Our Thanksgiving meal

We realized a few years ago that while turkey is traditional for Thanksgiving, none of us actually like it that much. We’re all perfectly fine with eating it (which is why we’d done it for years), but for a holiday that centers on food we decided it would make more sense to cook dishes we looked forward to eating more. And that includes the main dish. So we started cooking other things. (The New York Times had a recent article on turkey brining that discussed how some cooks are moving beyond turkey, so we feel vaguely avant garde.)

This year we once again choose Cooks Illustrated’s chili con carne as the main course. We really like their chili, and it has the added benefit of taking several hours to cook, making the kitchen toasty warm and filling the house with its fragrance.

For our primary side we opted for the smoked gouda variant of their garlic mashed potatoes. We typically switch back and forth between that recipe and their twice-baked potatoes (which are basically a fat delivery mechanism), so we’ll make the latter for Christmas this year.

We made their gluten-free corn muffins for our rolls. They’re tasty, and the recipe makes enough leftovers that we can enjoy them for a few days. Our daughter particularly likes them for breakfast, warmed up and drizzled with maple syrup.

For dessert we went with an old family recipe for peanut butter pie. There are a number of online variants that are pretty close. I’m not sure where my parents originally got the recipe, but I remember having it as a kid and our daughter is a huge fan. These days we typically make an oreo crust from scratch, which is much easier than it sounds.