A Classic Thanksgiving From Scratch!

Well, with Thanksgiving being just days away, I thought it would be fun to whip up some recipes, get some inspiration going, some classic Thanksgiving recipes, a lot of which I grew up with, but my mom used to make for Thanksgiving and that I now love to cook for my family for Thanksgiving. So I actually have a little bit of a head start here on the turkey, and I'll talk about that in a minute. So first, I'm going to fill my big pot with water to get the mashed potatoes going. I'm doing this kind of like I would on an actual Thanksgiving morning. So a couple things I've made ahead. This is the cornbread for some cornbread stuffing that we'll work on here next. So we'll see if we can beat the clock. I actually have this morning exactly to film. So hopefully we're not late to our own Thanksgiving dinner. While you're watching, I would love to know what is one of your staple Thanksgiving dishes in your home. Okay, now for our cornbread stuffing. So I like to try to get something in the oven as soon as I can because the oven is going to be busy on a morning like this. So I thought it'd be fun to start with a stuffing. My mom, for years and years, has made her own stuffing at home. It is so much better than the store-bought kind, so I highly recommend trying that this year if you haven't already. I'm just going to start off by dicing my cornbread in little pieces. And you can also just do this with regular sourdough bread. Personally, I like the little bit of depth of flavor you get with the cornbread, but either way will work. So I want 12 cups of cubed bread here. Alright, next I'm going to melt some butter, so I'll do a cup of butter, and then we're going to saute a bunch of celery and onions. I don't measure the celery and onions, I would just say add a good bit. So we'll cut that up next. This is actually some celery from the garden still, and then I'll grab a couple onions as well. Alright, so we'll cook this for about 10 minutes, and then we're going to add some these until they are nice and soft, and then we'll add them to the bread. Wow, these are smelling so delicious, but we're going to add this to our cubed bread now. Next we're going to add a cup of water to this, and then we have a bunch of herbs as well. I do not like a dried out stuffing, I want it to be nice and moist and buttery, so that's what we're going for here. Okay, I'm going to do a tablespoon of garlic. I have garlic powder, and then, looks like I'll have to crush this up, about a tablespoon of dried thyme as well, and then my mom would usually add some chicken bouillon as well. I don't have any right now, so I'm going to skip that step, and then we'll also do a tablespoon of sage, and I don't have enough dried sage, so I'm going to have to grab some from the garden and we'll just dice that up and add that to this as well. Oh, and I almost forgot, I also want to add some parsley. With this I probably do closer to two tablespoons. Alright, we'll mix that all together, and then we'll press it into a pan and bake it at 350 for about 20 minutes. I just take my hands and press this down like that, and then we'll bake it. Alright, ready for the oven. This is normally the video where I share with you New Flora's monthly collection, and I am so incredibly disappointed that I did not have the package in time this month. Right now it's actually the day before the video goes live, so it's Sunday afternoon. We need to run out the door here again in a little bit, and I just got my package yesterday after it was already getting dark in the evening, so I'm super bummed, but the pieces are absolutely stunning and they are very much like Charles Dickens inspired, I would say, these beautiful vintage fabrics that are going to be so perfect for Christmas, but even ones that you can keep wearing throughout the year. So one of my favorite collections so far, and that collection releases this coming Wednesday at 2 o'clock. I'm hoping to share a little bit of try-on type stuff on Instagram, but we'll see if I actually get to it. It's a very busy week here as we're getting ready to host all those people for Thanksgiving, but my discount code GOLDENHOUR10 is good on everything in the entire collection as well as everything on the entire website, and I did want to also make note of the fact that they are having a gift card sale November 28 to December 1. Gift cards will be 20% off, plus I believe my discount code GOLDENHOUR10 will give you an extra 10% off, so really, really good time, and obviously that would make such a great Christmas gift, giving them a gift card to New Flora, or if you just want to also get a gift card for yourself to get a really good discount on your next order, you could totally do that as well. So, I know so many of you love when I can do these actual try-ons. I will try my best to have the actual clothes in time to try on again next month, but wanted to at least give you this little heads up. Okay, back to the kitchen. All right, our stuffing is done and looking so tasty. So, we're going to set that to the side now, and then actually moving on to our rolls, if you will. Now, I had planned to make dinner rolls from scratch, but I didn't get my sourdough fed in time yesterday, all the things, so I actually just pulled a bag of frozen sourdough croissants from my freezer, and I thought, you know what, that's actually a great option if you're still a couple days out from Thanksgiving, and so this can be a really good option if you want something that feels a little bit elevated, but you can actually do ahead of time. I've done that before with busy seasons coming up, just making a bunch of croissants when I have the time, and then baking them once I need them. I would say they bake quite well. I think the very, very best is still, you know, eating them the same day that you make them, but if you didn't know, you probably couldn't tell. So I am going to go ahead and just put an egg wash on these, and then we'll bake these. I just pull them straight out of the freezer, and then bake them for about 20 minutes. So we'll pop those in. Again, we're trying to keep the stove going pretty constantly this morning because we have a lot of things that need the oven, and in order to have it ready by noon, which is when we usually celebrate Thanksgiving, it's going to be pretty much nonstop. The water for my potatoes has been boiling for quite some time now, so while the croissants are baking, why don't we quickly throw these in there so they can start to boil? These are still potatoes from our garden, so that's always super fun. I'm just going to peel these and then dice them, and we'll throw them in the boiling water. I'm on to the next potato dish. So I pulled out and peeled some sweet potatoes, and sometimes I feel like Thanksgiving dinners can be a little heavy on the casserole side, and that same texture. Mashed potatoes are soft and squishy. Sweet potato casserole is, you have green bean casserole, there's all these different ones, and so I am going to, instead of making another casserole, plus I don't really care for the marshmallows on a sweet potato casserole, I am going to dice these and roast them, and then we'll still kind of give it that same flavor by drizzling some maple syrup, and we'll sprinkle some crushed pecans over the top, but it just helps with adding a little bit of variety with more textures, and then of course, you don't have all of the marshmallows on the topping of the sweet potato casserole as well. So I'm going to dice these up, and then I'll roast them at 500 for, I never actually time, probably about 20, maybe 30 minutes. Alright, so I'm going to put little bits of butter over these, and then we'll drizzle with maple syrup, and a little cinnamon. Moving on to one of my personal favorites on Thanksgiving, and that is green bean casserole. So I will link the recipe down below that I follow, but it does call for cream of mushroom soup, and I do not like buying bought cream of mushroom soup, so I'll also leave the recipe down there for this cream of mushroom soup recipe that I love, and I feel like that's really what makes the dish, making that cream of mushroom from scratch. So I am starting with just slicing up these mushrooms, then we'll saute them until they're tender before we proceed. It honestly does not take long, maybe 5-10 minutes, and it tastes so much better than the bought kind, so we'll do that quickly, and then throw the casserole together, kind of like this. Alright, so I'm just waiting for these to start releasing their liquid, looks like we're getting close. Potatoes are still going, and then I'm also heating up my green beans here for the casserole since they were frozen. Our mushrooms are tender now, so we're going to add ¾ cup of supposed to be chicken broth, I have freeze-dried chicken broth, so I'm going to do the ¾ cup of water, and then a little bit of the powder of my chicken broth as well. Alright, we'll add a little bit of garlic powder, some onion powder, if I have some, I'm not sure if I have any on hand right now, but I'll check, and then we'll make like a roux on the side with some flour and some milk, and we'll add that until it's thick. It's kind of just like you're making a gravy, honestly, but it's delicious. Add a little bit of salt and pepper, and then that's it for the cream of mushroom soup. Our green beans seem to be heated through, so we're going to take our cream of mushroom soup now, we'll mix that in, looks delicious. Also going to add a half a cup of whole milk along with some soy sauce, and then I'll do some seasoned salt, I'm using this Redmond's Real Salt, we'll put a bit of that on as well as some pepper, and then we're ready to put it into our dish here. Now, normally for pretty much anything I bake, I like to put parchment paper in, it just makes for super easy clean up. Unfortunately, I just finished my parchment paper off with the croissants, and so I might just oil my baking dish here to hopefully make clean up a little bit easier, but we'll mix this in good, and then you want to top it with some breadcrumbs. You can also do those crispy fried onions, I normally just do breadcrumbs, and it's delicious. If you don't have breadcrumbs, another really good option is crushed up Ritz crackers, not as good for you, but very tasty nonetheless, so some options for that, and then we'll pop this in the oven and bake it as well. Now, normally I would double the recipe for this pan, it's only about half full now, but it will work. I'm just going to sprinkle these on, and then we'll bake. Something I'm really noticing before I get ready to host Thanksgiving in a couple weeks is how much I'm in need of a few more baking dishes, or serving bowls, or things like that. This is what it looks like right now, and I'm going to bake this for about 30 minutes at 350. Well, it is after 11 o'clock, so final countdown, if we are practicing here for Thanksgiving, but I grabbed two bags of corn from the freezer. These are, well I actually had them thawing a little in the sink there. This is corn from our garden, so it always feels rewarding when you can cook from that, but whatever corn you have on hand will do, and I'm just going to do a pretty simple butter buttered corn recipe. I will try to leave for you in the description box below a corn casserole, that's also pretty common to do, and super delicious, but again, sometimes I don't want everything so breaded and heavy. I like to keep some things lighter if possible, either of them though is a delicious option. This one is a little less work as well, so I'm just literally going to let that heat up, then we'll add some butter, salt and pepper to that, but my potatoes are ready, so it's time to pull my mixer over here, because I have a couple of things actually that I need to do in there next. Alright, we'll strain the potatoes. I know some people like to save their potato water for a gravy, things like that. I actually prefer, that means my green beans are done, so let's quickly dump this in here, but I want to use my turkey drippings for the gravy, so we're just going to dump the potatoes in. Oh, that's looking so good. Let's see if I can get you a close up without burning myself. That's what that looks like, and obviously if I was actually cooking for a crowd right now, I would be a little bit more intentional here about keeping everything hot as best I could until we're ready to eat. I'm going to put an entire stick of butter in with my potatoes, as well as some salt and pepper and garlic powder. We are planning to host, I think around 50, 45 to 50 people for Thanksgiving this year, so I can use a little practice, although I will have help with food, thankfully. But let's pop this on, and then I like to first kind of mash these like this, and then we'll add the rest. The mashed potatoes are looking pretty smooth now, so I'm actually going to add some heavy whipping cream. I know some people like adding cream cheese, some people like adding milk. I love adding some heavy whipping cream. I feel like it makes them extra fluffy, so I'm going to add that now along with some parsley flakes. All right, let's see what it needs. Really good, but I'm going to add a little bit more salt. I think I could use that. But often I actually like to add shredded cheese to my mashed potatoes. Super delicious, but again, with it being a heavier meal, I do want to be mindful about how much of that kind of thing I add, just because you do also want to feel good in your stomach after this big meal. So we're definitely not going light on the butter, but I am going to pull back on the cheese for the potatoes. Now one last element is more butter. I love pouring a little bit of melted butter over the top of the potatoes. One, it looks nice, and then if you brown the butter, which is what I'm planning to do, it just also adds that depth of flavor that is absolutely delicious. So I'm actually going to leave it in here for the time being, but then right before we're ready to serve, I'll pour the butter on. Okay, we have a couple more things for our mixer here yet as the clock winds down. I put some softened cream cheese in my bowl here. I'm going to whip that first, and then I'm going to add some yogurt as well as, where's my honey? There we go, as well as my raw honey and some vanilla bean paste to this. Now what I'm doing is, yesterday I made a cranberry jello salad situation. I know that's really common during Thanksgiving. Often it's done in these big molds. You can do it in a pretty glass bowl, so many options, but it's a fun side dish to have on the table. I'm not doing dessert in this video. I feel like that could be its whole own separate video, and I've done quite a bit of dessert videos recently. And to be honest, the kids for school just had a pie bake-off, so we still have pies sitting around. Hudson did a pumpkin pie, Kyra did a banana cream pie, Lissy did an apple pie, and Abby did a peach pie, and it was so cute. Anyways, we're not going to do pie in this video, but pumpkin pie, apple pie are well loved. And apple cake is another really fun one for Thanksgiving, a cheesecake, so many good options. I really was tempted to make something like that in this video, but the truth is, if I were to do the entire Thanksgiving meal by myself, I focus heavily on things that I can make ahead. So I would probably gravitate toward possibly a cheesecake or something where the flavors are even enhanced by making it ahead of time. Same thing with this cranberry jello. The jello, I kind of needed to make yesterday already so that it would have time to set up and be nice and firm, and so that could be done even a couple of days in advance. You could even add the topping probably at least the morning, first thing in the morning of when you're going to be serving it. The croissants, like I said, can be made ahead of time. I love really, especially if I'm the one also hosting, because then you have the house to get ready and the table to get set and all of that. I really try to plan my menu accordingly so that I don't need to be all stressed and frazzled till the actual Thanksgiving dinner, because that is not what Thanksgiving is about. So a couple little tips there, but I'm going to start this and then we'll pull out the little jellos that I made. I just had these little yogurt glass containers that I had bought, who knows when, a long time ago, but I just saved the little jars so they're perfect for little individual servings now. Okay, I popped my cream cheese, yogurt, honey mixture into this piping bag, so we'll pipe that on top of this and then I'll top it with some more pecans as well. Let's see who's going to make our apple butter here, so she just put two sticks of butter into the mixing bowl and then I actually use apple butter, so I guess you could call this apple butter butter, because we add the actual butter as well. So the other thing that we love to do is pumpkin butter and I think I showed that to you recently, so it's a very similar idea and I'll try to leave the honey pumpkin butter for you as well. So first, let's see, we're actually going to mix just the butter, so we'll mix the butter until it is creamed and then we'll add probably a tablespoon or two of this butter. This is homemade canned apple butter, it is so delicious and in my opinion, again, a lot more flavorful than if you buy it bought, but of course, if you don't have homemade, you can also buy it. So we'll mix that next and then that is to go with our croissants. But where is the star of the turkey dinner, you might be asking, or of the Thanksgiving dinner, I should say, which is of course the turkey, right? Well, it has been cooking all night last night and it is warm and ready to serve, so this is a very delicious way to not be worrying about your turkey the morning of. My only complaint with this recipe is that it makes the turkey so fall apart a lot of the time that it's hard to keep it in that nice shape on your platter, but otherwise, this has worked so well for us and I'll leave that recipe for you in the description box below as well. It is super, super easy. Basically, you're going to put a whole bunch of butter, again, all over it and then pour this kind of like a brine over it that's like vinegar and Worcestershire sauce and some different things like that. I also stuffed the cavity with apples and then you literally let it cook for an hour and a half at 500 degrees and then you just leave it in the oven. Do not open the oven door and you literally let it sit in there all night. And then since we're not eating first thing in the morning and it has to be super wrapped up with aluminum foil to completely keep it sealed off because you want it to be super juicy and flavorful. So anyways, I like to just pop this. This is actually my roaster pan. It's what I use to put it in the oven because I don't have a giant pan that fits it otherwise, but then this morning we just put this in my roaster oven on a low temperature just to keep it hot. I don't want it sitting lukewarm there all morning. So we're going to try to transfer this to the dish now. It might fall apart. That's always my thing. It tastes the same whether it's like in a perfect shape or not, right? But it looks so pretty when you have it in its actual shape. These are my heat resistant gloves that I use to make cheese. Maybe that'll help us out. Usually Josh and I will both take an end and lift it out. I'm a little bit nervous. Somebody hold your breath for me. Oh dear. Well, it definitely fell apart, so it will definitely be tasty and delicious. I'm going to try to piece it together a little bit. Okay, so what would I do if that happened? When I'm literally, it's Thanksgiving morning, you have that little freak out moment. Oh no, it didn't plate like I wanted. It completely fell apart. What happens? Because the truth is things like that do happen when you're hosting. So I thought a little bit and I was like, you know what? Probably what I would do is just scrummage it the best that I could. So I went, added a whole bunch of sage to the outside of this. I was planning to put some around it anyway. We added some grapefruits, some oranges. It is not perfect and you can tell, but the truth of the matter is till the first two people are through the line, it's not going to be perfect anyway. So that's probably what I would do. The other option would be just to quickly pick it off the bone, serve it with a fork and you'd be good to go that way. But I think all that we have left to do this morning before lunch is to take our turkey drippings, which are looking so delicious and rich, and make a quick little gravy out of them. So all I'm going to do is make a roux with some butter and some flour and then we're going to add this. I'll taste it. If it needs any seasonings, maybe we'll add a little bit of salt and pepper. But I think that is all that we need. So I'm going to get to that now. Gravefully and humbly, I give you everything. Well that is a lot of food. The truth of the matter is this is kind of the bare bones. If I were hosting Thanksgiving, this is what I would start with and then add accordingly. I would love to add a salad. I actually got the ingredients for it and just did not get that far this time. But I wanted to make as much from scratch for you this morning as possible, so I hope it gave you some inspiration in your kitchen this week and with Thanksgiving coming up. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you were inspired and I look forward to seeing you next time. Bye friends!