Thanksgiving Planning

Our family on Thanksgiving 2009

Overwhelmed with the task of single-handedly planning my family's entire Thanksgiving dinner (and wanting it to be big and special even though it will only be the three of us), I knew I had to over compensate with some extreme planning.  If you ever find yourself in the same situation, I hope that some of my pointers come in handy for you.


1.  Plan the Menu.  First, I did what I do every week for every meal-- I planned what we were going to eat: Turkey, dressing, rolls, pumpkin pie, cranberry sauce, green beans, gravy, baked apples, mashed potatoes, and cinnamon rolls for breakfast.  I told you I wanted it to be big and special!

2.  Find the Recipes.  I did not yet have recipes for several of the things I wanted to prepare.  I scoured the internet for the yummiest looking recipes and printed them to PDFs on my computer.  It's probably a good idea to later print out a hard copy too, but I'll probably just keep the laptop in the kitchen with me.  Yes, I'm making several new recipes over the course of two days.  Yes, I know that's crazy.


3.  List the Ingredients.  With all of my recipes at hand or opened on the computer, I listed in an Excel document all of the ingredients for each dish.  It looked something like this:

Stuffing	Pumpkin Pie
sourdough bread	2 eggs
3 T ghee	1 (15 oz) can pumpkin
1 stalk celery	1 cup light brown sugar
1/2 onion	1 t cinnamon
2 cloves garlic	1/2 t nutmeg
2 T parsley	1/2 t ginger
1/2 t sage	1/2 t salt
1/4 t marjoram	1 T molasses
1/8 t pepper	3/4 cup coconut milk
water	1 pie crust

4.  Combine Ingredients Lists into a Shopping List.  Directly below the ingredients lists, I began organizing everything into a shopping list.  I filtered out the things I already had on hand (which was surprisingly a LOT) and, as always, divided my list by Dairy, Meat, Fresh, General, and Non-Food.  It looked like this (which includes everything I need for the week, not just Thanksgiving):

11/20/10
Dairy	Meat	Fresh	General	Non-Food	?
butter	bacon	celery	salt	wipes	coconut milk
	chicken breasts	onions	sugar	body wash	worcestershire
	salami	garlic	marghiran		gelatin
		bell pepper	sesame oil		lemon juice
		sesame seeds	flour
			juices
			millet
			jam
			PB
			potato chips
			tortilla chips

The "?" column at the end is where I write things that I cannot remember if I have enough on hand or not.  Instead of getting up to go check several times, I make a list there and then check them all at the same time after I've planned everything else.  It's a little thing, but it saves quite a bit of time for me on my shopping morning and helps my easily distracted self stay focused on the task at hand.


5.  Make a Timeline.  The last thing I did was make a timeline of when everything needed to be done.  It spanned Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and  Thursday's to-do list was in order of what to do first, second, etc.  You'll see that I also noted how long some of the things would take that I wanted to all be finished at the same time:

Tuesday Wednesday Make sourdough sponge Make sourdough bread for stuffing for bread, rolls & cinnamon rolls Brine turkey Make & bake pie crust Par-bake rolls Make pumpkin pie Make cinnamon rolls and refrigerate Thursday Cinnamon rolls for breakfast Green Beans-cook in morning, reheat Turkey- 6 hours including prep Stock/gravy- 1 hour stovetop Mashed potatoes- 1 hour stovetop Stuffing- 30 minutes stovetop Fried Apples- 30 minutes stovetop Warm beans- 5 minutes Warm rolls- 10 minutes after turkey Warm pie- 15 minutes after rolls

Then all I had to do was collect my ingredients and execute my plan!  I'll let you know after Thanksgiving how well that went!