Weekday Dinner Ideas, Including Thanksgiving

With so much to do (this is our weekend to rake up all the leaves, plus Thanksgiving prep), this necessarily must be quick.  Tomorrow will be our reheat of something big made over the weekend, which this week is last night's very successful sweet potato and butternut squash soup from the New York Times.

Tuesday will be another easy one, baked potatoes with spiced beef chili from Bon Appetit, drawing organic russets from my big five pound bag (very good at $2.99 a bag at Sprouts, but outrageously cheap at $1.79 at Vitamin Cottage).

With Thanksgiving looming, Wednesday will be even easier, doing the fantastic crab cakes Whole Foods has on sale for $13.99 a pound.  I'm headed to Vitamin Cottage today to stock up on Lundberg's wonderful rice blends (the wild rice blend and black japonica are especially good) at just $2.39 for a one pound bag, so lovely rice will go on the side.  Plus, there's a theme going here of doing dinners that don't create leftovers, since the fridge can only hold so much, and we can only eat so much, too (and there's been no poultry involved for several days).

So for Thursday, the turkey will be the star.  Several items on my table are fixed traditions: the turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, and a stuffing made with the New England classic, Bell's Seasoning (Pearl Street Whole Foods doesn't have it this year, but the Superior store does, thank heavens).  I'm really mixing it up this year with the rest.  I've burned out on the carb-heavy dinner, so we won't be doing any other root vegetable dishes (as admirable as they are at other times) or rolls this year.  Instead, we'll have sauteed broccolini with tomatoes from Cooking Light, but the really radical thing will be adding a salad, and a kind of wild one (yet appropriate to the season), to boot.  Jumping on the current craze for kale salads, I'm going to try kale and Brussels sprouts salad from the current issue of Bon Appetit.  Not only is this a departure for me in terms of having a salad at the Thanksgiving table, but the interesting thing is that both the kale and Brussels sprouts are raw.  We'll see.