A Thanksgiving Game Plan
Prep work
Last thanksgiving I was in charge of cooking the Thanksgiving meal for the first time. I cooked the meal for seven adults and two toddlers. With Thanksgiving coming around again, pulled the recipes I used and meal plan. Overall, I’m really pleased with how the meal came out. I won’t be cooking the meal again year, but I’m sharing my materials here in case there are any first-timers that could use some help!
Dishes
I pulled all my meals from Bon Appetit to simply the shear number of recipes that could be followed.
Planning
I used this Google document to plan the shopping and cooking schedule. It has the following tabs:
All Ingredients: This tab has all the ingredients for each recipe. The amounts for each ingredient are aggregated in the Shopping List tab.
Shopping List: A basic pivot table to sum up into a shopping list.
Cooking Schedule: Here I manually copy-pasted the steps for each recipe and added the date it needed to be done (either Thanksgiving Day or prior) and the timing on that particular day (morning or afternoon.) Once they were all in the list, I sorted on “date” and “timing” to set the schedule. November 24th Schedule: For the actual cooking day, I scheduled out the cooking tasks for each meal by the hours so I could see where meal-prep tasks would be overlapping.
Results
I was really pleased with how things came out. I was preparing the meal in an AirBnB in London and the owners had a beautiful space for cooking with patina-ed Le Creuset cookware. I was preparing the meal for some Brits who were experiencing their first Thanksgiving so if the turkey came out dry, I was prepared to tell them that that is the true Thanksgiving experience. Luckily though, the turkey turned out really well. This recipe recipe called for splitting the bird out into white and dark meat and then cooking them for different lengths. Why isn’t everyone doing this! Who cares if the bird is in one piece when it lands on the table - white meat and dark meat need to be cooked for different lengths, it only make sense to separate them. We didn’t get the Normal Rockwell painting-esque photo of the turkey on the table, but I’d say that white meat that didn’t taste like chalk was worth it.
Appendix
For kicks, I had ChatGPT the same aggregation that I did in my Google Sheet and it delivered in spades.