November part 2

Ok well I hope that you all enjoyed the first installment this month about some possible starting courses for your Thanksgiving table. I know that sometimes there are so many different dishes served that it seems a waste of food to serve appetizers or salads, but I do have one suggestion to you all to get around that. I don’t know if we were the only people like this, but we normally didn’t even eat our meal until around 4pm, so there was a lot of time to kill between the time that people started arriving until we actually all sat down for dinner. Now, not that you want to fill this time with anything but family time, but that time can also be spent sharing some appetizers or salads or soups, such as I have offered in last weeks discussion! Also, feel free to look at the past columns from A Chef’s Kitchen, I am sure that you might find something that you could use to start the day off right.

Now, for this week I thought I would take some time to discuss some possible side dishes for you to serve at your table. I know that most people think of Thanksgiving as being the time to eat ham or turkey, but think about all the side dishes that you are missing! Think about what Thanksgiving would be without stuffing, or without mashed potatoes and gravy? What table would be complete without some sort of vegetables thrown into the mix? I dare say that man can’t live on turkey alone, or woman, not even on Thanksgiving. It is for that reason that you would like some sort of diversity on your table.

I thought that I would stick to 3 dishes per column, otherwise they tend to get a little longwinded. So for this week, the three dishes are going to be Fall Risotto, Honey Glazed Sweet Potatoes, and something that I am running this week at the club, Blackberry Chutney.

Although we don’t typically think of Thanksgiving as a time to serve any sort of Italian style food, I think that we would miss out if we dismissed risotto out of hand like that. Rice isn’t something that is normally seen this specific time of year, but it is certainly a fall dish. Think of all the wild rice and such that we eat this time of year. This dish calls for you to use aborria rice, which although I don’t know for sure the correct spelling of, I know that it is available in most supermarkets now. It is a high starch short grain rice, which we have discussed in this column before. Try this version, it would do well to grace your table.

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