Holiday Side Dishes | In Season

This month’s column is inspired by a season rather than a seasonal ingredient. It’s holiday time, which means weeks of family gatherings and parties and “What can I bring?” and “How about a side dish?” Here are two fun, festive, and crowd-pleasing options.

The first is a casserole inspired by that classic of 1970s steakhouses, the twice-baked potato. In this case, baked potatoes are mashed with cheddar cheese, bacon, sour cream, and roasted garlic and topped with scallions. Delicious. Next, with a tip of the hat to the many Polish-Americans living in New England, we have pierogi, stuffed with butternut squash, feta, and caramelized onions and topped with crispy sage leaves. This second recipe is a bit more time-consuming, but it’s really quite simple and you can make the dough and the filling a day or two beforehand (in fact, the pierogi taste even better when you do). 

Twice-Baked Potato Casserole

Butternut Squash Pierogi

Amy Traverso

Amy Traverso is the senior food editor at Yankee magazine and co-host of the public television series Weekends with Yankee, a coproduction with WGBH. Previously, she was food editor at Boston magazine and an associate food editor at Sunset magazine. Her work has also been published in The Boston Globe, Saveur, and Travel & Leisure, and she has appeared on Hallmark Home & Family, The Martha Stewart Show, Throwdown with Bobby Flay, and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Amy is the author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, which was a finalist for the Julia Child Award for best first-time author and won an IACP Cookbook Award in the “American” category.

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