What are your thanksgiving plans?

I will miss my family dinner this year, and most of the delish food I always look forward too. Tell me what’s on your menu and what activities you are looking forward to. And remember, be someone that someone else will be thankful for this year.

Just another day for me. I never understood people stuffing themselves into a food coma. I’d always just take what I’d normally eat on a regular day for a regular meal, and call it quits.

I’ll probably just bake a chicken-breast with taters and onions. Was gonna either do brownies (from a box, not from scratch) or try a peach “dump cake” for the first time.

My munchkins keep me busy, otherwise.

Going to my sister in-law’s for a family thing.

I’d rather stay home, but I’m an introvert. I tolerate other people, but most of them drain my energy.

That sounds like a nice meal. But I’d throw some carrots and garlic in there too.

Chicken’s frozen, so I always “brine” it in hot saltwater to melt it.

What happens, whether I cook it in a pan (lemon-chicken, curry chicken, etc.) or bake it, it always releases that water on cooking.

So what I do is layer the bottom of the “broiling pan”(?) with quartered onions, split apart, then the potatoes on top, then the chicken. So the chicken releases the water and essentially boils the onions, while the taters dry nicely on top to a crispy-chewy texture. And as long as the chicken gets up to temp, it’s good.

Oh, that Adobe spice on top is essential. Flavors the chicken, makes a nice “broth” for the onions.

If I mix them up, then the parts of onions sticking up into the air end up undercooked and have that raw-onion taste, and the submerged taters are pretty much exactly the texture of boiled potatoes.

It’s a combination of science + laziness to come up with the perfect solution. Garlic could probably be dunked along with the onions, but not sure where the carrots would fit in. I’d prefer chewy, so probably on top with the taters, but they wouldn’t need nearly as long to cook, so might get overdone.

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That is great advice for burgeoning cooks!

I live in Australia so will just be cursing the lack of response from US suppliers :slight_smile:

It’s the engineer in me, to come up with “optimal solutions”.

Eg, want lemon chicken? Brine the chicken as mentioned, cut lengthwise into 2-4 strips, or into bite-sized chunks, whatever you want. Brown in a big pan.

Glop a half-can of cream-o-chicken soup into it (like Campbell’s, where you add 1 can of water into the concentrate to thin out into soup). The water from the chicken thins out the glop. (yay!)

Keep cooking to cook the chicken through, and to boil down the “soup”.

Towards the end, add lemon juice (from half a lemon preferred, but a sploosh from bottled is okay). Boil a bit more.

Taste. Add sugar if too tangy, but not so much that you end up with lemonade chicken.

That’s it. Spoon over rice, drop some capers on top, done.

If you wanna get really lazy, fling some rice into the chicken-water + glop and cook the rice that way vs separately. One less pot to clean, at the expense of a bit longer cooking-time and possibly overcooking the chicken. But boiling it down to thicken vs cooking rice is usually about the same amount of time, so it usually works out.

Use the time off work to get some stuff done, and/or get drunk. Partner will probably make some kind of food. Her family doesn’t particularly like me, plus she is currently not on speaking terms with a lot of them so I doubt we’ll be going anywhere.

Going Snowboarding! :wink:

This is my slice of heaven, last year… Im the guy in front

I bought a new board on sale at end of last season, and have been waiting all year to go back on snow.

I dont care about eating Turkey. Everybody gets sick after that. Plus a couple of friends recently got Covid, so Im not interested in meeting indoors.

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Whoa…

Add some machineguns and a helicopter, and you got yerself a James Bond movie!

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Nice. Always wanted to try that.

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This is really cool. I can appreciate your method and I see why you wouldn’t add the carrots. I still suggest garlic, but you do you.

My family has been practicing with cooking kindablike this for a few years, since the best cooks left the household. Generally, we’d pick one dish and practice till we get it down perfectly, then move on to something else. We’ve got a lot of hands to make the workload pretty light, so it’s not too much to make multiple dishes at once and such.

Anyway, enjoy your holiday.

When I make garlic mashies (for one, ie, 2 medium taters or 3-4 teeny ones), I’ll use a whole bulb of garlic.

Just made spaghetti el essessino and use like 2/3 bulb in it. Only had a half-jar of sauce, so it was a meal-for-one. (Used too much oil and too much salt; rookie mistakes.)

I looooove my garlic, but it’s gotta be done right, else “raw garlic” taste just kills whatever it’s in.

Like with the onions not in the water/brine, they get all soft and wilty, but still have that nasty “raw onion” taste to 'em. Odd, and I can’t explain it, but the first time I made it the bad way by mistake… never again.

So yeah, I might try the garlic, see how it turns out.

Y’all have a good holiday!

My beloved mother and my nephew in law’s father both passed this year, both unexpectedly. I have been searching for a prayer to use this year. I have found some generic ones but none of them seem right for our sorrow. Does anyone have suggestions?

My 2 boys fly into town tomorrow!
Daughter and grandkids are coming along with son in laws folks and my mother. So happy to have whats left of the family all coming to our house and will be a crazy weekend full of fun and laughter.
Cherish what you have.

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Turkey legs seasoned with Jamaican curry and other spices. Cornbread with a hint of calypso yellow hot sauce and real corn. Rice and peas. Homemade cranberry sauce. At my moms place. There will be flashlights while I pass the time.

I forgot the whole roasted garlic cloves

I dont know why people bother making a whole turkey, its takes too long to cook, most of it goes in the garbage (bones etc,) difficult to cut.

Best alternative is to buy just the breast.

I know cooking the whole turkey has a much better presentation but so many down sides.

I’d rather skip the turkey than just use breast. I like turkey, but it’s dark meat for me.