Thanksgiving Snack Platters

Break out the vegetables, cheese, fruit, meat, and get your turkey on!  In just a matter of minutes, you can construct an adorable snack platter for Thanksgiving that will keep guests happy while the formal meal is being prepared.

Grab a friend to join you in this endeavor, as I did with my friend Denise Mayree. The clever ideas multiply when you draw inspiration from each other, plus it’s a whole lot more fun!

The platter pictured above uses half of a kabocha squash for the turkey body.  Thinly sliced rainbow carrots are feathers, plus the carrots are cut into beak and eyes.  Cranberry rolled goat cheese makes a wattle.  Cucumbers, cauliflower, tomatoes, join the slices of cheese and meat.  Cheese curds are scattered along the bottom.

On this one, we again use rainbow carrot slices, but use a pear for the turkey body.  The eyes are slices from the top of baby zucchini (vertical slices of the zucchini join the other vegetables in the feathers section), topped with even smaller slices of rainbow carrots.  Carrot beak.  Jalapeno pimiento cheese spread makes the wattle.  The cheese spread also was used to “glue” the facial features on.

Realizing that just having carrots and zucchini as the vegetables might not be universally appealing, I just kept adding more vegetables — thin sticks of English cucumber, thin strips of red pepper, florets of broccoli.  Much more balanced, eh?

Cheese and meat time!  Oh, and the feet.  The feet are carved from a piece of yellow carrot.  There are just two types of cheese, a pepper jack and some weird thing that had a name I had never heard of that was basically gorgonzola sandwiched between hunks of cheddar.  (If I was willing to recommend it, I would have written down the name, but trust me, it was odd and frustratingly crumbly, so don’t bother going to hunt for it.)  Salami and another Italian sliced meat completed the cute platter.  A container of dip for the vegetables and crackers for the cheese and meat lurked nearby.

Now for the critique.  Just noticed he had lost an eye before this picture was taken!  If I had it to do over again, I would have added some dark green thin slices of zucchini or English cucumber to these tailfeathers.  Instead of cucumber slices below the turkey body, I would have used dark wheat crackers.  And the meat and cheese that is at the top?  I would have put it on first, with the vegetable turkey “feathers” overlapping.  You can learn from these observations and take your snack platter to the next level!