It's November which means Holiday Cooking Season is officially open! If I'm cooking, I start planning my menus weeks in advance. If I'm making the whole meal, I also break each recipe into steps, figure out which ones I can do in advance and how far in advance, and draw up a schedule to save myself the grief of discovering that I need to do 8 different intensive cooking tasks at once. Making Thanksgiving (or Christmas or New Year's or Easter) dinner in a step a day makes life so much easier on the holiday itself!
I don't generally subscribe to notions of "tradition" and "convention" and "because we always do it this way" LOL I mean, I've done that for holiday meals b/c my husband prefers it when I don't muck around with his favorite dishes, but truthfully, it kills a little bit of my soul not to try at least one thing new.
I have come to a point though where I've found a few things that work really well and so I gravitate to those recipes. I don't do exactly the same thing every year, but I've got a rotation of less than half a dozen Thanksgiving main dish recipes now. My favorite preparations are either brining the turkey or using some kind of butter-herb rub under the skin. Brining gives a very moist turkey with crispy skin after roasting, while the sub-q butter gives the turkey an unmatched flavor although it sacrifices the crispy skin.
Either way, you want to make some turkey stock in advance for gravy. I have occasionally seen boxed turkey stock at the store, if you wanted to buy it rather than make it. No, homemade gravy is not hard (whereas canned gravy is yucky). The turkey needs to cool before you whack into it anyway, so there's plenty of time for gravy-making. If you make stuffing, you can also use the turkey stock for the stuffing. Btw, I do not stuff my turkey, partly b/c of the health recommendations against doing so and partly b/c if I make stuffing, I want those crunchy, crispy bits that only come from being baked next to rather than inside of a turkey.
A quick thought about thawing...the standard line is that you want to give the bird 24 hours in the fridge for every 5 lbs, so a 15 lb. turkey should thaw in 3 days, etc. I find that this never is sufficient to thaw that block of ice in the cavity, the one you'll have to chisel the giblet package out of if you don't have a totally thawed turkey. So I calculate 1 day per 5 lbs. plus an extra day for the giblets. And if you plan to brine, don't forget to set your thawed-by target 24 hours prior to actual cooking (I screw up so you don't have to).
First things first, stock. Make some the weekend before Thanksgiving (or earlier) and freeze it. Use the meat from the wings/drumsticks in tacos, soup, pot pie, salad, sandwiches...you know, any of the Thanksgiving leftover recipes.
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