Thanksgiving is a big holiday in Canada and as we are living in Canada now, we decided to go full into the culture and make a traditional Thanksgiving dinner.
The turkey we already knew was the most important dish, but we did not know how to cook it and also did not know what sides we were going to cook. So we tried the internet and found many options for traditional food to cook.
As we are only two, we decided to not have so much variety, but we still ended up making 5 different dishes and bought another 2 ready-to-eat. The dishes that we made were: Turkey, gravy, mashed potato, stuffing (or dressing), and green beans. And we bought cranberry source and a pumpkin pie ready to eat.
The decoration was all Mayara’s idea, it was a very Canadian theme with small pumpkins and mainly maple tree leaves.
Thanksgiving dinner
Let’s see each of the dishes and the recipe that we based on.
Picture of our table in our first Thanksgiving
Turkey
The most important dish and also the most challenging one to make. This was our first time doing it so we tried to follow the recipes and adjust a bit to our taste.
The first step was the turkey brine, we started the process one day earlier brining the turkey. The main ingredients of the turkey brine were: apple cider, water, rosemary leaves, garlic, salt, brown sugar, and orange. If you are interested, we followed this recipe.
We left the turkey refrigerated in the brine solution for around 24 hours. before starting the cooking process.
Before cooking it, we stuffed some vegetables and fruits with seasoning, but we ended up not eating that as we had many other options.
To cook, we follow this recipe. We pre-heated the oven to 175 degrees C, poured the chicken broth over the turkey, wrapped the turkey in aluminum foil trying to avoid contact with it, and put it in the oven for 2 hours and 30 minutes. We then removed the aluminum foil and put it again in the oven just for it to get the nice cooked color and removed it and let it rest below some new foil for around 10 minutes.
The result was surprisingly good for the first time. The color was very nice and the taste was really good.
Gravy
The gravy was also new for us, the first time we made it. It was also new to the usage of spices like thyme and sage which are not common for us. We followed this recipe. The main ingredients were butter, starch, turkey pan drippings, chicken broth, salt, thyme, and sage. This was easier to do, we just followed the recipe.
Mashed potatoes
Mashed potatoes are easy to do, in this case, we used potatoes, butter, salt, milk, and sour cream. We based ours on this recipe. The sour cream makes a difference in the taste.
Stuffing (or dressing)
This was an adaptation from this recipe here. But we made our lives easier by buying the base of the stuffing (bread) ready to use. We then just mixed the vegetables and put them in a pie shell that we had. It was kind of a stuffing pie.
Green beans
The green beans were very simple, just green beans wrapped in slices of bacon and fried up to the point that the beacons became crunchy.
Cranberry source and pumpkin pie
Cranberry source and pumpkin pie we just bought and served. No work was required.
I could risk saying that the Thanksgiving dinner was a success. The taste was very different from what we were used to eating and we liked it
Happy Thanksgiving!