiday pie lineup. Bring it back to the table in Twelve-Layer Mocha Cake. This cake is like an elegant cousin of tiramisù, dressed up for the holiday in its coffee and mocha buttercream best. With a chocolate curl on top, when it’s good it’s very, very good—and it can never be bad.
In my cookbook, a trifle is no simple thing. Why wait for Santa’s sleigh when you can enjoy a stunning Almond Sherry Christmas Trifle right away? The best part is you’ll be enjoying an apéritif on the couch while the turkey tenders run around like you-know-whats. This trifle is always best when made ahead, which gives the cake layers (and you) time to soak up the Sherry.
What are you bringing for Thanksgiving dessert?
It may come as no surprise that Thanksgiving is one of our favorite days of the year at Gourmet Live. Turkey, trimmings, and no shame in second helpings of it all? What’s not to love? This year, I’m even more excited to pile my plate high thanks to seven brand-new recipes from our Thanksgiving for 2 or 20 menu.
Recipe developer Gina Maria Miraglia Eriquez and Gourmet Live senior editor and recipe cross-tester Kemp Minifie wowed us with their culinary prowess, producing not one, but two can’t-miss takes on turkey. For larger crowds, opt for our Citrus-Sage Roast Turkey with Gravy, or skip the big bird and apply the same flavor profile to a hearty turkey breast.
The Thanksgiving table wouldn’t be complete without my favorite part of the meal: the side dishes. We’re serving up Roasted Butternut Squash Ribbons Salad; Mashed Potato and Cauliflower Gratin; Cabernet-Cranberry Sauce with Figs; Challah, Sausage, and Dried Cherry Stuffing; and the ultimate sweet finale in the form of an Apple Crostata with Spiced Caramel Sauce.
Have we tempted your taste buds yet? Check out our full Thanksgiving for 2 or 20 menu and weigh in below with your favorite dish from the year’s biggest feast.
Thanksgiving can be a lot to handle, but let’s do it right this year. From breakfast parfaits to tasty turkeys, we’ve wrangled the best in Thanksgiving recipes from across the Web.
Before Dinner
Prepare for guests who may arrive hungry. You don’t want to overstuff them, so we suggest that you leave out some light snacks and nibbles, such as Baked Sweet Potato Chips from the Minimalist Baker. Chips often call for dip, so whip up a batch of Butternut Hummus from The Little Things. Family Style Food also has a yummy recipe for Ricotta Flatbread with Pomegranate Salsa. This dish is flavorful, yet light so guests can munch safely, feeling satisfied and never uncomfortably full.
Dinner
Begin the meal with soup. You can even make the soups the day before and properly cool and reheat them for Thanksgiving consumption. Cauliflower-Kale Soup with Dill and Roasted Chestnuts from So Hungry I Could Blog is a light and aromatic soup thanks to the fresh dill and drizzled olive oil. Chopped and roasted chestnuts additionally garnish the soup and provide a buttery crunch. Pumpkin Cauldron Soup from Warm and Snug and Fat (pictured above) looks gorgeous in its toasted pumpkin shell. To make the soup, reserved pumpkin flesh is sauteed with spices including sage and nutmeg. The dish is then layered with cream and stock in a baked pumpkin cauldron. Continue reading
Photo: Stephanie Foley
November is World Vegan Month and we’re celebrating by incorporating more meat and dairy free meals into our diets. We found out that giving up these foods doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice flavor. This Curried Carrot Almond Soup proves that vegan meals can be healthy, ethical, and absolutely delicious.
What’s your favorite vegan dish?
Photo: Sang An
Get a load of this startling statistic: Seventy-four percent of Americans buy cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving as opposed to making it, according to the folks at Ocean Spray. What? So only 26 percent of us are turning those bags of berries piled high at the supermarket into homemade sauce?
Come on, people! Of all the iconic elements of Thanksgiving, cranberry sauce is the easiest and fastest to make. There’s the back-of-the-bag raw version in which you grind the cranberries in the food processor with sugar and a chopped-up orange, and the cooked version, which requires nothing more than dumping a bag of berries into a pot, adding sugar and water, and cooking it until the berries pop, a mere 10 to 15 minutes.
Despite the ease of making sauce from scratch, I think I know the allure of the jellied canned stuff. When I was a kid, my mother bought it until she discovered what a cinch the homemade sauce is. My brothers and I loved to open the can at both ends, push the cylinder of jelly onto a plate, then gleefully watch it slip, slide, and jiggle as we carried it out to the table. Continue reading
