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I like the idea of bringing a fresh green salad with any combination of vegetables- add dried cranberries for a festive Thanksgiving touch. I always like to bring a large green salad to Thanksgiving dinners.
You could make a pasta salad of some sort. One of our family favorites uses shell pasta, salad shrimp, chopped tomatoes, onions, green peppers, salt & pepper. The 'sauce' is just equal parts mayonnaise and miracle whip. You can add as much or as little as you like of all ingredients, to taste and depending on the size of the salad you need.
A nice dish is cauliflower cheese - it's basically macaroni cheese made with cauliflower instead of macaroni. I add broccoli to mine too. It's a Christmas staple in my house (we're British so Christmas is a longer standing tradition for us than Thanksgiving). You can make it and put it in the fridge and then just reheat it when you arrive.
Another idea is a quiche - it can be served hot or cold so if the hosts just want to put it out as an appetizer while dinner is cooking they don't need to do anything, or can be eaten later in the day or even the next day.
I like to bring cold or room-temp salads to a potluck, so I don't have to worry about transporting a hot dish (like a hot crockpot) or keeping the dish warm. Sometimes food doesn't get served right away, so don't bring anything that isn't good if it's not piping hot or put together at the last minute.
I would have chosen a salad, but you said you didn't want that--you meant a green salad, right? There are lots of different kinds of salad. For instance, this is a good one to make a day ahead.
I'm a wild rice fan at Thanksgiving, so here's another of my wild rice recipes:
Wild Rice & Cranberry Salad
1 cup uncooked wild rice
1 bag of fresh cranberries
1/4 cup of orange juice
1 T. lemon juice
1/4 cup of sugar
1/2 cup of chopped walnuts
Cook the wild rice.
While rice is cooking, boil fruit juices & sugar in saucepan. Boil 1 minute. Turn to simmer. Add cranberries. Stir while cooking. When cranberries start to pop, remove from heat.
Run wild rice under cold water in colander.
Mix cooked rice with cranberry mixture. Chill in frig. Garnish with walnuts before serving.
Does it have to go with the meal? It sounds like there is already a lot of dishes being brought. Are you interested in some dip or other appetizer recipes?
2 of the big cans of cooked yams (you COULD cook them yourself but I never saw the point).
Drain AND RINSE the yams until the syrup they're canned in is all drained away.
Spread them out in a big glass baking dish (like a lasagna dish).
Add:
A big palmful of brown sugar, scattered over the top.
A big palmful of raisins, scattered over the top.
A medium-sized can of chunked pineapple, canned in its own juice, including the juice.
A big fat splash of apple cider.
A clove set in each corner of the pan, and maybe 2 or 3 more stuck in the top yams in the middle.
A 1/4 of a small cinammon stick, ground to a fine powder (use a coffee grinder for this - MUCH better than pre-ground powder that's been sitting on a shelf for 4 years). Sprinkle that over the top.
Squeeze a tangerine over the whole thing (get rid of the seeds first)
Bake at 325-375 (depending on what else you need in the oven that day - anywhere in that range will work) Bake for around 10 minutes - then spoon some of the sauce from the bottom of the pan, over the top of the yams. Bake again for around 10 minutes. If the sauce is bubbling like crazy and the cinammon is properly soaked into the yams, and they're hot, then it's done.
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