My brother is the orchestrator of this year's Thanksgiving dinner. My assignments this year:

  • "that soup again" - my butternut squash soup with roasted red pepper and ancho chile cream; after several years of cooking this repeatedly by request, I've finally gotten bored and started experimenting, so we'll see what it's like with sweet Filipino sausage (longanisa) instead of spicy Italian, with some apple for tartness.
  • "some salad thing" - I'm lazy, so that's probably going to end up as a fruit (probably pear) and cheese (probably bleu) one.
  • "vegetables" - I have recently discovered kale, so I'm going to do some sort of green-beans-and-kale thing instead of the normal ol' green bean casserole. And we already have the squash in soup form.
  • "dessert" - triple chocolate pumpkin pie, because you can never have enough dark chocolate in your life.
  • and then providing assistance with the Turducken as needed.

Honestly, I'm not sure what anyone else is cooking, because that seems like a fairly complete dinner to me right there, but... hey, for food, I'm completely willing to be the sucker who most of the work; I like cooking, and it's been a long time since I really rolled up my sleeves and made good stuff. The last time was perhaps this summer, at my aunt's house, on the day of multiple elaborate layered casseroles and souffles, which was magnificent.