What is your favorite Thanksgiving side dish?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Don’t like thanksgiving food ducks
ducks, if supposed to be a link, not working. I’m not figuring out what you mean with the ducks
If it walks like a duck… 😉
Brussel sprouts with panchetta, roasted. But I’m not going to get any tomorrow.
This dish is the best kept secret in the food world. I grew up choking down bitter, over-ripe orbs which had been boiled within an inch of their life. When we discovered this dish, I could not quit eating it. It is one of our favorites year round.
totally agree;
is mince pie considered a side dish or a main course?
Does anyone younger than fifty even eat mince pie? Or has it fallen into disrepute along with fruitcakes. Bad ones of either are dreadful but the good ones are wonderful.
we’ll see – just bought one in my food store yesterday; maybe when I go back there again the same large stack of mince pies will still be there. Maybe I will try to cook one next though
Homemade mince pies may be more endangered than the ones still made by bakeries. Have never made one myself (although once made some mince tarts that were very good). OTOH, have never purchased a pumpkin or pecan pie.
Johnnie Walker Gold.
Some Jameson Irish. But I won’t be getting that tomorrow either.
That potato, ham, and cheese casserole with crushed potato chips on top. But I won’t make it, because that stuff is a diet nightmare. So, alternatively, sweet potatoes with cinnamon and a bit of honey butter.
Stuffing, although I really do love the cranberry sauce out of a can and have given up on making it fresh because the canned stuff is better.
Plus it’s hard to mold fresh cranberry sauce into the traditional can shape.
Turkey is never complete for me without fresh, uncooked cranberry-orange relish. It also goes well with baked ham and chicken breasts in artichokes and cream.
Everything with lots of gravy on it.
Nothing. I don’t bother with side dishes.
Turkey. Ham. Homemade bread rolls.
All else is dross.
Crow.
Beat me to it.
2nd favorite?
Revenge. Best served cold.
AG
P.S. As you might guess, I am not much of a holiday guy. As William Burroughs so aptly put it…”Don’t tell me when to be happy!!!” Why? ‘Cuz then they can tell you when to be everything else, too. When to shop, when to vote and for whom, when to be afraid (Currently? Always. Bet on it.), when to be sad, when to be a jingoistic, firecracker-popping, rockets’ red glaring fool and so on.
Bet on it.
AG
My wife makes a green bean casserole which is different from any other I have ever tasted. It is the one thing she makes where I am not allowed in the kitchen to see what she does that makes it different.
Anything cranberry. Though that’s only because pumpkin pie is a major food group, not a side dish…
Not even Boston Market limits a non-Thanksgiving turkey meal to one side dish.
What I want is stuffing (with apples and toasted pecans), yams (sauteed in butter), brussel sprouts (prepared any way as long as they aren’t mushy), butternut squash, cranberry sauce, rolls and pumpkin, pecan, and mince pies.
What I don’t want is gravy, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, and any creative version of pumpkin pie.
Pie. Pie. More Pie. It’s piemageedon here. It’s one thing I do and it’s time to reap my reward.
http://comealongcafe.com/thanksgiving-pie-sale-nov-27.html
Looks great, will definitely stop by sometime.
what’s you’re thinking re: mince pies?
mmm…mince pie. I’m immediately biased against mixing fruit and meat, but the spice pallet is appealing. I’m not currently doing meat pies, but will be rolling out some savory ones with meat this winter, so who knows where that will lead. A year ago I would have told you I don’t do fruit pies, and now it’s what I sell most.
So mince pie…I’ll have to look into that.
Holy crap! A local fellow foodie here at The Pond!
Jeff, those look great! And from what I read about The Kitchen Factory, it is a great place for those who want the resources of a professional kitchen without breaking the bank. Kudos to those who came up with that idea. It is a great reasource.
The Kitchen Factory is a great concept. Melissa, who runs it, is a true foodie. I’m just casting about in the river when I get a break from running my household.
Pie is the entire reason for thanksgiving around my place.
Cinnamon baked yams. From an old Good Housekeeping cookbook from about 1980 or so. I make ’em every year. Everybody flips.
Cinnamon baked yams that everybody flips for sounds intriguing. Tried google and didn’t come up with a god match. Maybe you could post the recipe here?
Guilt.
Heh. That’s not my favorite dish, but one I’ve been served often. I’ve learned to say no when someone offers.
For me, favorites are a good stuffing (I’ve had a variety) with a rich turkey gravy, and green beans with bacon bits. For dessert, it’s pumpkin pie with whipped cream.
Sorry, my Bad.
Not my guilt … my family’s. Every Thanksgiving, I put pictures of starving people, animals being mistreated, Xtian malfeasance, and so on on (everybody gets different pictures and texts … this is SOOOOOOO easy) each of their facebook pages. Lori;Wally;Suze(siblings), Earl;George;Cynthia;Rupert(don’t ask)(nephews and nieces). My mother (85 and refuses to get on a computer) won’t let ANYBODY unfriend me.
Even more better, they live in Kansas, I live in Mass. Can I get an AMEN!!!!!
cranberry sauce. My favorite is homemade cranberry-orange sauce (cooked, not Marie2’s uncooked relish). Stuffing is also essential, with gravy, and some kind of sweet potato dish (not yams).
I’m in my kitchen already today, cooking the things that can be done ahead of time. Tomorrow is the turkey, mashed potatoes, homemade yeast bread, and baked sweet potatoes.
Today I’m fixing my favorite green beans, where I take something perfectly healthy and ruin it to perfection. 😉 I broke up fresh green beans and set them aside and fried bacon and drained it, sauteed chopped onion and garlic in the bacon grease and dumped it all into the beans. Added water, salt, and pepper and they’ve been cooking for four hours. Tender, delicious, homestyle green beans, my favorite.
My mom always says these beans will taste like heaven, because I’ve cooked the hell out of ’em.
The bacon grease is questionable, but cook for four hours? That’s a lot of energy to boil off all vestiges of nutrients and fiber.
I know! 😉 When they’re done, they practically melt in your mouth and the flavor is amazing. It’s an old Appalachian thing and my family loves them. The kitchen smells good, too.
Donnah, as a fellow Buckeye with a long Kentucky lineage, I know EXACTLY what you’re talking about. A bowl of those beans, a good onion and a slab of cornbread. I would call that the perfect meal, all by itself. Don’t let any furrowed brows dissuade you. You go right ahead, lady!
You’re welcome at my table any time, Mike!
I hope you and yours have a great day.
I’ll throw in a Hoosier vote for your beans, donnah.
Sounds like how my mother described what her Austrian immigrant mother (who had been employed as a cook) did with vegetables. And why my thrifty and nutrition minded mother hardly ever served anything but in-season or frozen vegetables quickly steamed with practically no water.
Curious question in a way. To me, so many dishes are part of the tradition that it’s hard to choose. A good wine and our traditional cranberry sherbet are essential for us too.
Time to go home and start cooking for tomorrow. The turkey has been brining for a couple of days now. I make the cranberry sauce the day before, and get the apple pie filling done so it can go into the shell tomorrow (we like hot apple pie for dessert).
A few other small tasks — eg. toast pinenuts and bread cubes, and cook up the turkey sausage, for the stuffing. The more I get done tonight the less stress in the kitchen tomorrow.
I hope all you frogpond denizens have a happy thanksgiving!
Yams, diabetes-inducing yams…
My favorite side dish is stuffing with gravy.
Vodka
Greens and cornbread.
I’ve been low-carb for awhile, but Thanksgiving is like epic cheat day–and my mom has a stuffing recipe with sausage in it. It is ridiculous as a stand-alone casserole of browned fat-soaked bread, studded with sausage and celery. I could probably just flip off all the other Thanksgiving foods, and just eat, like, two pounds of sausage stuffing, wash it down with some asti spumante (Tickle Me Elmo Pio), and call it a good life. Since I value my breathing privileges, I try to maybe eat only 6 oz or so at a sitting, but damn, that stuff. With or without gravy. It’s even good cold the next day. It is sick but good food.
My mom might have the same stuffing recipe or at least one that’s very similar by your description and I couldn’t agree more with every word you said. Thanksgiving? Hell, it’s probably my favorite side dish period, though it only gets made at Thanksgiving. We love that stuff so much that mom makes an extra large batch and bakes what won’t fit in the bird in a pan of it’s own. Not as moist as the stuffing stuffing the turkey, sure, but still devine. Enjoy!
Does a midnight turkey sandwich on toasted homemade wheat/corn/oatmeal bread with lots of pepper, mayo, lettuce and cranberry sauce count as a side dish? How about if I never really stop eating all day and evening? 🙂
The coffee in the car on the way home.
My wife’s stuffing (with celery , onions, sage and turkey giblets), cranberry sauce, pumpkin or apple pie. ;))
Gimme Yams. If I were to go vegetarian in the coming years (I never seem to get around to it) Yams would be my fall back gooey, almost protein like substitute for animal parts. There’s always that statistic that things like rice and peanuts are twenty percent vegetable protein, so I would spend my days eating yams like a silverback gorilla with good colon health from all the fiber.