Thanksgiving Dishes to Make One Week Ahead

By Food & Wine
Updated March 08, 2017
From cheesy biscuits to a free-form apple tart, here are make-ahead recipes for one week before Thanksgiving.
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Roasted Winter Squash and Onion Turnovers

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

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Thai Red-Curry Squash Soup

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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.

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Salty Black-and-White Sesame Cocktail Cookies

Credit: PHOTO © QUENTIN BACON
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“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.

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Gargantuan Gougères

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

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Brandied Apricot Butter

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

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Cauliflower Soup with Crispy Chorizo Bread Crumbs

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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.

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Cranberry-Quince Chutney

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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.

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Savory Ricotta-Squash Tart

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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.

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Cranberry, Ginger and Orange Chutney

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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.

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Herb-Topped Sweet Potato Biscuits

Credit: PHOTO © QUENTIN BACON
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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.

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Crunchy Baked Fennel

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

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Herb-Gruyère Biscuits

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

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Candied Cranberry Sauce

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

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Pumpkin-Gingersnap Tiramisù

Credit: © Lucy Schaeffer
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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.

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Free-Form Apple Tart

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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.

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Ricotta and Prosecco Poached Pear Crostatas

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

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Chilled Grapefruit Caramel Meringue Pie

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

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