Here it is, Saturday morning, and the Big Meal is, well, four days if you don’t count today or Thursday itself, or six days if you do . . . I never know how to do the inclusion/exclusion bit. Anyway, if you’re in charge of dinner you know when it is! So I thought I’d share my own timetable for the meal in case it helps you get a handle on things. I know that my biggest weakness is that I’m so liable to fly by the seat of my pants, thinking that I have plenty of time, and then there’s a horrible last-minute crunch. This year my job is made so much easier than it would normally be by the fact that I can make as big of a mess as I need to/want to down in my own cozy little kitchen and then take everything upstairs, where my mother-in-law will have done all the setup. The part that’s normally so frantic is getting the house (and yourself) company-ready in the midst of food prep. In our old house I had one of those good news/bad news situations, in which I had a large, beautiful kitchen that was open on both ends and could be used as the buffet area since it had a long counter plus an island. The problem, of course, was that the kitchen was the same place where I’d just been cooking my little brains out. So it was very hard to have a well-organized, tidy area where my guests could circulate and get their food. I was never organized enough to meet my goal of having the only dirty item in the sink to be the turkey roasting pan and the only last-minute task to be making the gravy.

So here’s what I plan to do day by day starting today. If you haven’t already settled on the menu and made up your shopping lists, this weekend would be a good time to do that. I have a list for King Soopers (our local grocery chain) and for Costco. I’m linking to all the recipes again just in case you don’t want to go back to the last post.

Here’s how I see the week shaking out:

Saturday evening:

Take whole turkey out of freezer and put in fridge (I have a 14-pound turkey, and the guideline is that it takes 24 hours for each 5 pounds of turkey to thaw. I’m also marinating the turkey for two nights, so that means I want to start that process on Tuesday evening, which is three days from now.)

If you haven’t bought your turkey already, today is the day, especially if you want a big turkey and are getting a frozen one. If you’re planning on a fresh one you probably needed to order it ahead of time.

Tuesday:

Do all shopping, including the fresh vegetables but excluding the turkey(s), since I bought those already.

Make the pie crust, rolling it out and getting it all situated in the pie pan. Wrap well with plastic wrap and put in the freezer. (This link is to Sally’s Baking Addiction, whose crust I decided to go with. My pie doesn’t have a top crust, so I’m not doing that lattice thingy. If I happen to run across some pumpkin- or leaf-shaped small cookie cutters, though, I might do something fancy around the edges. I might.)

Prep whole turkey, patting dry, removing giblets and neck, rubbing with dry brine ingredients, bagging and refrigerating.

Boil down cider to make syrup. (See recipe below for the sweet potato casserole I’m making. I’m adding my own twist to it, adding apple slices and drizzling the top with this syrup, for which you just boil down a whole gallon of syrup to make about a pint. You have to watch it carefully in the last stages or you may end up with an irreparably scorched pan–not that that’s ever happened to me!)

Wednesday:

Prep all stuffing ingredients: cube and dry bread, dice and saute vegetables, saute sausage. Bag each ingredient separately and refrigerate.

Prep Make-Ahead Gravy base.

Prep green beans, topping and tailing (if necessary—won’t be if using haricots verts from Costco) and blanching, bag and refrigerate. Slice and saute mushrooms, bag and refrigerate. (I’m making a double recipe of this.)

Prep turkey breast, patting dry and rubbing with dry brine ingredients, bagging and refrigerating.

Make cranberry sauce.

Make and freeze biscuits.

Thursday:

Complete pie—by noon.

Make cranberry cake—by noon.

Stuffing in crockpot by 3:00—on high for 15 minutes, stir, put on low, check every half hour. When good and hot, put on “keep warm” setting. (I have one of those big Rival crockpots, and it tends to run very hot. I’ve burned the outside of the stuffing before, thus the shorter time and incessant checking.)

Prep mashed potatoes and put in upstairs Oven to stay warm—by 4:30

Prep sweet potato casserole and put in lower oven to bake—by 3:00—then put in upstairs oven to stay warm by 4:30.

Whole turkey into oven by 2:30; breast in by 3:30.

Turkey resting by 4:30; make gravy including pan drippings, keep warm on stove

Green bean casserole in downstairs lower oven by 4:30.

Biscuits in the oven by 4:45—two pans in upper downstairs oven.

Everything ready to go by 5:00. I’m using two chafing dishes and an electric warming tray, putting all the hot things on a serving table. Biscuits and salads go on the regular table. I’ll clear off the hot things at some point and we’ll put the desserts on that table.

You’ll notice references to “upstairs” and “downstairs” ovens and to “upper” and “lower” ovens downstairs. That’s because I have a plethora, indeed a richness of ovens. Since we have a kitchen upstairs and downstairs, I have access to two ovens, plus my oven downstairs is actually a double oven. (Can I just be kind of nauseating here and tell you how much I love, love, love that oven? We bought it at a scratch-and-dent outlet and it has proven to be great. The lower oven is smaller, so I use that whenever I just need one rack’s worth of baking—a pizza, for instance. The upper oven has a sliding rack that I’ll have to remove to make room for the turkey and roasting pan, which is too bad, but there it is.) If you have just one oven you’ll need to plan things out carefully so that everything can be hot at once, the bane of TG planning. What works, at least in theory, is to put all of the side dishes in to heat for the half hour or so that the turkey rests, but you can’t do that if everything is ice cold. So if you’ve made your side dishes ahead—which I hope you have, for sanity’s sake—be sure to take them out of the fridge 45 minutes to an hour ahead of time so they can come to room temp before you put them in the oven. If you have convection capabilities in your oven, so much the better. Try 375 on convection and even so take a look and switch things around at the 20-minute mark, if you have enough brain cells left at that point to think of it.

So that’s what I’m planning to do. I’ve found it very, very helpful to think all of this through ahead of time. Hope I’ve given you some inspiration!

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