Thanksgiving cooking plan
Unlike Mr. Bean , turkey preparation is going smoothly at our house this morning. I’ve been making Thanksgiving meals nearly every year since coming out to California as a grad student. A Thanksgiving feast can be fairly simple to put together, primarily requiring planning and organization skills, as opposed to creative seasoning skills. Once the bird’s in the oven, there isn’t much to do for a few hours, leaving time to hang out, get in a good run, or catch up on feed reading while looking at the parade on television.
The hardest trick is getting everything to come out at the same time, since the bird has a somewhat variable 4-5 hour lead time on it, and there’s a limited supply of stove burners and pans for cooking the vegetables and side dishes during the last hour. We normally have salad, along with corn, peas, yams, potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and the traditional Thanksgiving kimchee (highly recommended, even if you aren’t Korean). Plus pumpkin and French apple pies for dessert.
The main procedural refinement over the past several years has been in reducing the size of the turkey so we don’t end up with perpetual leftovers. (I actually enjoy the leftovers more than the initial meal, but only for a couple of days). This year’s turkey is around 11 pounds, just a little more than the one this woman ate by herself yesterday.
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