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Are you getting ready for Thanksgiving?

For many, the shopping, menu planning and decorating is enjoyable and nostalgic. For others, knowing how to choose, prepare and cook the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving meal is daunting. And, sometimes you are pretty sure you know what you are doing, you just need a little help!

We believe preparing your Thanksgiving turkey should be fun — and at gThankYou, we are here for you and your team!

Turkey by itself — especially the breast meat — doesn’t have a ton of flavor and can run a little dry. For the best-tasting, juiciest turkey, most birds need a little help.
Here are the most popular ways to add richness, spice and excitement to your Thanksgiving turkey.

Photo via Indulgy.com

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The appointed hour has arrived: it’s time for you and dozens of your relatives and friends to gather around the dining room table, stretched out to its full capacity for the most celebrated meal of the year –Thanksgiving. But, like a weary child from the backseat during a cross-country trip, one question nags at you: Are we there yet? Am I sure the turkey’s done?
For cooks who are afraid of disappointing all their aunts, uncles and cousins on a national holiday, here is a quick list of tell-tale signs that your Thanksgiving turkey is ready for its grand entrance.

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A holiday ham doesn’t have only one part to play in your end-of-the-year celebrations. Check out these great ham appetizer ideas for passing around at family gatherings — all finger food and easy to execute.

Ham Appetizers You Won’t Be Able to Pass Up

Ham and Cheese in Puff Pastry

From Ina Garten, The Food Network.
This is one of my all-time favorite holiday appetizers. It starts with premade puff pastry and comes out of the oven bubbling and delicious. (I especially like it because it doesn’t involve filling little individual quiche cups or wrapping dozens of shrimp in bacon. Who has time?)
You can vary the cheese — cheddar is great for a more kid-friendly version, as is part-skim mozzarella — and any hard cheese could substitute for Gruyere. Yum!

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Few centerpieces are more anticipated than a perfectly pink holiday ham, glazed with a spiky coarse mustard and sweet fruit preserves, and sliced into lovely petals.
But if you’re cooking a ham for the first time, getting from the package in the grocery store to that beautiful Christmas Day dinner-table picture can seem like a daunting journey. So, for the newbie, this is our ham primer.

Nueske’s spiral sliced bone-in ham

Choosing and Cooking Your Ham

Start with a cured or smoked (precooked) ham. (You can definitely make a fresh one, but today let’s leave that to the more experienced cooks.) (more…)

Preparing a Christmas ham, especially if it’s been conveniently pre-smoked or cured for you, is about the easiest thing you can do for a centerpiece. But that doesn’t mean you can’t add a little something to it—namely, a sweet, decadent glaze to make your ham that much more delicious.
Here are four tips from food bloggers we love on how to make your Christmas ham even more dazzling this holiday.

4 Ways to Glaze a Holiday Ham

1. Blackberry- and mustard-glazed ham, from The Cottage Home

With just four ingredients (blackberry preserves, whole-grain mustard, apple cider, and a precooked ham), this holiday entrée couldn’t be simpler. Blogger Lindsay reports that it’s “a great crowd-pleasing ham … even my husband, who would much prefer some type of red meat, absolutely loved it.”

Credit Curtis Stone

A nicely cooked ham is beautiful to behold. But how do you prepare the absolute, #1 Best Tasting Ham?

Borrowing advice from the ham-savvy Serious Eats Food Lab, it’s easy:
1) Buy the right ham, and
2) Don’t screw it up.
Fair enough.
But, seriously, ham needn’t be a complex dish. With these simple tips, you’re guaranteed to have success.  (more…)

Helping your holiday ham taste its best!

Sometimes foods with distinct flavors need counterpoints to bring out the best taste combinations. Whether it’s strong coffee in barbecue sauce, a pinch of hot pepper in Mexican cocoa, or a splash of balsamic vinegar on a bowl of freshly sliced strawberries, these culinary marriages will delight your taste buds!
Such is the case with ham. . . salty, smoky, and succulent it pairs wonderfully with sour fruit (pineapple, orange, cranberries, currants, rhubarb), sweet elements (brown sugar, maple syrup, honey, even cola!) and spices (cloves, mustard, (more…)

By mid-October, the supermarket checkout aisle is full of magazine covers, each boasting a glorious, burnished brown Thanksgiving turkey — so juicy and tempting, you can almost smell the savory aroma while you dig out your debit card.
And indeed, it’s not too soon to start thinking about stuffing (should it have bacon this year? Probably!), your other side dishes — and of course, the holiday centerpiece: a beautifully roasted turkey.
Before you choose a bird, check out these five tips to keep in mind as you plan your holiday meal, whether you’re serving 25 assorted aunts, uncles, and cousins or a simple Thanksgiving turkey feast for two. (more…)

Just like I’ll fight (nicely, of course) the other cooks at the Thanksgiving table for possession of that flavorful turkey carcass — such a great way to make stock — I do the same at Easter for the leftover ham bone.
These rainy April days are the perfect time to take that ham bone out of the freezer and put it to good use for some great tasting and heart warming comfort food.
Bean soups especially benefit from a long simmer with a leftover ham bone, whether or not there’s much meat left on it. If there is, that’s just a bonus; slice it off at the end and add it to the soup.
Allow at least two hours for each of these home cooked soups, and know that they’re just as good (more…)

Something has been going around my office, church and social circles, and it’s not a funny Facebook meme. Everyone seems to be coming down with a strange cold-flu hybrid, an exhausting, hacking, miserable illness that takes a good week to work its way out.
When you’re sick, the last thing you might feel like doing is cooking soups. But if you happen to be the healthy one — or if, like me, you’ve already recovered from the plague and are ready to help your sniffling family or even your coworkers — one of these soups should do the trick.

1. Chicken Noodle Soup
This is the soup I made two weeks ago when I was guzzling NyQuil at night and curling up with tea during the day. Alton Brown uses chicken stock (homemade if you’ve got it), a few savory (more…)

There are so many holiday party options. What about a perfectly browned turkey or a glazed holiday ham, sliced into layers like the petals of a flower. Either makes for a crowd-pleasing main course, ample enough to feed a crowd, with leftovers to spare.
But when you’re hosting a holiday gathering (that isn’t Thanksgiving — turkey has the clear edge there), which do you choose for your centerpiece? What makes better appetizers for a cocktail party?
If your gathering is less than two weeks after Thanksgiving, everyone might be happier with ham. A spiral-sliced, smoked bone-in or boneless ham comes already cooked, so all you have to do is warm it up, glaze it and serve.
Hosting a cocktail party? For appetizers, ham is a little more decadent than turkey.
For example, I served ham and cheese puff pastry squares (recipe by Ina Garten on the Food Network) for my New Year’s Eve party in 2010. They were finger food, easy to make and fantastic with sparkling wine.
If you have picky eaters or anyone who keeps (more…)

The turkey has been cooked and carved. The mashed potatoes are packed away, the pie decimated, the football games concluded. The relatives have either decamped for home or are napping, sedated by carbohydrates.
Now comes the best part: Thanksgiving Leftovers!
Leftover roast turkey is a marvelous thing. This year, go beyond even the perfect turkey sandwich with these five simple recipes.
1. Jambalaya from Food52

Jambalaya on Food52

Jambalaya is the ultimate one-pot rice meal, accommodating everything from spicy sausage to shrimp, crab meat and scallops. This version on Food52 incorporates (more…)

Few things taste more like summer than food cooked outdoors on the grill.  It just seems to call for friends, laughter and celebrating being together.
Here are some favorite grilling tips from our expert friends:

• Use the Right Equipment…
  1. A pair of tongs for arranging food on the grill and flipping it when needed. To avoid losing juices during turning, always flip your meat or vegetables using tongs or a spatula, rather than a fork.
  2. Good quality paintbrushes from (more…)

It’s that age-old question, where do you put the meat thermometer in a turkey?
You may have spent days looking at recipes, brining your Thanksgiving turkey, and finding just the right ingredients for some amazing stuffing, but if you serve raw turkey at your next Thanksgiving dinner, all that effort will be wasted. (Not to mention a lot of good food!) Fortunately, there’s a very simple way to make sure your turkey is cooked properly – just look in the housewares section of your grocery store for a meat thermometer. Follow the instructions below for proper use and rest assured — your bird will be perfect! Oven-safe or instant-read, a meat thermometer is a good investment in great taste!
Whole Turkey
The tip of the meat thermometer should be placed in the thigh, just above the lower part of the thighbone (but not touching the bone!), pointing toward the body. For the stuffing temperature, the tip of the thermometer (more…)

For food safety, a good meat thermometer is an essential kitchen tool. It’s just as important to know how to use it properly. This is the topic of much confusion and consternation. Fret not! We’ll clear it up with a common sense tips on where to insert the meat thermometer in your Holiday Ham.
Tip # 1: Always use a meat thermometer when baking ham. This applies regardless whether you’re baking a partially cooked or fully cooked ham. It will tell precisely when your ham is done avoiding over-cooked, dry hams or undercooked meat – which can cause food-borne illness.
You can’t guess at ham doneness by eyeballing or using general per-pound oven cooking times. Ovens vary too greatly, as to peoples’ eyeball (more…)

We make egg salad once a year. Bet you guessed that it’s the week following the annual visit from that famous bunny, who leaves colorful, hard-cooked eggs all around our house — in the yard if the snow isn’t too deep.
Likewise, I have favorite recipes I pull out annually following the big Holiday Ham Dinner. I make ‘em once a year and they’ve become almost as much a tradition as what we do on Easter itself.
In my estimation, there are probably about 101 ways to use up a bone-in ham. Boneless, too – although I favor a ham bone to make a rich soup stock.

Favorite Leftover Ham Recipes

While I love a thick sliced ham sandwich any day – here are (more…)