How to stay sane on turkey day

Or how I learned to stop worrying and love Thanksgiving

Cooking a great meal for more than a dozen family and friends on vacation is one of the most stressful challenges the average home cook will face.

What is the key to maintaining sanity? Plan, plan, plan, then plan some more … Cook as much as possible 1 or 2 days ahead.

For the big day itself, I like to write a timeline of the whole day. Why?

– You can avoid doing too much at once. Most Thanksgiving disasters happen because you have too many things to do at once and you forget to serve a plate at a crucial time.

– You can see if your menu is feasible for your kitchen. You may find that you have too many dishes that use the oven and that you cannot cook everything in your kitchen.

So how do you do it? I like to write the timeline using Excel, but you can also use pencil and paper.

1. Decide what dishes you want to prepare

When you come up with the menu, consider the resources of your kitchen. Don’t plan all the dishes for the oven. Think about whether you can fit 10 pounds of potatoes in your largest pot; you may need two pots and two burners.

Write each plate at the top of your timeline.

2. Find out what can be done in the future

Cooking ahead is the number one way to make things easier for yourself on the big day. Write down the steps that can be done ahead of time on the timeline.

Things that can or should be done 2 days in advance:

– Cranberry sauce (try making your own, it actually tastes good!)

– Pumpkin cake

– Make turkey broth for sauce

– Start defrosting the turkey (it may take more than a day to defrost).

Things that can or should be done 1 day in advance:

– Make salad dressing

– Assemble the filling and prepare it to bake the next day

– Sweet potato puree (they keep very well)

– Cut vegetables for veggie

– Make sauces

– Soup of a cozy autumn (pumpkin, zucchini);

– Make pans

– Bake bread or rolls

– Brine your turkey

– Clean your house, decorate, set the table …

3. Plan the big day on the schedule

Make a column for each main kitchen resource, each oven, and each stove burner, and add another column for miscellaneous tasks.

Find out when you want to serve dinner and then plan the turkey for that time. If you are serving at 4pm, then you need to take the turkey out of the oven at 3:30 (for it to rest) and put the turkey in at 12:30 to give it a 3 hour bake time. Check off these tasks on the timeline under the oven column. These are just our examples, your cooking times will vary depending on the size of your bird.

Schedule your other dishes on the timeline below the cooking resource they will use (stove burner # 2, oven # 1, …). Also, schedule the miscellaneous steps (for example, peel and cut 10 pounds of potatoes) in the miscellaneous column.

Make sure you don’t give yourself too much to do with any given time slot. If you do, change the recipes to a less busy time. During actual cooking, the schedule often slips, so give yourself some leeway between dishes just in case.

4. Re-evaluate your menu

When you filled in your tickets, did you have trouble fitting things together? Were too many dishes used in the same oven? You may need to plan more non-oven dishes. Be creative. There are recipes for pumpkin soup that can be a good starter.

If you have too many things packed in a time slot, you should try to plan more dishes than can be prepared the day before. Instead of baked sweet potatoes, maybe make an asparagus salad that can be made ahead and stored in the fridge.

5. Cooking time

For the days leading up to Thanksgiving, be sure to follow all the steps you have planned. The exact moment is not that important.

On the big day, just start following the timeline. At any given time, you can easily see what it is supposed to do by checking the row for the current time.

Now the most important …

6. Have fun

I know this all sounds like a bread schedule, the point is that it doesn’t take long to make a timeline, and it’s a lot less painful than having a mental breakdown on Thanksgiving.

The point of scheduling things is so that you are not too busy at any given moment. This way you can stay calm and have fun before and during the big meal. It is also so that you can be a good host. Nobody wants to see you freak out on Thanksgiving. So don’t worry and have fun! That’s all it is …