Can Americans (or people who live there) tell me what sides you have at thanksgiving?

[cactusdog]

In particular, is sweet potato casserole a side or a dessert?
The recipe I'm looking at has candied pecans and marshmallows on top!
Looks delicious but I can't find if it's a side.

Do you just serve everything up together? Like I keep seeing pumpkin pie and pecan pie as "sides" for thanksgiving dinner?

We make gravy by making a roux with pan drippings and flour, then adding turkey or chicken broth. Some people add cooked giblets (liver, etc.) but we skip that part.

Well quite @quickkimchi
However the bread in a can and yams with marshmallows don't sound particularly traditional to me. They sound like the traditions were re-written in the mid to late 20th century!

Pumpkin pie and a turkey sounds like something that has more of a connection with what the pilgrims may have eaten.

I love this thread, I'm so excited for my thanksgiving meal 😄

I'm an American. I've just shared my Thanksgiving Mac & Cheese recipe on another thread:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/4082527-Come-and-tell-me-your-dull-and-unexciting-news-7-Calmly-through-the-day

I'm doing ham this year as it's only the four of us for dinner.

Are Roast potatoes not a 'thing' in the US?

I do them, but with a prime rib of beef or a chateaubriand. Turkey gets mashed potatoes. I'm in New York, so adjacent to New England.

I do a holiday mashed potatoes dish made with butter, cream cheese, and sour cream that is the food of the gods, but not this year.

This is a very typical American thanksgiving I grew up from all my family. We have green bean casserole (from Campbell soup recipe) , pumpkin pie, sweet potatoe pie or sweet potatoe casserole with marshmallow topping or walnut/pecans/any tree nut toppings, mashed potatoes, baked Mac N Cheese, turkey stuffing, jellied cranberry as a turkey spread, whole wheat dinner rolls

www.campbells.com/recipes/green-bean-casserole/

(I like the Smokey mashed potato the most but it isn't traditional)

Claudia what I meant was that people cooking Thanksgiving meals now are possibly following their grandmothers' recipes from a magazine ad or box of processed food.
Anyway, it's not a historical reenactment, it's a homely festive meal with a nod to its origins but mainly made up of things your family likes and finds comforting. Often there is some tension between the desire to keep things the same year after year and the desire to add new things, and it can get a bit out of hand if you add new dishes every year without archiving old ones.
I thought the Friends episode where everyone wants different kinds of potatoes (including Tater Tots) was pretty accurate.

Blueberries 'Try these twists' said every recipe from an American magazine since the beginning of time
I love those chipotles in the little tins, I puree them with a stick blender and use them on pizza and allsorts.

@quickkimchi

Blueberries 'Try these twists' said every recipe from an American magazine since the beginning of time I love those chipotles in the little tins, I puree them with a stick blender and use them on pizza and allsorts.

You should definitely try the smoky mashed potato :)

It is from southern living magazine cookbook

@cactusdog

In particular, is sweet potato casserole a side or a dessert? The recipe I'm looking at has candied pecans and marshmallows on top! Looks delicious but I can't find if it's a side.

Do you just serve everything up together? Like I keep seeing pumpkin pie and pecan pie as "sides" for thanksgiving dinner?

My family treat it as a side lol

I absolutely hate the marshmallow topping ones

For American biscuit making, make sure you have the right flour - soft wheat flour. Makes all the difference. Doves Farm does it in the UK.

If in the Nottingham or Derby area, Annie's Burger Shack make good biscuits and sausage gravy (though the biscuits are square which weirded me out at first, and it has to be ordered at breakfast time which was an odd time to get a takeaway for me, but we did it for my DD2's birthday in August so we had time to do so).

As others said, it's regional. My paternal family also, for some reason, always had honey-baked ham as a side (often from the honey baked ham company - they had it as a main at Easter, it was a whole thing). There was also creamed corn which I would not recommend. Green beans and other veg in all the gravy tended me to be favourite each year.

For desserts-as-sides, my aunt made a great pumpkin cheesecake though it needed cool whip around the edges as the crust got quite dry.

@BiBabbles

For American biscuit making, make sure you have the right flour - soft wheat flour. Makes all the difference. Doves Farm does it in the UK.

If in the Nottingham or Derby area, Annie's Burger Shack make good biscuits and sausage gravy (though the biscuits are square which weirded me out at first, and it has to be ordered at breakfast time which was an odd time to get a takeaway for me, but we did it for my DD2's birthday in August so we had time to do so).

As others said, it's regional. My paternal family also, for some reason, always had honey-baked ham as a side (often from the honey baked ham company - they had it as a main at Easter, it was a whole thing). There was also creamed corn which I would not recommend. Green beans and other veg in all the gravy tended me to be favourite each year.

For desserts-as-sides, my aunt made a great pumpkin cheesecake though it needed cool whip around the edges as the crust got quite dry.

Typically we use wheat dinner rolls that use yeast.

But maybe some people do use buttermilk breakfast biscuit but not from my experience. Btw, I make breakfast biscuits for work and the secret is clean cut (no edges being mashed together) and keep your fat (butter, shortening, whatever) cold and don't overwork it.

sallysbakingaddiction.com/soft-dinner-rolls/ dinner rolls

My family is from the South and Midwest sides would be:
-Dressing (made out of hard crouton like bread cubes, not crumbs. Plenty of onions and celery.)
-mashed potatoes (generous with the butter)
-sweet potato casserole (mashed sweet potato with a bit of apple pie spice again plenty of butter and marshmallows on top)
-green been casserole made with condensed soup and fried canned onions on top
-cranberry sauce
-giblet gravy
-homemade clover leaf roles
-ambrosia salad (oranges, coconut, grapefruit and Marciano cherries

After
-pumpkin pie
-pea can pie
-coffee
-sweetened whipped cream for the pies

After this menu, everyone falls into a diabetic coma. A lot of these dishes are “traditional.” They go back to times before fresh veg and fruit were available in late November most places. I think the menu is changing and lightening up these days.

If you are looking for Thanksgiving recipe ideas, here is a good link:

www.southernliving.com/thanksgiving

...we also often had buttered rolls but these are hard to explain and I don’t know how you’d make them (I think we would get them in one of those tins that explodes when you open it).

I make Parker House rolls. This is what my exMIL used to do (southern midwest). They're a soft yeast roll. I cut the dough into triangles and roll them like a croissant. There are recipes online - they're delicious.

Biscuits would be more of a breakfast or brunch dish for me, served with sausage gravy. YY to using softer flour for authentic American biscuit recipes.

Sausage gravy:
Fry breakfast style sausage on a pan. Skinless sausage results in more fond on the pan.
Skim off a good deal of the fat from the pan, then turn on the burner under the pan.
You can crumble a sausage patty or two into the pan for extra sausagey texture in the gravy if you wish.
Add flour to form a roux.
Add milk and whisk over medium heat to create what is basically a sausage-flavoured bechamel.
I like a little nutmeg and a pinch of ground sage in my sausage gravy.

For turkey gravy -
Roast your turkey and remove it from the roasting pan after resting it for a while.
Skim off a lot of fat from the roasting pan with a spoon. Leave a little on the pan.
Make sure you leave as much of the turkey juices as possible on your pan when you skim. The fat will be clear/yellow, and the juices should be under a layer of fat, and brownish in colour.
Put the pan on the stovetop and turn on your burner to low/medium.
Add a few heaped tablespoons of plain flour and mix with a whisk to form a roux over low-medium heat. Don't burn the flour (burned = dark brown colour). It should end up thickened to a firm paste and a light caramel colour.
Turn up the heat, add dry white wine if you wish (please don't use a sweet wine) followed by hot veggie water in which you have steamed your dinner veg, whisking continuously to break down lumps of roux. The more liquid you add, the thinner your gravy will get. Adding hot liquid is best. If you throw out your veggie water by accident, you can use a thin turkey or chicken stock instead.
Taste and season.

Are Roast potatoes not a 'thing' in the US?

I don't think they are, sadly.

I always do roast potatoes though. We have them on all the big occasions apart from the Fourth of July.

I basically serve an Irish Christmas dinner for Thanksgiving, with a few nods to American traditions and some omissions from the Irish side, and we have the same but with roast beef at Christmas.

I've never tasted, let alone served the sweet potatoes with the marshmallows. exMIL, homecoming queen of her high school, circa 1949, and in a great many ways a poster child for Norman Rockwell's America, never did either. I boil them, mash them with butter and molasses and S&P, sprinkle finely chopped pecans on top, dot with butter, and put in the oven for a few minutes.

For veg I do green beans, carrots, Brussels sprouts, and roast parsnips. ExMIL always served cauliflower, carrots, and green beans, mashed potato, no parsnips. Also cornbread stuffing, which tasted too sweet to my tastebuds.

I do Mary Berry's/ my mum's sage and onion stuffing, with added chestnuts, and I use cubed baguette, not breadcrumbs.
No celery, no cornbread, and it goes into the turkey for roasting.
I've seen photos of American friends' 'dressing' which seemingly gets boiled in a saucepan with turkey giblets added. Not for the faint of heart...

For dessert at Thanksgiving we have pumpkin pie, and for the second year in a row we'll have pecan pie too. For Christmas we'll have those two again, plus mince pies and tiramisu, possibly a baked chocolate pie and/or a pavolva, and a variety of cookies. I do tiramisu because it's the closest I can get to a trifle - the DCs are not keen on traditional Irish sherry trifle. They don't care for traditional Christmas cake either, or plum pudding, and it's too much bother to go to just for myself.

I make cranberry sauce with cranberries, orange juice, a little grated orange rind, and sugar.

My local classical music station always plays this around Thanksgiving

'Lime Jello Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise'

You can buy jars of gravy but it looks like a by-product of cement mixing.

I'm a great believer in shortcuts, but I make my own gravy.

In particular, is sweet potato casserole a side or a dessert?

It's a side dish.

You might think at first glance that something sweet wold be revolting with a savoury gravy, but actually they go well, a bit like cheese popcorn and caramel popcorn do. They bring out something in each other.

I grew up in a Korean immigrant household and so our Thanksgiving dinner would have the turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, green beans almandine, gratin potatoes, mashed sweet potato, along with grilled whole fish with a spicy sauce, chap chae, kimchi, and some other Korean sides. A pumpkin pie was always purchased, but nobody ate it beyond a couple bites.

My thanksgiving dinner this year is typical of the ones we usually have:
Turkey
Brioche, sausage, chestnut, apricot and sage stuffing
Spiced cranberry sauce
Green beans almandine
Brussels sprouts slaw
Roast butternut squash with pomegranate, feta and candies pecans
Mashed potato
Parker house rolls
Pumpkin panne cotta
Apple pie

@cactusdog

White sausage gravy and biscuits is something I really want to try one day

I'm in the UK but have lots of family in America and the first time I went over we had biscuits and gravy and now it's one of my favourite ever things. My mum makes it for us now and we usually have it on Christmas morning, probably going to miss out on it this year! My parents usually go over for thanksgiving and I'm always so jealous of all the photos it always looks amazing.