Hi I’m Marty Richardson from chefmartyrich.com. Welcome back to our daily tip series.  Today I am going to discuss three essential side dishes for Thanksgiving dinner.  Gravy, stuffing and cranberry sauce.

It’s All Gravy

Gravy is not as hard as it seems.  Take your roasting pan out of the oven when your turkey is done.  You turykey is done when the internal temperature reaches 165 degrees. Use an instant read thermometer to measure. Then let the turkey rest for the 20 to 30 minutes before you carve.  This is the time you make your gravy.  With all the juices still in the pan, add to that about 1 quart of chicken stock or turkey stock (if you have it) and a cup of red wine, especially, if you are serving that wine at dinner.  Scrape up all the turkey bits that are stuck to the bottom of that roasting pan.  Keep the pan on the stove with the burners on medium heat underneath.  Then, remove all the pan juices to a fat separator and remove roasting pan from the heat.  In about 5 minutes, you will see all the stock at the bottom and the fat rising to the top.  Put all the fat back into the roasting pan, and return the burners to medium heat on your stove.  Add about 1/2 cup flour.  Stir it around with a whisk until it thickens up.  This is a roux which thickens your gravy.  You don’t want it to form a paste, but you do want it somewhat thick.  Then, you add all your stock back into the roasting pan while you whisk continuously for about 5 to 6 minutes. You shouldn’t have any lumps and you should have a nice, flavorful gravy.  Season with salt and pepper, and maybe some dried herbs or fresh herbs if you’ve got them, like sage, thyme or oregano.

Stuffing vs. Dressing

Stuffing versus dressing.   Now what is the difference?  Dressing is cooked in a casserole dish outside of your turkey.  Stuffing is cooked inside the turkey.  If you have been watching, you know I prefer dressing.  There are so many different kinds of stuffing.  I’m not even going to try to give you a recipe.  Everyone has got a different one.  The base ingredient can vary from crumbs you bought at the store to your home made bread crumbs to corn bread to wild rice.  Flavorings range from sausage to oysters or just vegetables (onions or celery or maybe some mushrooms, spinach or artichokes).  Additional add-ins could be dried fruit like cranberries or nuts. Watch out for people with food allergies of course.  Or you may want to mix in any kind of other fresh herbs.  If you want a more solid, dry, cakelike stuffing, you can mix 1 to 2 beaten eggs into your stuffing before you bake.  The approximate proportion is about a cup of stuffing to every pound of turkey.

Cranberry Sauce

Cranberry sauce.   Go ahead and buy a can to have as a backup.  But, it is really, really, really easy to make cranberry sauce.  It is basically a sweet and sour sauce with cranberries.   Now, sweet and sour sauce is usually 50/50 sweet to sour.  Because cranberries are already kind of tart, you might want to increase the sugar portion in your sweet and sour sauce.  I would make it approximately 2/3 sugar to 1/3 sour.  Now your sugar portion could be regular granulated sugar, brown sugar, honey, maple syrup or any combination there of.  Your sour component could be white vinegar, apple cider vinegar, rice wine vinegar, orange juice or cranberry juice.  Use real cranberry juice.  Don’t use cranberry juice cocktail.  Take this combination of ingredients, 2/3 sweet to 1/3 sour, and put it in a pan and start to simmer that until it begins to thicken.  Then, you add in your cranberries, fresh or frozen.  Simmer that, stirring regularly (not constantly), until the cranberries start to pop.  You will see that clearly as it is very evident they start releasing their juices.  Now there is enough nature pectin inside the cranberries in order to thicken up that sauce.  So you can do one of two things.  You can make it Thanksgiving Day and let it come to room temperature and it will be somewhat thick.  Or you can make it the day before and then pour this mixture into a mold (maybe a ring mold) and then the next day it will harden just like the cranberry sauce that comes out of the can. So again, it is very easy to make, straight forward and kind of interesting and fun.

Tomorrow I am going to start in on vegetables.  Then, we are going to wrap it up with desserts and Happy Thanksgiving.  Thanks for watching and I will talk to you tomorrow.  Thanks.