Thanksgiving is coming. What would be an ideal dinner?

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Thanksgiving is coming.

I don't know how everyone feels about the more or less traditional dinner. What would you prefer to do differently?

For example, I would enjoy a Thanksgiving dinner consisting of a small bowl of chili to start followed by brisket, country fried potatoes, ranch beans, and freshly cooked bread, and then pie (pecan, pumpkin, cherry, apple, ...) for desert.

I haven't seen them in years, but it used to be pretty common to have small individual loaves of bread so that each diner or two would have his own freshly baked loaf. I have some bread pans just for such things (also useful for banana nut bread).

I don't think that the traditional Thanksgiving dinner is particularly good. I'm vegetarian (who eats fish) so I don't eat turkey anyway, but turkey is really not that good. Chicken is better. And I don't really like the traditional sides like stuffing either. Though I'm gluten free so I wouldn't eat that either.

I guess my ideal dinner would be salmon with maybe a side of asparagus.

I like the traditional Thanksgiving dinner. It's what I grew up with so it'll always be comfort food for me.

Two or three times when I was a kid, we had Red Snapper for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas. I loved it but not everyone enjoyed it as much as I did.

By the way, I made some gluten-free apple crisp a couple of weeks ago. I was going to eat dinner with some friends of mine who can't eat gluten so I made it with a gluten-free flour instead and took it with me. In most gluten free things I've eaten -- mostly gluten-free cookies -- the texture was terrible. I couldn't detect any difference between the apple crisp I usually make with flour and the one with the gluten-free flour.

As for chicken, I've read that capon can be much better, but I've never tried it. In case you aren't familiar with capon, they are roosters with their testes removed at a young age. They grow quite a bit larger than hens, but must be protected from the hens because the hens will kill them. They are supposedly much more tender than regular chicken meat.

One thing that I would like to try is goose, but it is really expensive and has a lot less meat than turkeys. Apparently, a single goose can feed maybe 5 or 6 people.

One thing that I'd like to try is Fondant Potato. They basically cut a potato to resemble a barrel, cut i in half cross-ways, and cook one end in butter to a golden brown. (Some people cook both ends in butter.) They then pour stock in and bake it in an oven. The results are said to be spectacular. I have thought about fixing this to take to my niece's house on Thanksgiving and/or Christmas.

I have only ever eaten one asparagus dish that I liked, but it is good enough that I cook it maybe four times a year. It's also one of the simplest dishes I know of. I cut the asparagus spears into 1.5 to 2 inch pieces with the cuts at a slant and I cut some chicken into bite sized pieces. I stir fry the chicken until it is nearly done and then add the asparagus spears and keep stirring. After a couple of minutes, I put on a mask, stir in some siracha paste (how much is entirely up to you), and keep stirring for another minute or two. Without a mask, I can't stop coughing when I'm cooking it. Serve over rice. I learned this from a Chinese restaurant in the Houston area years ago.

I used to like turkey when I was young. Then, in college, the cafeteria served turkey once a week. I got to the point that I was so tired of turkey that I couldn't stand it for years. I eat it now.

Smoked turkey is a bit better. I was buying a smoked turkey breast every Thanksgiving so that I could have "leftovers" for a few days after. It worked good until one year when I got a smoked turkey breast that was so full of water that I could barely stand it.

In Canada we have Thanksgiving in the middle of October and I had to miss out on it last month because I was sick. I'm hoping I won't have to miss out on Christmas, but with the luck we all have these days, I'm not too optimistic. But since when have I ever been?

I don't really get the American Thanksgiving. You sit around the table and give thanks for things you have, and then the very next day you're trampling each other to get things you don't have.

We have our Christmas Dinner on Christmas Eve. Three or four years ago, I ate my Christmas Dinner at a KFC about sixty or seventy miles from home and about eighty miles from where we were having our Christmas Dinner. The night before, I tripped and fell and broke my left hand. The doctor's office was open on Christmas Eve so I went in to have it checked out. By the time I got out of the doctor's office, our Christmas Dinner had already started. That particular town didn't have much in the way of restaurants, especially on Christmas Eve so my choice was KFC, Taco Bell, Subway, or Sonic.

I avoid stores after Thanksgiving. I accidentally went into one WalMart on Thanksgiving Day thinking that the frenzy didn't start until the next morning. I was wrong. It started at 6 pm. I got there at 5 pm and was allowed in as a regular shopper -- allI wanted was a package of cookies. Even with the crowd at the door, it was a madhouse trying to find the cookies.

All of this sounds delicious!