Thanksgiving Menu

Seitan Roulade, Mashed Potatoes and Gravy, with sauteed Green Beans.

Thanksgiving meals are something that most families have traditions of their own. Some of the most popular traditions are having turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, mac and cheese, and pumpkin pie. My family is very traditional when it comes to the food we make for Thanksgiving in every way except the turkey. Growing up, a typical Thanksgiving meal included stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce, pumpkin and apple pie.

This year for Thanksgiving I was asked to the majority of the meal. I thought long and hard about which recipes I wanted to use and how I could apply what I had learned in my time in Culinary to the meal. I decided to make a seitan roulade in place of the stuffing, make mashed potatoes and gravy, sauté some green beans with garlic, and make deep dish apple pie. I made a cranberry sauce to drizzle on the roulade and also just to eat.

Deep Dish Apple Pie

For the Roulade, I made a filling out of feta cheese, cream cheese, parmesan cheese, thyme, and basil. For the mashed potatoes, I boiled some potatoes and added milk and butter to them. The gravy was a recipe that my culinary professor gave me, and it has become my favorite gravy.

For the green beans, I boiled the green beans in water for a few minutes then put them in ice water to cool them down before sautéing them with some minced garlic and oil. For the apple pie I followed a basic deep-dish apple-pie recipe from my textbook. The meal was a huge hit with my family and the apple pie has become one of their favorite pies.

French Hot Chocolate

My family has a tradition where we put the Christmas tree up Thanksgiving night. One of the things we do is drink hot chocolate and eat candy canes. It has always been one of my favorite traditions that we do. However, I am not a big fan of hot chocolate and even though I still drink a cup or two because its tradition, I wasn’t really looking forward to drinking it.

This year though, I decided to make a French hot chocolate. I had made it for the first time this semester in my beverages class and had really enjoyed it. So, I decided that I was going to introduce my family to it. It was as easy as melting chocolate chips with corn syrup and mixing it with whipped cream. They loved it and my cousins’ children decided that they must learn how to make it so they could have it even if I wasn’t home.