Pearl couscous is small, round, toasted pasta with grains about the size of peppercorns. You’ll generally find it next to rice and rice mixes in your grocery store. This side dish lends itself to all kinds of dressing up. Add chicken, shrimp or tofu, or stir in some Parmesan or your other favorite cheese.
Friday morning you need sustenance. And not just leftover turkey sandwiches. How about a hot, fragrant breakfast for those houseguests?
What’s a Southern Thanksgiving without Sweet Potato Souffle?
This recipe published in Atlanta magazine and here’s Susan Puckett’s write-up:
“Tony Morrow, chef/owner of College Park’s Pecan restaurant and Tony Morrow’s Real Pit BBQ, owes his appreciation for good food to his mother, Dr. Joyce Irons. A voracious cook ever since she was a small child, she helped her grandmother bake cakes and strip collard leaves from their stems on the family farm near Decatur, Alabama. A practicing psychotherapist, Irons’s idea of “winding down” is freezing a bushel of white corn or boning a whole turkey and rolling it up with spices like a jellyroll.
Every holiday, Morrow gathers with thirty or so family members at his mother and stepfather’s house for a massive feast that includes turkey and cornbread stuffing with giblet gravy, baked ham, chitterlings, collards (from the farm the family still owns in Alabama), macaroni and cheese, cranberry sauce and Irons’s signature sweet potato souffle—a creamy, nutmeg-spiced casserole thickly blanketed with a candy-sweet topping of coconut and pecans. The sweet potato dish, Morrow says, is a longtime favorite: ‘I could add a scoop of my mother’s homemade vanilla ice cream, and I’d have my dinner and dessert without even getting up from my seat.’ ”
This makes excellent cornbread to cube up for dressing. Just bake it tonight, or early tomorrow, let it cool and then cut into cubes. You can toast the cubes in the oven to dry them out a little so they’re maintain their integrity in your dressing. Or if you prefer the cornbread to break down and meld with the other ingredients, then just use it right out of the oven. It’s really, really sweet though. That works great if you’re making a sausage dressing with lots of savory ingredients, but feel free to cut down on the sugar if you like.
Of course, you could just serve it as cornbread. What an idea!
This recipe came from Bon Appetit no telling how long ago. An easy, easy salad and a nice green addition to your Thanksgiving table.
— Adapted from a recipe in “Farming, Friends, & Fried Bologna Sandwiches” by Renea Winchester (Mercer University Press, $21).
When grits appear in our boxes, my first thought is “shrimp and grits.” This is the dish most often requested by AJC readers for our “From the menu of” column. We publish a shrimp and grits recipe at least four time a year. This is from my early days with the column, published back in 2009.
The next two recipes are adapted from the archives of the New York Times.
Is last week’s head of bok choy still sitting in your refrigerator (like mine)? If so, combine it with this week’s and make this dish.