Thanksgiving Menu Bible

Don’t let the holiday meal stress you out! Get organized.

I believe the number one thing that overwhelms the Thanksgiving cook is not being fully prepared. The best outcome for a large holiday meal comes from being prepared — knowing when you are doing each step is very important. Pull off an amazing Thanksgiving dinner by following these simple steps.

Plan out your meal, I always like to do traditional dishes, but each year I rotate in a new dish or two in order to make new traditions.

Write out your detailed grocery list and write it in order of the departments of the grocery store — for example, put all produce in one line and dairy in another. Doing this will save time when shopping in the crowded stores and will help prevent you forgetting an item.

Make a “Thanksgiving Menu Bible.” I do this every year, and it saves me so much time in addition to making sure nothing is forgotten.

Finally you will be able to throw a stress free holiday!

Make My Thanksgiving Menu Bible

You will need a three ring binder with plastic page sleeves.

We all find recipes in cookbooks, online and passed down on recipe cards. I like to take and print everything on full size pieces of paper. If the cookbook you are using doesn’t have an online version, copy the page or type it out yourself. This way you will have all the recipes you need in one place and you won’t have all your different cookbooks lying around your kitchen and possibly getting ruined. Put each of these recipes into the plastic sleeves and place into the three ring binder.

I also like to figure out when each dish is going to be prepared, so I make a timeline page. This timeline page tells me that I’m prepping the stuffing on Wednesday and setting the table on Tuesday…

The next page I create for my menu bible is the “day of” timing. This will tell me exactly what time each dish goes into the oven and at what temperature. Now, everything everything is so easy because you will know that at exactly 3:30 p.m. you need to have the oven set at 375 degrees for the cauliflower gratin, for example.

Lastly, I make a table of contents (put in on the first page in the menu bible for easy reference). I make sure I put the year on the top — each year I can look back at previous years to see what exactly I made.