Thanksgiving Made Easy

My Dad’s not big on holidays or celebrations – he’s always been kind of a free spirit. We don’t tend to gather for events, and I actually can’t remember the last time we celebrated a birthday or holiday together! So when he happened to be visiting over his birthday last month, I decided to throw a birthday-holiday-feast extravaganza. I tried a Thanksgiving trial run using Knorr’s new homestyle stock and simple recipes that don’t require a ton of ingredients. I managed to pull off an entire Thanksgiving meal for the whole family easily in just a few hours.

Here are the easy Thanksgiving recipes that had my family chowing down in no time:
Broccoli & Cheese Casserole
Citrus Herb-Roasted Turkey & Port Gravy
Savory Mashed Potatoes
Warm Bacon & Shallot Spinach Salad
Holiday Stuffing

Even though some of the recipes called for chicken stock and some called for beef, I made an executive decision and just used chicken to keep it simple. Everything still tasted delicious, and I was impressed at how easy it was to bring out the flavor out in each dish with stock. I should confess that I’m big on StoveTop, so I tend to just whip up a box of that to save time. I do, however, like that Knorr’s dressing recipe offers a happy medium between doing it from scratch and doing it all from a box. Their recipe uses boxed dressing as a base and spices it up with italian sausage and seasonings. I’d suggest simplifying the meal even further by using bacon instead of sausage, since you’re already preparing it for the spinach salad. You can also chop up some extra herbs while you have them out for the turkey and throw those in there along with carrots, onions, celery and other vegetables that serve double-duty as a stuffing inside the turkey. Voila! Fancy stuffing with no need to buy any extra ingredients.

A couple other steps you might take to minimize prep and cooking time include chopping all the vegetables at once since there are a lot in each recipe, and using onions in place of shallots for the bacon spinach salad (since the onions are already out for dressing and turkey). Lastly, you can cook the broccoli at 400 degrees for a shorter time so you can use one oven, at one temperature, for all the dishes. There’s no need to be all precise about the temperature unless you’re baking. Which reminds me: save even more time by grabbing a pumpkin pie at Costco. Costco makes a mean pumpkin pie, and not having to do it from scratch will shave an hour and a half off your kitchen time.

Finally, you don’t even need one of those bulky rotisserie pans for the turkey. Simply roll up some foil and prop it under the bird in a large Pyrex pan to keep the turkey from sitting too long in its own juices. No extra equipment necessary. For more tips and a look at how I made Thanksgiving easy with simple recipes, check out my #NewKnorrStock post on ThisMoment.

Now that you have all these easy Thanksgiving recipes, what on earth are you going to do with all that extra time?

This project has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for  #collectivebias. All opinions are my own.