Thanksgiving Dishes to Make One Week Ahead

The filling for these turnovers also makes a terrific side dish on its own.

Boston chef Joanne Chang switches up the flavors of Thanksgiving’s classic squash soup with a host of Asian ingredients, including curry paste, ginger and coconut milk.

“In these cookies, you start with a sweet dough and the sesame seeds push it over on the sweet-savory continuum,” says Dorie Greenspan. Blending ground almonds with the flour emphasizes the nutty sesame flavor.

Almost twice the size of ordinary gougères, they’re a bit like crispy, cheesy, slightly spicy popovers.

This fruit-filled butter is wonderful on crusty bread as an hors d’oeuvre.

Sautéing bread crumbs with Spanish chorizo makes them supercrispy and infuses them with spicy flavor. The bread crumbs are an excellent topping for this sublime, velvety cauliflower soup.

Shawn McClain says cranberries and quince need a bit of sweetness to taste their best, so he combines them with apples, raisins and sugar, as well as cider vinegar and spices, to make a tangy chutney.

Instead of appearing in a soup, squash gets cut into rings, caramelized and baked in a tart that can be served with a salad as a starter, or as an unusual side dish.

This chunky cranberry chutney is super-fresh-tasting because the cranberries are simmered briefly and the orange sections are added near the end of cooking.

These biscuits get a kick from cayenne pepper and an aromatic lift from fresh herbs. Mashing the sweet potatoes with a fork means that the biscuits will be flecked throughout with orange.

Sweet roasted slices of fennel topped with herbed bread crumbs make for a fabulous freezer-to-oven side dish.

The herb-and-cheese combination is infinitely variable: Try cheddar and minced chives or chopped rosemary and Parmesan.

Cooked with less water and in a wide skillet, tart cranberries get candied in the sugar syrup and remain almost whole.

Pumpkin pie meets tiramisù, with layers of pumpkin-mascarpone custard and gingersnaps brushed with Calvados syrup. In the freezer, the flavors and textures meld to form a deliciously creamy dessert.

Sam Mogannam’s wife, Anne Walker, usually makes this dessert with Arkansas Black apples—an heirloom variety—from Mogannam’s parents’ orchard near Sacramento. The dense, tart apples are harvested late in the season, making them a good Thanksgiving choice. Granny Smiths are an easier-to-find alternative.

The crostatas can be prepared in advance and frozen for up to 2 weeks. Bake directly from the freezer.

Deborah Snyder layers pink grapefruit curd in a crunchy graham-cracker crust with caramel sauce and a delicate topping of fluffy meringue.