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5 ways to a perfect Thanksgiving Dinner
Thanksgiving is always a busy time and of course you want your Thanksgiving Dinner to be perfect, but each year you seem to behind. Guests show up and dinner is not ready. Well, these five ways for a perfect Thanksgiving Dinner should help ease your...
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How to Stay Sane on Turkey Day
Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Thanksgiving
Cooking a huge meal for over a dozen relatives and friends
during the holidays is one of the most stressful challenges that
the average home cook will undertake.
What's the key to keeping your sanity? Plan, plan, plan, then
plan some more... Cook as much as possible 1 or 2 days ahead of
time.
For the big day itself, I like to write out a timeline of the
entire day. Why?
- You can avoid doing too much at once. Most
Thanksgiving disasters occur because you have too much going on
at once and you forget to tend to some dish at a crucial moment.
- You can see if your menu is feasible for your
kitchen. You might find that you have too many dishes that
use the oven, and you can't possibly cook everything in your
kitchen.
So how do you do it? I like writing the timeline using Excel,
but you can just use pencil and paper too. Here's a a
sample timeline. You can also download an Excel Thanksgiving timeline here.
1. Decide what dishes you want to make
When you're coming up with the menu, keep in mind the resources
of your kitchen. Don't plan every dish for the oven. Think about
whether you can fit 10 lbs of potatoes in your biggest pot;
maybe you'll need two pots and two burners.
Write each dish down at the top of your timeline.
2. Figure out what can be done ahead
Cooking ahead is the number one way of making things easy on
yourself on the big day. Write down the steps that can be done
ahead of time on your timeline.
Stuff that can or should be done 2 days ahead:
- Cranberry Sauce (try making your own, it actually tastes
good!)
- Pumpkin Pie
- Make turkey stock for
gravy
- Start thawing the turkey (you might even need
more than one day to thaw).
Stuff that can or should be done 1 day ahead:
- Make salad dressing
- Assemble stuffing and get
it ready for baking the next day
- Mashed sweet
potatoes (they keep very well)
- Cut vegetables for
crudite
- Make dips
- A hearty Autumn soup
(pumpkin, butternut squash)
- Make casseroles
- Bake bread or rolls
- Brine your turkey
-
Clean your house, decorate, set the table...
3. Plan out the big day on the timeline
Make a column for each major cooking resource, each oven and
each stove burner, and add
another column for miscellaneous
tasks.
Figure out when you want to serve dinner, and then plan the
turkey around that time. If you're serving at 4pm, then you
should take your turkey out of the oven at 3:30 (to give it time
to rest), and put the turkey in at 12:30 to give it a 3 hour
bake time. Mark these tasks on the timeline under the column for
oven. These are just our examples, your cooking times will vary
depending on the size of your bird.
Schedule your other dishes on the timeline under the kitchen
resource they will be using up (range burner #2, oven #1, ...).
Also, schedule miscellaneous steps (eg. peel and cut 10 lbs.
potatoes) under the miscellaneous column.
Make sure that you don't give yourself too much to do with any
given time slot. If you do, shift the recipes to a less busy
time. During the actual cooking, the schedule often slips, so
give yourself wiggle room between dishes just in case.
4. Re-evaluate your menu
When you filled out your entries, did you have trouble fitting
things in? Were too many dishes using the same oven? You might
need to plan more non-oven dishes. Be creative. There are
recipes for butternut squash soup might make a good starter.
If you just have too many things packed into a time slot, you
should try to plan more dishes that can be made the day before.
Instead of baked sweet potatoes, maybe make a asparagus salad
that can be prepped ahead of time and kept in the fridge.
5. Time to cook
For the days before Thanksgiving, just make sure that you do
all the steps you've planned for your self. The exact timing
isn't as important.
On the big day, just start following the timeline. At any given
time, you can easily see what you're supposed to be doing by
checking the row for the current time.
Now most importantly...
6. Have fun
I know all this planning sounds like a pain, but it doesn't
really take much time to make a timeline, and it's much less
painful than having a mental meltdown on Thanksgiving day.
The whole point of scheduling things out is so that you're not
too busy at any given time. This way you can stay calm and have
fun before and during the big meal. It's also so that you can be
a good host. No one wants to watch you freak out on
Thanksgiving. So don't worry and have fun! That's what it's all
about...
About the author:
Howie Wang is creator of the FoodieView Recipe Search
Engine, which allows you to search dozens of recipe sites
from one central place. FoodieView also provides a recipe box
and cooking tips.
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