By Karissa Schwab | | Creative Director

Thanksgiving: family, friends, and, most importantly, food. Thanksgiving is all about filling your plate with as much food as possible, going back for seconds until you’re stuffed, and then proceeding to eat copious amounts of pie anyway. Below are some of my favorite Thanksgiving recipes and dishes to make your holiday extra sweet!

My Thanksgiving is never complete without sweet potatoes topped with ooey-gooey, toasted marshmallows. For those of you who have never tried sweet potatoes with marshmallows, you’re missing out big time. Start with rinsing the sweet potatoes to get the skin just a bit wet, then wrap them in tin foil, and bake them in the oven. Once baked, the skin will fall right off the potatoes, and you can get to work mashing them. Add a bit of brown sugar, butter, and evaporated milk to the sweet potatoes and spread them into a large dish. Line up marshmallows on top of the sweet potatoes and bake in the oven until the marshmallows are nicely toasted, and they are ready to serve!

Another necessity at the Thanksgiving dinner table is cranberry sauce to top off the turkey. Homemade cranberry sauce is a fun dish to add your own spin on. First, you’ll need to cook the cranberries down in a mixture of water and sugar on the stove. Before letting the cranberry sauce cool, you can add anything you’d like to the mix such as orange rind, cinnamon clove, nutmeg, raisins, or blueberries—make it your own!

Pumpkin, pecan, and apple pies are the heroes of Thanksgiving dessert, but if you’re late to the food sign-up and the classics have been claimed, never fear. Instead, you can stun the family with a creamy custard pie, a surprisingly easy bake, requiring only eggs, milk, sugar, and nutmeg whisked together into a bowl, poured into a pie crust, and baked.

One recipe I cannot unfortunately divulge to you all is my Grandma’s famous sausage stuffing casserole. It’s the best stuffing you could ever have, and although I can’t share my Grandma’s recipe, there are many you can find online that might come close (but won’t compare, I’m sorry to say). 

I hope these recipes help make your Thanksgiving that much better, as we have so much to give thanks for this year in particular, as being back together with family and friends is more of a gift than ever. Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Sophomore Karissa Schwab is the Creative Director. Her email is kschwab@fandm.edu.

By TCR