If y’all have been here for a bit, you know how much I love Thanksgiving. LOVE. IT. Maybe even more than Christmas.
Last year I shared our menu for Thanksgiving, but I didn’t really share how we plan. I got so many sweet messages asking me to share how we plan and keep it all together, and I realized something: I don’t really plan out the day too well. Dinner ends up being like 90+ minutes later than I tell everyone to prepare for, and inevitably something is underdone and I’m so stressed out by the time I sit down, I can hardly eat anything.
One rather notorious year where my kids were both with their dad, I managed to drink about half a bottle of wine while trying to baste the turkey, and I fell asleep at the dinner table. *AHEM*.
So this year, we are trying a plan.
And we are trying to keep it a little low-key, which means only two kinds of potatoes. And two kinds of rolls. And maybe only 3 pies. For five people.
So how do we plan our Thanksgiving?
- I used a google doc for the first time this year, which we are excited about. My mom can add comments if needed, and when dad is ready to go to the store, he can just print it out and check off items as he goes.
- We start with the menu. Always a meat, always at least 2 kinds of potatoes, always a salad or veggie of some sort. Everything else is gravy. (Not literally.) This year to make things easy, I also added links to the recipes. (Those without links either don’t need recipes, or we have made them for so many years, we have the recipes memorized.)
- This year, I color coded the items that will need oven time on the day of Thanksgiving. We only have one oven, so it makes it kind of hard when you’re trying to balance a turkey and seven sides that all need to be straight from the oven to the table. You have to figure out what can be made ahead and finished just before taking it to the table, and what has to be oven to table in one move.
- I went through the recipes one-by-one to see which ingredients we had on hand. I made a list of what herbs we could snip from our garden, and what I thought my mom and dad would have in their kitchen. Then I built the shopping list from there.
I’m hoping this will get dinner onto the table around the time we set to eat (2pm) and that my brother (who works in a professional kitchen in Seattle) doesn’t make too much fun of me.
I used a google doc this year, which is great.