Thanksgiving: A beginner's guide to how to cook for it

Just like I did for the Mother Sauces, I’m going to make a whole series dedicated to Thanksgiving, perhaps the most iconic holiday in our country and to the rest of the world in terms of its classic gastronomy. Recipes normally go out on Fridays, but all of this needs to be out by Thursday, so Black Friday would be too late in the week for any of this to be useful. The feijoada recipe had originally been scheduled to go out on November 12 (a Friday, like normal) in anticipation of Republic Day (one of the two biggest civic holidays in Brazil, the other being Independence Day in early September), but instead, to make room for this series, I moved the feijoada to the 15th, and this series will all go live on the 12th during the normal Friday slot. This way, there’ll be more than enough time for all of you to plan and purchase everything you will need for Thanksgiving 13 days later on Thursday the 25th.

The image of modern Thanksgiving that everyone recognizes, of course, is a big turkey served whole on a platter with vegetables and surrounded by gravy and a whole smorgasbord-worth of other accoutrements.
This series will follow that image and will take you step by step, dish by dish, down to the minute, for how to plan and execute your perfect Thanksgiving meal.
Especially since I took over the kitchen, we haven’t been doing much entertaining, and our thanksgivings are never really big anyways—it’s almost always just my parents and me—so we make some modifications. Those of you who have been long-time readers remember my whole chicken recipe from last Christmas. That, or something very similar, will be coming back in our house in a few days when Thanksgiving rolls around. After all, we’re three people, and if we ate from that “picture-perfect Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving turkey,” we could probably eat for a week. That’s too much, so we nearly always change that out in favor of my chickens. And as a general rule, we as a family like to have Thanksgiving lunch instead of Thanksgiving dinner.

The holiday has as many correct ways of expressing itself gastronomically as there are families who celebrate. I’ll try to hit all the core elements, but, of course, feel free to customize this to your tastes and needs, just as we do here at home.
This series will cover:

a. The turkey (and I will link to the already-published chicken)

b. Cranberry Sauce

c. Asparagus (and there I will link to both the Hollandaise and Béchamel segments of my series on the Mother Sauces)

d. A pan sauce

e. Creamed Spinach

f. Brussels Sprouts

g. Corn-Bean salad

Two important items on our Thanksgiving menu, the farofa (the traditional Brazilian analog to the American Thanksgiving classics of stuffing and/or dressing) and the mashed potatoes, will not be covered explicitly, except in the final post where I offer a schedule template. These recipes have already been published here, and I have had no reasons to make major revisions to either of them, so I will simply post links to them within this post. The names of those two dishes are hyperlinks to elsewhere on this blog where you can find those two recipes.