Easy Thanksgiving Side Dishes From Scratch

Welcome to my kitchen again today. I am so excited to share with you some easy Thanksgiving side dishes. These could really be good for any of the holidays coming up. Christmas coming up for us in the U.S. here. Thanksgiving is literally what, three days away? And so I thought it would be fun to share with you some easy dishes that are still from scratch but don't take, you know, a week to prepare. And so these are some of our favorites. We are planning to host Thanksgiving at our house this year as well and so some of these are ones that I am planning to use this year and so I hope it helps you out as well. While you're watching, let me know in the comments what your current favorite holiday side dish is. I would love to hear from you as well. I'm actually starting off with some stuffing. This is no regular stuffing. This is my mom's recipe and I remember growing up she would always get such rave reviews over her stuffing and then I've made it here for friends and family and same thing. Everybody just loves it. It is a pretty like chunky stuffing and so I think people really like that. The flavor is absolutely phenomenal. So what I'm doing is cutting some bread that I made last week. I think it's been in the fridge and so you can use fresh bread but stale bread also works great for this. I'm just gonna cut this up into little cubes and then we will saute our onions and celery and all the things. So let's start off with with the bread first. And then we're gonna measure this out. Mom's recipe calls for 24 cups of cubed bread but I think I am gonna go ahead and do half that. So we're gonna see if we have 12 cups here because I think that will be plenty for us. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. I'm gonna go two cups short. We have 10 cups here and it's not that picky. So we're gonna go with 10 cups cubed bread and then we need to melt some butter. Yeah. I'm gonna add one stick or half a cup of butter. While the butter is melting I'm gonna go ahead and chop up some celery as well as onions. This is just to taste. Mom would just throw it in. You know how moms do. And I do the same now. So I will put in, I like a good amount. I'll probably do at least one whole big onion like this. I might even go for two. Just adds really good flavor and then I would do, I don't know, I might do half of the stalk of celery and then we will sauté that in the butter. There you go. Just like a princess. I need my dress on and then I'm a princess. All right and this is about what I'm going for. They are translucent now but we still have a little bit of butter on the bottom. And then I have a whole bunch of herbs and spices here that I want to add. We're going to do some sage, some parsley, oregano, garlic powder, and thyme. These add such good flavor to this dish. Obviously you can play around with amounts that you want to use but I'm gonna do about half a tablespoon of every one of them except the oregano, wherever it is. Can't see from the top. This one I am gonna do more like half a teaspoon. And parsley I'm gonna do a little bit more, more like a whole tablespoon. I'm gonna add a cup of water to this as well and then we're just gonna mix it and bake it at 350 for about 20 minutes or until the bread is like golden. This brings so many memories of a kid at Thanksgiving. My favorite part of having stuffing was getting it when it was in this stage. I would go and taste it because it tasted so good. The bread was all nice and soft. Anyways, all those herbs smell so good. I'm just gonna take wet hands and press this down. I like to press it pretty firm here. All right, that's what it looks like right now. We'll pop it in the oven for 20 minutes at 350 and then it'll be done. A big key for staying on top of things and not feeling overwhelmed when you're hosting over the holidays is to stay on top of the dishes. So I just washed up what I used here for the stuffing. I find that that makes such a difference at the end of the day if I can look over and there's maybe one or two dishes from the last thing I did versus an overflowing sink. It just makes me so much more likely to want to host again soon in the future and it really doesn't take much time to just do little bits as you're using the dishes. So a little tip. I completely forgot about the chicken boulan. So my stuffing, thankfully, actually my stove is still preheating but I do also want to add half a tablespoon of chicken boulan or half of a cube of the chicken boulan to my stuffing. This just adds really really good flavor. So I'm gonna quickly mix that in yet. Obviously you wouldn't usually just eat a plate full of stuffing but this is what it looks like when it's done. And then moving along to sweet potato casserole. I actually did not grow up eating sweet potatoes. I try and remember the first time I had sweet potatoes I think it was sometime when we came to the States and if you're new here I'm originally from Canada. But it has become such a favorite of mine and I know by now even where I grew up they do eat sweet potatoes. People might have back then as well. My family didn't until we were introduced to them in this state. So this recipe we made last thanks no Christmas I think for the first time and absolutely loved it and so I'm excited to add this again this year. I cooked these sweet potatoes this morning and they are a little well cooked. I think they're looking a little shrivelly but it's fine because we're gonna mash them anyway for our casserole here. So I have five sweet potatoes here. I'm not sure if I should have done a little bit more. They're not as big as some. If these were normal sized I would do four to five and I will link the recipe. I'll try to put all these recipes down there either in links or written out if they are mine. So this one is off of a website. I don't remember the website name but I do have the recipe so I'll leave that linked for you down there below. And then we'll see if these are cool enough to handle and peel them. I do have a couple spots I see on these. Oh that one does not look good. Okay I guess we're getting rid of half of one and then we will put the rest of them into my mixer here and blend them. After beating my sweet potatoes I decided you know what if I'm going to all this work I want to at least feed my family for a meal so I am cooking some more sweet potatoes so we'll get back to the sweet potato casserole after a bit once those are cooked. For now I actually want to move to a sweeter side dish. This is a cranberry cream cheese dip that I think would be delicious with apples or you could do like crackers or bread but we're gonna make this now. So to start off with we are going to add one 12 ounce bag of fresh cranberries into our pot along with a cup of sugar, a cup of water, half a cup orange juice, a tablespoon of orange zest, a quarter teaspoon cinnamon, a quarter teaspoon allspice, a quarter teaspoon cloves and we're gonna cook that about 10 minutes or until the mixture thickens. Okay letting my cranberry mixture cool now but my sweet potatoes are done. I peeled the rest of them and put them into my mixer here as well so I'm gonna add a half a cup of raw milk along with three eggs and then the rest of the seasonings and everything that goes into here and I will leave that recipe for you down below. I think it's some salt, some vanilla, some sugar. I think I'm gonna do maple syrup. Y'all know how I prefer swapping out some of those things. Maple syrup in here and then the rest I will just go by the recipe. So we'll mix that together, pour it into the pan and then make the topping and I need to know are you a marshmallow topping or a pecan topping kind of girl? Let me know in the comments below. I feel like people will have big opinions on this. Personally I prefer the pecans and that's what we're gonna do here today. I feel like sweet potatoes are sweet already. If you add marshmallows it's practically dessert. Back to our cranberry dip. I am going to... by the way isn't this awesome? Our local Amish store sells these giant sticks of cream cheese. But I'm gonna do two eight ounce sticks or as much as that. So 16 ounces of cream cheese. I'm gonna blend that in my bowl here and then we're gonna add our now cooled off cranberry mix to that as well. Should have turned my oven down just a little bit. My pecans got a little dark but I think it'll still be good. Again not something you would really eat just on its own like this but just envision it next to some turkey and stuffing and corn and salad and dinner rolls and all the things you eat on these big holiday meals. Next up I want to do a recipe that I like to do for company anyway. This is great like Sunday lunch when you're doing one of those big meals. We love doing baked corn. This is corn from our garden and so it's something that we usually have a lot of in the freezer throughout the winter but is also great for Thanksgiving or Christmas. And so I am starting off again at my stove melting four tablespoons of butter. I'm gonna add three tablespoons of flour to this and then some milk and I'll take you along through the process. To my roux here I'm adding two cups of milk. I'm using raw milk from the farm here but of course you could use store-bought milk as well. And I forgot that I need to add the corn to this pot as well so we are just gonna get a bigger pot here. Pour it in. All right the milk is thick starting to boil so I'm gonna add my corn now. Four cups of corn and stir that in and then we'll heat this thoroughly before adding the eggs. The corn is heated through now so I'm gonna go ahead and whisk up my eggs. I have four eggs in here and then we'll add that to the the corn mixture as well. Pour that into a pan then I like to cover it with buttered crumbs. This can be bread crumbs, panko crumbs or I really love it with what probably tastes the best is crushed up Ritz crackers. We rarely have Ritz crackers on hand and we don't right now so I will probably just use bread crumbs or you can use crushed up Rice Krispies. Put a little of the chicken soup base in there that adds really good flavor. Lots of options but you do want kind of a crispy top because that really just adds a lot of texture later to your dish. Creamy corn with a nice little crunchy top. And I guess I used my bread crumbs for the stuffing. So I ended up doing what else I had on hand which was a little bit of chips and I ground those up. This is not ideal. I should have thought that through a little better but they will still give us a nice crunchy topping so if you have I would definitely recommend one of the other things. Pretty much anything crunchy would work. Nuts could even be really good on here I think. I like a nice thick layer of crumbs but about like a cup I would say. That's probably what we're going for here. And then I'm going to add one more thing. I freeze dried a bunch of parsley this year. Obviously you don't have to use freeze dried. You could just use dried parsley or even better would be fresh but for the color I like to just sprinkle a little bit of this on top. Add a little pop of green and some flavor. Okay we'll pop this in the oven. I just realized in my viewfinder that you're seeing my half painted fireplace out there. Hopefully next week I will have an actual finished product to show you. Y'all know it's getting cold outside when I start getting my paintbrush out. I love painting in the winter time. I just have to do something. I can't garden or grow flowers and so I have to do something to keep my hands busy and this has been a project I've been wanting to do a while. Kind of DIYing that fireplace anyway. It's not done yet. It does not look anything like it's supposed to but hopefully next week we will start decorating for Christmas and I can show you guys that. Okay I'm trying to decide is salad a side dish or is it its own category? Somebody help me out. I want to share with you a salad that I really really like. Again it's full of textures. Hey buddy did you want to help mama? Should we get a big pumpkin? Look at this one. Pumpkins are starting to go out of season for us here so this one if you're local you might want to do for Thanksgiving versus Christmas but the salad is also really good using roasted sweet potato instead of roasted pumpkin but that's one of the textures and oh my word this is like texture and flavor explosion so we're going to get into that but first I want to dice this into fairly small little cubes and then we'll drizzle it with some avocado oil and salt. I haven't decided if I want to do other spices or not but we're going to roast it and let it cool so it'll be a cold salad. All right mommy needs to cut it up if we can't cut it. To tell my trainer I worked out today. There we go we did it William. Wow that's such a pretty pumpkin though. What are you freeze drying? Okay Josh came in and looked at the pumpkin as well and he thinks too that it probably got frozen and that's why some of it is just a little bit slimy right in that ring so I'm just taking some of it out that was further in than that was able to cut it out and I'm just going to roast enough for our salad and then I think the rest of it will just feed to the chickens and let them peck at it because yeah it doesn't seem quite right but these parts seem firm and fine so we're gonna do that and carry on with our salad. So I'm going to pop these in the oven and then I'm actually going to start making some candied pecans. These are another all-time favorite all throughout the year on salads for us. These candied pecans are so delicious you just want to like eat them by the handful and sometimes we just do but they are so good on salads they add a lot of flavor they add some sweetness to the salad and so we'll work on making those next. Okay our corn is done. I don't know if you can see that but that's always a delicious one for especially for having guests one that you can just kind of pop in the oven and forget about. Okay I am going to start off my candied pecans by toasting the pecans just a little bit and fair warning I do not have amounts for any of these. It's one of those you just eyeball and do to taste but I'm going to just put some pecans on here and then toast them at 325 and honestly I just mess around with the temps too. So I'm going to put these on here and toast them until they smell nice and toasty and then we'll work on the maple syrup and brown sugar in the meantime. It is about two hours later now I think my light is starting to go on me here but I am continuing on with my pecans so they are toasted now I added some paprika and salt after I pulled them out of the oven and then I got footage but I had I forgot to turn my mic on earlier but anyways what I did was I had some brown sugar in here and just added enough maple syrup to make a kind of wet sand consistency and then you just bring that to a soft boil stage and add a little bit of baking soda just I don't know like half a teaspoon or so this is what it looks like right after that so this is ready to go on the pecans you don't want to wait too long after this is ready I'm just going to pour it over the pecans we'll stir it in and then I like to pop it into the oven for just a couple more minutes it just helps to break it up even more and that's all there's to it you just cool them and they are so tasty I would highly recommend using parchment paper with this or else you will have a bit of a time cleaning your cookie sheet this does get quite sticky but with parchment paper it is easy cleanup all right now for the fun part I absolutely love putting salads together isn't this such a big head of lettuce apparently it's local still we are going to put a lot of toppings and textures and flavors on the salad so first I'm just going to chop up the lettuce and I love that you have all the textures with this salad but also you have sweet you have salty just so much goodness okay then I want to add just a few little slivers of purple onion love you and then I also have an apple put some apple slices on which will add sweetness but also color and then I have my chilled roasted pumpkin now you'll notice as I am loading my salad here that I'm putting it kind of in clusters I find that it's visually much more appealing that way than if it's all equally spread so I put it on like this and then of course you can easily give it a quick stir before serving but this just is more pleasing to the eye and the pecans are nice and crunchy now you can just break them apart like this and then last we're just going to add a little bit of feta cheese so many textures and flavors I would just add some chicken to this and have it be my meal well I hope that gave you some inspiration for your thanksgiving or holiday cooking this year thank you so much for watching and I will see you next time thank you so much for joining us I will look forward to seeing you next week hopefully for some Christmas decorating we'll see you then bye friends