Nontraditional Thanksgiving Foods
I was getting ready to tell you about Thanksgiving. (All the way back in November. Although it’s the middle of December. Apparently it’s taken me that long to recover.)
But first, in honor of Chocolate Covered Anything Day, I made this little collage of, well, chocolate covered everything:
All pictures are my own. All opinions are also my own:
Chocolate Covered Bacon: Fun for something different.
Chocolate Covered Oreos: Yes. Oh yes. Just don’t try this at home. You might eat too many oreos. (I didn’t, but I can see how it could happen quite easily!)
Chocolate Covered Potato Chips: This tasted about the same as the bacon, just not as chewy.
Chocolate Covered Coconut: Delicious.
Chocolate Covered Celery: Nope. Don’t do it. (I knew it wouldn’t like it. I did it for the picture, not because I thought it would be incredibly tasty or the next big craze.)
Chocolate Covered Apples: Also Delicious
Chocolate Covered Pineapple: Very Delicious
Now back to Thanksgiving….
…which usually brings to mind foods like turkey, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie, cranberry sauce, and that stuff that some people cook in the turkey (and some people don’t) that some people call stuffing and some people call dressing. My family was confusing the issue by calling it both. Next year we should combine the two and call it “stressing”. 🙂
I set out to make some nontraditional Thanksgiving foods to complement our nontraditional Thanksgiving. (Due to work, our feast is always on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. And due to location, Thanksgivings often do not involve any turkey.)
It would have been more traditional to make pies for dessert, but my mind was made up to make something with chocolate. Chocolate pie is not in my repertoire (yet!) and, besides, pie only stretches so far, despite the fact that if I can cut a pizza into 16 slices without a pizza cutter, I’m fairly confident I could do it to a pie too.
My choice was truffles. There were so many truffles that it took two evenings to finish them all and the overflow had to be stored in a neighbor’s fridge.
It was hard to narrow down my options!
Oreo Truffles: Perhaps the first time I made them I used a recipe, but this time I didn’t. Just crush a bunch of oreos, add enough cream cheese to make the mixture stick together, form balls, freeze them a few minutes, dunk them in any kind of chocolate you want, and refrigerate.
Mint Chocolate Chip Truffles (pictured): I used a recipe from Food Fanatic. We didn’t seem to have any green food coloring, so the truffle centers were a creamy original off-white instead of mint green. Nobody knew they were supposed to be green and nobody who told me they were awesome also said “but they would have tasted even better if they were green“, so it’s relatively safe to assume the green food coloring is optional.
Peanut Butter Truffles: These were the biggest hit of them all. (Recipe: Use Real Butter) (I didn’t use butterscotch chips. Instead I coated the truffles in dark chocolate melted down from a 1kg (2.2lb) chocolate bar.)
Peanut butter truffles are like Reeses, only plumper. They were *amazing*.
There were also supposed to be coconut truffles and pumpkin truffles (because apparently I like biting off more than I can chew when it comes to truffle making). The coconut truffles got cancelled and replaced with pumpkin truffles due to the last minute trouble of finding fresh coconut. (Quite ironic, considering I live on a tropical island. Coconut palms grow here. Anyway.)
The pumpkin truffles refused to cooperate. The filling simply would not get thick enough to make into balls, despite my best efforts by adding substantially more powdered sugar and coconut flour than the recipe called for, and freezing it for several hours. (I ended up spreading it in a dish, pouring melted chocolate over it, and announcing it was a gluten-free pumpkin chocolate experiment.)
Suffice it to say, the truffles were a huge hit and – who knows – may become a Thanksgiving tradition!
A particularly imaginative 11-year-old I know has come up some truffle flavors I should try next time. His suggestions fit the chocolate-covered-anything theme. In case you’re curious, the flavors ranged from heartily approved coffee truffles and cheesecake truffles (must.make.both.stat.) to totally bizarre flavors such as pickle and broccoli. He doesn’t mind broccoli. I like broccoli too, but that doesn’t mean I am going to ruin the chocolate (or the broccoli) by combining the two!
Do you have a favorite truffle recipe? If so, please share!