Thanksgiving Series #1: Planning & Preparation

I am a list maker. It is just how I keep things in order and keep myself calm in the wake of a major event such as vacation or a holiday. I highly recommend keeping a list for Thanksgiving preparation. Three is best; one for things to do, another for things you need to buy and a last one for the actual event of cooking.

This year my "to do list" included things like cleaning the table cloth, finding new dishes and flatware , making sure all dishes, bar towels and dish towels were clean. A deep clean of the kitchen was necessary as well! These are the things that can be done a few days in advance, which is a sanity saver! 

The next thing I do is plan a menu. Having it all in writing helps me to make sure I have a rounded spread. I like to make sure that the table and plates are visually pleasing and there are a variety of colors to eat. Another advantage of putting your menu in writing is to make sure you are not too heavy on one course or element of your dinner. This year I discovered I had planned too many starchy things and had no vegetable! Luckily I had my planned menu, otherwise I would have discovered the dinner was all neural tones as I was putting the platters on the table! Use your menu as a guide to make sure you have enough serving vessels, I have learned this that hard way in years past!

To help determine just how much food to buy, here is a guide:

Turkey: 1 pound per adult, 1/2 of a pound per child. If you want left overs, round up! We had 12 people here (7 adults and and 5 kids. and a 16 pound bird yielded barely any left overs)

Potato dishes: 1/2 of a pound of raw potatoes per person

Veggies & stuffing/dressing: 1/3 to 1/2 cup per person

Rolls: 2 per person is good for a typical crowd. In this house we use parker house rolls which are small, so we estimate 3 to 4 per person.

Once my menu is established, I make it look pretty and print it out. Guests love seeing it displayed on the kitchen counter like a restaurant! Sometimes I put it in a picture frame and sometimes I print on cardstock an use a plate stand/easel to hold it up. It all depends on my mood.

Here is the menu for this year:

Now that you have a menu you can make a plan of attack! Is there anything you can make in advance? We make the baked beans a few days before Thanksgiving (they actually taste better that way!) and the cheesecake gets made the night before because it needs to hang out in the fridge overnight. Turkey takes the longest, so that should be the first thing you tackle. After we have the bird in the oven I start getting the appetizers ready. Next is the sweet potato dish followed by the mashed potatoes. While those are cooking, I get the apple crisp ready to go in the oven once the turkey comes out. The gravy is made with the drippings while the bids is resting on a cutting board.

At that point all of the non cooking people help to set the table and they carry the filled serving vessels to the table as they become ready. Rolls, cranberry and steamed (frozen) broccoli are the last thing to be done for dinner. As we eat, the apple crisp bakes and bubbles away in the oven. It comes out of the oven just as we are finishing dinner and cools on the counter during clean up.

After dinner is cleared from the table, the massive job of dishes and packing up leftovers starts!

this is the actual aftermath of our first Thanksgiving of the year. One load is in the dishwasher and The Hubster had already washed a sink full of larger items by hand!

Not much left over this year!

And THAT is how we plan and prepare Thanksgiving for a herd!