Recipe: Five seasonal Thanksgiving recipes
San Francisco Chronicle · Christian Reynoso ·
Christian Reynoso's Thanksgiving recipes balance comfort with bright, fresh flavors: persimmon salad, roasted squash, leek mac and cheese, apple bars and more.
One year for Thanksgiving, I made a stuffing out of an entire loaf of bread, scored with a criss-cross pattern so it opened like a blooming onion. My friends affectionately called it the best-tasting stuffing that looked like a hedgehog, its rounded, golden body bristling with crisp points and buttery custard caked into every crevice. I remain very fond of that animal. But this year, thinking about what I want to cook, I keep picturing something lemony. Something with a little crunch left in it. A vegetable that might still taste green.
Thanksgiving can make me forget how I usually like to eat. I start planning a menu, and suddenly everything I’m looking up for inspiration is filled with custard, needs a crust or is cooked into submission for several hours. There are good reasons to love all those things. I mean, it’s a meal that should be warm, comforting and perhaps an escape from reality and the normy weeknight bowl. I get it; I’ve built a stuffing hedgehog. I think my credentials speak for themselves.
Still, there’s a whole dinner’s worth of possibility between a mound of mashed potatoes with butter pooling in its center and a few delicate leaves and celery sticks arranged on a plate. That’s where I wanted these five recipes to land. They needed to not only look and feel generous, but actually be those things. They needed to be seasonal, special enough for company and have something happening in each bite — besides richness.
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