A Supreme-ly Easy Thanksgiving Side

All this week, Special Fork bloggers will highlight Thanksgiving with tips, tricks and recipes for your holiday, culminating on Video Friday with a stuffed delicata squash demo, the perfect Thanksgiving main dish for vegetarians and a wonderful side for everyone else. For more recipes, visit our Special Fork database of recipes. Use the keyword, “Thanksgiving,” for your search.

By Katie Barreira
For Cooking Newbie, a blog for beginner cooks

If the closest thing to a raw vegetable on your Thanksgiving table is a plate of celery sticks stuffed with olive cream cheese, then maybe you know how I feel. What I miss most on this day of soporific turkey, bread stuffing and green bean casserole is some nice, fresh produce. The crisp texture and bright acidity of a seasonal salad make it the perfect palate-cleansing antidote. One refreshing bite and you’ll be ready to dive back into those potatoes!

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Thanksgiving Tips from Mom, with Love

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

Congrats to Stephanie H. from Dallas Texas who won our Logitech wireless speaker sweepstakes!

All this week, Special Fork bloggers will highlight Thanksgiving with tips, tricks and recipes for your holiday, culminating on Video Friday with a stuffed delicata squash demo, the perfect Thanksgiving main dish for vegetarians and a wonderful side for everyone else. For more recipes, visit our Special Fork database of recipes. Use the keyword, “Thanksgiving,” for your search.

When Dave made his first Thanksgiving dinner while at grad school in Massachusetts, I was prepared to be his personal Thanksgiving hotline until the meal was done. Actually, my son seemed to have survived his first major entertaining experience unscathed. As he pointed out with a chuckle, since many guests were international students, they had no great expectations.

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Roasted Herb Chicken with Pistachio Salsa

By Zoe McLaughlin
A new video for Video Friday

Roasted chicken thighs are easy to make, but ordinary. Dress them up by rubbing an herb paste under the skin to season the meat and create a ton of flavor without a lot of work. It’s important to use fresh herbs when making the paste because fresh herbs have a brighter, cleaner flavor than dried ones.

Use a mortar and pestle or finely chop the herbs together to release the oils, intensifying the fragrance. This recipe uses chicken thighs but you could use skin-on chicken breast or even a whole chicken. The key is to separate the chicken skin from the flesh, leaving the sides of the skin attached, creating a pocket for the herbs, to seal in the flavor.

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Imagining a Sustainable World

By Andrew Hunter
For The Family Table, a blog for busy families

Teaching children to think and live sustainably is an obligation we have to our children, ourselves and to our planet. Sustainability can be fun and it certainly should be delicious. Children are passionately curious. Digging hands into dirt, planting seeds and harvesting is an experiential way for them to learn about food from its source.

A recent day with Dan and Nanette Bercu at Sunset Ranch showed the fifth grade class from our boys’ school the cycle of life, from planting and harvesting to eating healthy and delicious food while it’s still warm from the sunshine. For city kids in Los Angeles, it’s not every day that they get to pick dry-farmed tomatoes, fetch warm eggs from a chicken coop, carve home-cured prosciutto, pluck squash blossoms, wild basil and pungent red onions, and eat the fruits of their labor on wood-fired pizza on a mountaintop farm in Malibu.

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Pork Roast: How Lori Weathered Sandy

By Lori Powell
For One or Two Bites, a blog for singles and couples

As mentioned last week, I got through Sandy by cooking two roasts, one beef and the other pork, in an attempt to soothe and satisfy neighbors who were not as fortunate.

Below is the recipe for the roast pork. My leftovers are sitting in my now-working freezer and will serve as the base for a delicious pork and white bean chili for the night my Thanksgiving guests arrive.

I spent part of last week sorting out and clearing out my pantry, freezer and fridge…long overdue. It was very cathartic and now I’m ready to cook from what survived in my pantry from the storm.

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