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Tell us how EYB has changed your Thanksgiving planning and cooking.  A copy of Barefoot Contessa's new book for the best answer.

EYB has changed the way I plan for Thanksgiving the same way it has changed the way I plan all my cooking. I just love deciding I want to eat a certain ingredient - maybe I am trying to use up something in the fridge. And I find a recipe that is in one of my cookbooks that I would never have found without EYB.

So for Thanksgiving, I am planning on making the standard fare (turkey, cornbread dressing, giblet gravy, cranberry sauce). But I will get creative with the sides and desserts. I have Persimmons on my tree, and have already searched for some recipes on EYB. And I also want green beans, so will look for some new recipes to try using EYB. And probably a new recipe for yeast rolls.

I couldn't live without EYB now!

For me, I plan on using it to find something different for dessert.  I've been making apple and pumpkin pies quite frequently this fall and I want to try something new for the holidays!  Since I don't host Thanksgiving and it's going to be a small event this year (just my mother, sister, and me) I'm only going to make one dessert (okay, maybe more than that.. once I get in the kitchen, crazy things start happening!) EYB is going to help me find a new pumpkin dessert recipe to experiment with.

And on a completely different note....

I know many people have mentioned this in other forum posts, but I wanted to reiterate how wonderful this site is.  I've got well over 500 cookbooks and this site allows me to really utilize my collection.  Just browsing my bookshelf here gets me excited about baking and cooking!  So a BIG thank you to Jane and Fiona and their staff who make this site possible.

I’m hoping to put an exciting twist on the old standbys. 

I live in a big retirement area.  A huge percentage of folks around here have moved here after retirement and their families are not nearby.  At 57, they think of me as ‘the young one’.  For the past 6 years, I have invited the people who don’t have families nearby for dinner.  For any given holiday, I have as few as 6 or 8, or as many as 20.  We are each others’ family at Thanksgiving.  This year the ages range from 64 to 78.

I think it’s important to them that I maintain tradition.  Turkey, stuffing, cranberries, pumpkin pie.  But it’s important to me to be creative.  So I’m using EYB to help me do both.  I’ve settled on Brussels Sprouts with Chestnuts from one of Julia’s books.   I found Cranberry Sauce with Roasted Shallots and Port in the Bon Appetit  Cookbook.  I didn’t know either of those recipes was in there!  I’m still choosing the pies and stuffing.  I never would have found these without this fabulous tool. 

Hopefully, by Wednesday, I’ll be able to put an EYB twist on all of my dishes. 

Hello Everyone,

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you! My husband and I have approximately 400+ cookbooks. I've never taken the time to truly count them. We entertain frequently but not as much these days with the recession and our guests always brings gifts such as cookbooks or something to do with cooking. Our cookbook collection contains cookbooks from around the world as my husband and I have traveled all over the world and have taken cooking classes abroad and have enjoyed the cuisines of so many countries. We once held an international party with dishes from around the world and that was alot of fun! EYB is our lifesaver and that is why I opted for the lifetime membership. Thanksgiving will be extra special this year because of your website and my membership. Thank you so very much!!!! I love, love, being a member with you and I hope that your business rocks 24/7!!

Sincerely,

Linda Lindquist

I am a relatively new member to EYB so, as you can imagine, I am spending a lot of my free time exploring.

This year for Thanksgiving I am having my entire family over, which is about 13 people.  Being that it is a pretty small group, I can play around with the menu a bit without much difficulty. I already had several tried and true recipes to fall back on, but I thought it would be fun to mix things up a bit. So I started doing research to figure out what my options were. 

I own two Thanksgiving cookbooks on my personal bookshelf, but I decided to find out what other Thanksgiving Cookbooks are out there.  I did a library search and found out there are at least 47 Thanksgiving Cookbooks in the EYB library, and from there I started searching their indexes for inspirational ideas.

Chestnuts came up fairly often, so I decided to make a chestnut soup recipe to start out my meal. After exploring all the chestnut soup recipes on my bookshelf, I settled on the Zuppa di Castagne out of Cucina of Le Marche by Fabio Trabocchi. This is a great cookbook, though it has not yet been indexed by EYB.  I am hoping this plug will help move it up on the priority list. I made the soup yesterday. It turned out wonderfully.  It is meant to be served as a puree, but next time I will leave it chunky so I can taste each component. 

Next I moved on to stuffing.  All of my past stuffing recipes have left me wanting.  I conducted a similar search and settled on the chestnut stuffing from Sunday Suppers at Lucques by Suzanne Goin. This recipe intrigued me because of the mix of ingredients, especially the chile de arbol and the lemon zest. I won't know how that one turns out until Thursday.

For dessert, my search led me to the crostata crust recipe out of Cucina Simpatica by Joannne KIlleen and George Germon.  For those of you who don't have this cookbook (it is a goldmine, by the way) the recipe is restated in Barefoot Contessa's original cookbook, which is on pretty much everyone's bookshelf.  I will be making two crostatas this year, one with blueberries, the other with pears. The crostata recipe is foolproof. Flakey and buttery and not too sweet.  Yum!

Even after I settled on my menu, I spent several hours exploring other members' bookshelves because I was having such a good time. Thanks EYB, you made searching for recipes as enjoyable as cooking my favorite Thanksgiving dishes. 

Unfortunately my husband and I couldn't travel this Thanksgiving, so it's just the two of us, and he has to work until 9:00 pm!  But I was determined that we'd still have Thanksgiving dinner.  I used EYB to research recipes that contained the traditional ingredients (like cranberries, pumpkin, sweet potatoes, brussels sprouts etc) but in recipes for just two people.  So instead of roasting an entire turkey, I'm doing quail with cranberries in the sauce.  And instead of pumpkin pie (which my Norwegian husband never developed a taste for) I'm doing a pumpkin cream cheese roulade.  This way I get thanksgiving, there's not too much food, and my husband will like everything!

It seemed like a good plan.  Tuesday night at around 9:30pm we'd get home to Seattle WA from two weeks of travel Back East.  We'd spend the night in our own bed, jump up refreshed and eager, drive down to Eugene OR, and have Thanksgiving with my husband's mom and sister.  Piece of cake, we've done it many times before.

Didn't work out that way.  Our flight was delayed and delayed, and then when we finally landed there was snow.  Seattle doesn't know how to handle snow.  The buses were running emergency schedules; the bus to our house was cancelled entirely.  No such thing as a taxi.  Trudge trudge through the snow.  We didn't get home till 1am.  Record low temperatures.  And then when we finally woke, grumpy and groggy, Seattle was crippled.  We both drive confidently and safely on icy roads, but other people from around here don't know how, and it's dangerous to be on the street with them.  No Eugene.

I have a traditional Thanksgiving meal I cook when Thanksgiving is at my house, but the cooking for it starts the Sunday before Thanksgiving.  No time now.  Ellery, my meat guy, scrounged up a smallish turkey for me.  I wanted a different take on some of the usual ingredients, maybe something ... Middle Eastern?  Moroccan?  I phoned my daughter and we brainstormed together, both of us looking at our Eat Your Books bookshelves.  OK, I can do this.

pumpkin, +Middle East, +salads -> Ajlouk de potiron from The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York by Claudia Roden

a bran bread I've been working on from Susan Roberts's The "I" Diet (not yet indexed)

buttermilk brine -> Southern buttermilk brine from Soaked, Slathered, and Seasoned: A Complete Guide to Flavoring Food on the Grill and BBQ by Elizabeth Karmel

cabbage, +Middle East -> Stuffed cabbage leaves with mint, lemon and tomatoes (Malfouf) from Moorish: Flavours from Mecca to Marrakech by Greg Malouf and Lucy Malouf

gravy, cranberry-orange relish, wheat berries, pears w/cheese for dessert

Of the new recipes, I would definitely make the pumpkin salad again -- more of a spread in my rendition, and I'm always in need of dips and spreads for munching vegetables.  And the gravy!  I'll be using that buttermilk brine again and again.

Thank you, thank you EYB.  You helped turn what threatened to be a depressing, empty meal into a quiet feast.

xxx, mcvl

This was our first Thanksgiving after retiring in May, so we had the luxury of planning and cooking ahead.  EYB helped source several of the recipes we wanted, but the coup was the Pickled Beets.

When you have a large cookbook collection, and you really use them to cook, it becomes harder and harder to manage the resources.  New books tend to take precedence over the early aquisitions.  For the beets, we had a specific taste in mind, like some we had at a favorite restaurant.  Like magic, my library gave me a list to choose from -- and the best choice was from one of the very first cookbooks we owned, over 40 years ago! -- Craig Claiborne's New York Times Cookbook. 

In a way, what I loved was the symmetry -- we sat down with our four children, four spouses, and four grandchildren, and fed them from a book that fed us from the first days of our marriage. 

For Thanksgiving this year, my husband and I were travelling to my grandmother's house.  I had only one thing to make this year - a dessert.  I had a can of sweet potato puree that I really wanted to use, figuring what better ingredient to use at Thanksgiving time?  Other family members were already making the usual family favorites, so I wanted to try something new.  I searched EYB and found a recipe for Spiced Sweet Potato Bundt Cake with Brown Sugar Icing from the Bon Appetit Cookbook. And amazingly, I had ALL of the ingredients in my pantry. I whipped up this cake the evening before we left and it was a delicious hit!  EYB let me find a new recipe, using ingredients I already had on hand.  Before I joined EYB, I probably would have just picked a recipe that looked good from one of my cooking magazines and went out and bought a bunch of extra ingredients. Instead, I was able to save time and money, and got a great result!  

Thank you to everyone that contributed to this topic.  I loved reading all your experiences using EYB for Thanksgiving.  But boy, it was hard chosing a winner.  Fiona and I debated and decided in the end that mcvl will get the prize.  We loved all the entries but hers just tipped the balance with her story of how EYB rescued a potentially disappointing Thanksgiving and her detail of how she carried out her searches.

I think we need to run a similar topic regarding cooking for Christmas as our members in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Ireland, couldn't join in this one.

Thank you so much!  I loved reading everybody else's contributions, especially susan g's.  I'm looking forward to the Christmas edition.