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Even though stuffed turkey, cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes are pretty standard fare, most families have their own version of the feast, including grandma’s recipes as well as traditional ones.

Photo courtesy of Steve Lupton/Corbis.

I’ve gathered some ideas that allow you to plan your own personalized Thanksgiving, right here in the Lake Geneva region, without having to have someone send you the ingredients from back home.

Thanksgiving planner

Epicurious has devised quite a clever Thanksgiving menu planner that should help everyone have a successful, stress-free Thanksgiving. You fill in a form, answering questions about what why type of dinner you want, and they propose a customized menu.

A gourmet Thanksgiving

I filled it in, with no holes barred, and this was what they suggested:

An easy Thanksgiving for four

Simpler menus are available, depending on how you answer the questions. This one is for four people who want to make a quick, traditional dinner.

There are endless possibilities, depending on how you answer the questions.

A vegan Thanksgiving

Veg Kitchen has a long list of clever ideas for a vegan Thanksgiving. What’s makes the recipes interesting is that they incorporate the traditional ingredients we associate with Thanksgiving, such as cranberries, sweet potatoes, and pumpkin, into mouthwatering recipes such as cranberry slaw, walnut-apple stuffing, and maple and tarragon sweet potatoes.

A vegetarian Thanksgiving

Photo courtesy of the site Chow.

Chow gives an interesting list of recipes quite in the spirit of Thanksgiving, such as roasted acorn squash with wild rice stuffing, mushroom and fennel bread pudding, and celery root and squash gratin with walnut-thyme streusel, and using seasonal ingredients.

What the Pilgrims really ate

Hanna Raskin thinks that today’s classic Thanksgiving meal is quite different from the Pilgrims’ and Wampanoags’ feast. She says they  probably “supped on seal, swan and extravagantly large crustaceans,” considering their proximity to the sea, along with staple harvest dishes such as corn porridges, turnips and grapes.

Finding the ingredients for Thanksgiving in Switzerland

Of course, in Europe, the difficulty is finding the right ingredients. Thanks to the large international population in the Lake Geneva region, we have more options than in most parts of Europe.

Any large Coop, Migros and in particular Manor, supermarket stocks fresh cranberries, sweet potatoes, maple syrup, and molasses. Pumpkin is staple winter food in Switzerland. The farmers markets are always well stocked with pumpkin as well.

The American Market sells vacuum-packed, peeled sweet potatoes, as well as corn meal, canned whole and jellied cranberry sauce, canned puréed pumpkin, pumpkin pie mix, turkey stuffing mix, gingerbread mix, eggnog, pumpkin bread mix, canned sweet potatoes, and canned turkey gravy. They have addresses in both Geneva and Nyon, and you can also order online.

Complete, freshly made Thanksgiving dinners, ready to heat up, can be ordered from the Grande Boucherie du Moulard in Geneva. They also sell fresh free-range turkeys.

Otherwise, it is possible to order turkeys ahead of time from large supermarkets that have butchers and from local butchers. The price may be steep, because they will usually be free-range turkeys from Bresse, but the quality is invariably good. Some of the large Migros have frozen turkeys. In any case, it is a good idea to make arrangements for your turkey well ahead of the Big Day.

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