Black celebrity Chef Richard Ingraham shares last-minute Thanksgiving prep tips and recipes
Chef Richard Ingraham might be a personal chef to celebrity clients including basketball star Dwyane Wade, but this holiday season he is offering his culinary expertise to all.
Chef Richard Ingraham might be a personal chef to celebrity clients including basketball star Dwyane Wade, but this holiday season he is offering his culinary expertise to all. The Miami native — who studied his craft at the Art Institute of Atlanta — is offering up tips honed over his fifteen years of perfecting his skills in the kitchen. Chef Ingraham wants to make sure you have a  ‘mishap-free’ Thanksgiving. Here are his top tips.
You probably have your Thanksgiving dinner all planned out — but as any host or hostess can tell you, anything can still go wrong. One common issue Chef Ingraham thinks you may encounter is loading up on main courses — and forgetting sweet treats to complete your offerings.
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“If you have your turkey, you’ve got everything that you need, and then you look around, and you think, ‘oh my God, I forgot dessert,’ or ‘I don’t have enough dessert,'” the celebrity chef recommends, “you can easily do something like a no-bake type of a dessert, like a chocolate mousse. And as a matter of fact, I just developed a chocolate mousse recipe along with Wal-mart. I came up with a really nice mousse that’s a no-bake dessert that someone can make in about 15 minutes. Because that’s really all the time you have when you mess up. You only have a small window of time to try to make up for it. It’s a very easy recipe, and something that’s very easy for the kids to come in and help you make as well.” (Check out the recipe for this quick and easy treat below.)
As you prep to serve your guests tomorrow, the chef also has a few professional pieces of advice you may want to consider. First, try to collect and arrange all the ingredients you plan to use in one place before you start cooking.
“One of the major things is just to get your recipes and plan them out. Get all of your ingredients together. It makes it so much easier when you know that you have a cup of sugar here, you have a teaspoon of salt there, so you don’t have to go back and forth to the cupboard,” he said. “You kind of lose your way sometimes. Especially with a bunch of people in the kitchen, kids running around, you have people from out of town — you have to engage them as well. So, it’s always great to have all of your ingredients out.”
And of course, with all those bodies flowing in and out of your cooking space, safety will be an issue. Ingraham insists on taking this extra precaution.
