Our Best Thanksgiving Day Side Dishes Start with Grandma’s Thanksgiving Noodles!

Thank you for sharing...

We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post, which is at no additional cost to you. :)

Yummy Thanksgiving Recipe Ideas

Frugal Upstate is one of the blogs I enjoy reading. It is a fun combination of a frugal blog, a cooking blog, and a mommy blog and I find it interesting for all those reasons. If you like fast, easy, and fun recipes and cooking activities for grandparents and grandchildren that don’t cost a lot, read through her various recipes. You’re bound to find something that interests you – probably several things. 

Frugal Thanksgiving Recipe Ideas

This week she is hosting a fun series, “Frugal Thanksgiving Mini Series.”  I thought it would be fun to join in on that and take y’all with me. Hopefully, we’ll all learn some new recipes and ideas that will save us some money and be fun to implement this Thanksgiving. And if you’re not able to join us in the festivities this year due to the Sandwich Generation issues of caring for elderly parents and grandkids, I hope you enjoy thinking about it a bit for the future. Save the articles you like, and we’ll pray that next year will be an easier year for us all!

Best Thanksgiving Day Side Dishes Recipes

Today she is focusing on Best Thanksgiving Day Side Dishes Recipes. When I was little, Thanksgiving meant one thing to me. Thanksgiving Dinner at my grandparents, complete with all my favorite Thanksgiving dinner foods like turkey, mashed potatoes, dressing, and, most importantly, egg noodles! Those noodles definitely corner the market for best Thanksgiving Day side dishes recipes in my family! We’ve even converted sons-in-law and brother-in-law! 🙂

My grandmother’s recipe was famous – among all of us, anyway! She started preparing a few days in advance, with mixing the dough from scratch, cutting the noodle strips herself, and drying them.

Then, come Thanksgiving, she would cook the noodles slowly until they were just perfect. They were a lot of work, and she did it all without noodles tools! But ohhhh, they were so good it was worth it!

Thanksgiving Shocker!

When I was about 12, my dad and I went over to my grandparents’ house early to help with dinner. We were shocked to discover that sometime in the past few years, she had discovered frozen noodles! Straight from the grocery store! She had given up making them from scratch, gone to a simpler recipe, kept cooking them with lots of love and we never even suspected!

We’ve laughed about that for years! In retrospect, I am really grateful. With all the other goings on during the holidays, frozen noodles are a lot easier and quicker.

My Grandma’s Holiday Egg Noodles

Ingredients:

2 packages of frozen noodles. Our favorite, would you believe, is Grandma’s Wide Egg Noodles.

4 cans of Campbell’s cream of chicken soup.

Water – ten cups (can add more water later if desired).

Directions:

• Defrost the noodles a bit – either by letting them sit out for a short time or popping them in the microwave.
• Bring the water to a boil.
• Slowly drop the noodles in bit by bit stirring often.
• Turn the heat down to a low boil and cook for about 1/2 hour – continuing to stir often.
• Add the soup, stirring well.
• Bring back to a low boil, and continue to stir frequently.
• Turn the heat down to a simmer.
• Simmer the noodles for at least 1 hour. 
• Stir frequently so they don’t burn.
• They are done when you are happy with their taste and consistency.

Flexible Thanksgiving Dinner Side Dishes

Talk about flexible! This is one of those recipes where you can change things easily – times, amounts, types of soup (I often use the Campbell’s Healthy Choice soups).  You can even make it a day ahead of time and reheat it the next day, adding a little water, if necessary, to achieve a good consistency. This kind of flexible Thanksgiving dinner side dishes makes it a great recipe for the Sandwich Generation. Many of us are so busy caring for elderly parents and helping with grandkids, who’s got time to do much! But these can definitely work around my schedule needs. 🙂 

Favorite Thanksgiving Dinner Side Dishes?

What’s YOUR fave Thanksgiving dinner side dishes? We’d love to hear!

Kaye

P.S. If you’d like to follow in the footsteps of my grandmother’s original way of making them from scratch, you might like Cook’s Illustrated’s book, The Complete Book of Pasta and Noodles. But hurry. It looks like they are running low on their supply of these useful cookbooks!