Believe it or not, next Thursday is Thanksgiving. Are you prepared?
Thanksgiving can be an insanely stressful day for those doing all the cooking, but you don’t have to let it become your worst nightmare. With a little planning and the acknowledgement that sometimes you just can’t do it all alone, this can still be a stress-free day. Here’s a couple tips:
- Make lists for yourself so you remember all the ingredients you need to purchase, and don’t hit the stores too late. You don’t want to end up with the world’s smallest turkey that is supposed to feed 15 instead of 2. I’ve seen estimates of 1-2 pounds of turkey per adult as the suggested serving size. I like to go on the larger size because if I don’t have at least 3 days worth of leftovers to eat afterward, it just doesn’t feel like it was Thanksgiving.
- Plan out your schedule for the day of and day before. Prepare whatever you can in advance instead of trying to get it all done on Thanksgiving Day. Bake pies a day ahead (this will leave your oven free for the bird and other side dishes) and prepare something quick for breakfast that only needs to be shoved in the oven in the morning like a breakfast casserole or cinnamon rolls. I actually keep my recipes and schedule together each year so when I make a new schedule, I don’t leave something out. Remember to read your recipes so you don’t forget to let your rolls rise or thaw something.
- Don’t feel that you have to cook everything yourself! Let family members bring a side dish or dessert. Purchase fresh rolls and side dishes to warm up in the oven instead of making them yourself. You can even have your whole Thanksgiving dinner catered if you can’t get in the kitchen yourself this year.
- Don’t go overboard with your recipes either. Stick to recipes that are easy, that you’re familiar with and that will not take you half the day to prepare. If someone wants to help in the kitchen, LET THEM! Give them something to peel, chop, stir or baste. Or have them set the table, run the vacuum cleaner, etc.
Having trouble planning your meal? Here are my tried and true recipes which I’ll be revisiting again this year. Brussel sprouts will also be on our list of goodies (probably instead of green beans although that will just depend on what inspires us at the farmer’s market) and I think I will make honey butter to spread on the rolls instead of just regular butter.
- Turkey (brined 24 hours in advance)
- Stuffing/Dressing cooked outside the turkey
- Cranberry or Currant Relish
- Gravy
- Sugared Carrots
- Green Beans
- Sweet Potatoes
- Philly Cream Cheese Corn
- Fresh Salad – throw some edible flowers (borage, gladiolus, lilac, rose (without the bitter white center, etc) in there to make it special
- Sweet Dinner Rolls
- Desserts: New York Cheesecake & Pumpkin Pie
In additional to all this, don’t forget to keep the kids entertained too! Print out some goodies for them to color, have a space with plenty of toys for them (remind parents to bring some favorites or purchase a few cheap toys for the occasion), get a couple of kid’s movies to keep them occupied and you can even put them to work in the kitchen too if they are interested.
How do you keep Thanksgiving Day from getting out of hand at your house?
LOL! We keep it from getting hectic by going to someone else’s house 🙂
Now THAT is a smart idea. No chaos, no cleaning up afterward…and you might even get yourself some leftovers to take home too. Nice 🙂
Move to a country where there isn’t a Thanksgiving and even if there was one, it would be in May, not November 🙂
Thursday is a work day, so I’ll be at work and turkeys are verrry hard to find here. We did find out that you can actually buy a turkey (frozen) in NZ at Raeward Fresh produced by Crozier’s free range farm in Ashburton. $60 for a 5.5kg turkey! We might get one for Christmas, but do we really want to cook on a hot day?
An interesting idea, Steve. But I guess we’d still end up celebrating it in one way or another like we do here in Germany. Honestly I just can’t go without turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and all the other goodies more than a year. And we really don’t cook a turkey for any other occasion. It is wildly expensive for a turkey here too but oh so worth it for a farm fresh, free range bird!
What do you normally cook for Christmas there? Fire up the grill and go July 4th style (minus the fireworks of course)? We lived in Miami for a while and Christmas was also warm there…but not usually like a summer day 🙂
Wow! Can I come to your house for Thanksgiving? 🙂
An American friend of mine and I are cooking up a Thanksgiving feast for some of our non-American friends (they’re South African and Irish), plus our German husbands on Saturday. It should be quite interesting…for dessert though, I combine your two desserts and I make a pumpkin cheesecake (I’ve got the recipe on my blog)…it is pretty darn good I must say 🙂 Have a good Turkey Day! 🙂
All of our friends coming are Germans also and a couple of them had never had sweet potatoes or pumpkin pie until the first Thanksgiving dinner we hosted two years ago. It was a great time even with all the work 🙂
My mom found a recipe for pumpkin pie cheesecake with a gingersnap crust last year and brought it (and ginger snaps) with her from America. I thought the cheesecake was fantastic. Tasted just like a creamier version of pumpkin pie. Hope your turns out awesome and don’t forget to leave the oven door closed during the entire cool down process, no matter how much you want to just smell that sucker 🙂
Hi Tiffany,
Since we are off season here, the ingredients for a true Thanksgiving is a real chore so we really do defer until the fall if at all. In all honesty, it’s easy to forget – there are no reminders around and the seasonal cues are all wrong. Same goes for Christmas. When it’s finally warm enough to go swimming, who wants to think about Christmas? Lights and trees make no sense when it stays light until 10pm and too hot and nice to stay inside. Yup, Christmas is more like July 4th with a bbq, but again, truth be told, most years we are on the road, hiking or camping and spend Christmas in a hut or tent and pack in a ‘Christmas dinner’, if we even remember what day it is!
Hey,
I thank you for this article.
Stress is mostly in one’s mind and depends on many aspects.
I encourage everyone to learn a bit about the reasons and background of stress, so you can understand how to avoid it.
This article for example will give you an idea how it is possible to avoid stress: http://fr.ee/article/5-things-you-can-do-for-free-to-get-rid-of-stress
All the best
Martin White