21 Easy Thanksgiving Recipes For Lazy Cooks (2024)

FAQs

What is one Thanksgiving dish you hate? ›

Twenty four percent of Americans polled don't like cranberry sauce. “Cranberry sauce never gets eaten and there are so many better dishes,” a friend of mine noted matter-of-factly when asked about the topic.

Unhealthy: Stuffing

“Bacon, sausage, mince meat, giblets, and a variety of similar ingredients find their way into many a stuffing, which takes an already unhealthy dish — often topping 500 calories per serving, depending on the recipe — to an entirely new level of unhealthy,” she said.

Green Bean Casserole won as the least liked Thanksgiving Side Dish in the poll, and since a large portion of the surveyed audience was over 60 years old, we concluded that there was no love lost between the two.

Mashed potatoes are a traditional Thanksgiving side dish for a reason, and we definitely look forward to serving up this delicious dish every November.

The centerpiece of contemporary Thanksgiving in the United States is Thanksgiving dinner (informally called turkey dinner), a large meal generally centered on a large roasted turkey.

Cornish game hen, goose, duck, ham, beef, salmon, and mushroom recipes make worthy centerpieces for holiday meals.

There's no doubt that a big, roasted Thanksgiving turkey is the centerpiece of any holiday dinner. But that doesn't mean there isn't room at the table for other main courses, too.

How many dishes should I have for Thanksgiving dinner? ›

How many dishes should I serve with the turkey? For 4 people, choose 1-2 appetizers and 3 sides. For 8 people, choose 1-3 appetizers and 3 sides. For 16 people, choose 2-3 appetizers and 3 or more sides.

Traditional Thanksgiving dinner includes turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes but the First Thanksgiving likely included wildfowl, corn, porridge and venison.

Fish and Shellfish

Culinary historians believe that much of the Thanksgiving meal consisted of seafood, which is often absent from today's menus. Mussels in particular were abundant in New England and could be easily harvested because they clung to rocks along the shoreline.

It is also worth noting what was not present at the first Thanksgiving feast. There were no cloudlike heaps of mashed potatoes, since white potatoes had not yet crossed over from South America. There was no gravy either, since the colonists didn't yet have mills to produce flour.