The problem I have with the endless emails and web articles I see about “16 Thanksgiving side dishes” and “10 million pies” and “what to make for Thanksgiving this year” is that, like many people, I like to make the same things for Thanksgiving every year, and I don’t use recipes for most of them. When I’m in charge of dinner, I generally make turkey, mushroom-sage stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, roasted sweet potatoes, creamed spinach, and pecan pie. And I don’t need other people telling me how to make those things, as I’ve already done them, thanks.
I was going to do a roundup of Thanksgiving recipes from the past three years of my blog, only to discover that I haven’t really written most of them down – for the above reason, that I don’t really follow recipes for this sort of cooking. I do use a recipe for pecan pie, but it’s pulled straight from Baking Illustrated so I don’t really want to reprint it here and have the fine folks at Cook’s Illustrated come after me with pitchforks. I have found a few good recipes to mention here – the fresh cranberry relish with a whole orange that I like so much, sweet potato dinner rolls, the spinach recipe that isn’t remotely healthy but tastes fantastic, and a cranberry tart that doesn’t replace pecan pie in our household but is still really nice.
And, since I’ve been so lame on the Thanksgiving post front, here are some posts from other bloggers giving a nice range of holiday experience and planning from past years, many of whom avoided all kinds of stress by simply leaving out the turkey:
Aunt Mary’s creamed spinach recipe needs to be in the national archives.