Sunday, November 11, 2012

Thanksgiving prep: The planning process






It is hard to believe that Thanksgiving is just a few weeks away. Where has the time gone?

For the past three years, the husband and I have hosted our families at Thanksgiving. My parents come for dinner and his parents join us for dessert.

Usually I get pretty overwhelmed when it comes to planning for Thanksgiving. But, this year I wanted to make it more relaxing and I decided to be a little more organized than just writing a schedule on a half sheet of paper and then flipping out when I couldn't find my shopping list.

The first step for my organization project was to purchase the necessary supplies which included a binder, divider tabs and binder sleeves.




We really don't have any tried and true recipes that we stick to each year. Since, our newly instated clean eating diet, we decided to hit the internet, Food Network and Martha Stewart magazines.


 Here is our menu for this year:


 After going through all of our recipes I placed them in the sleeves in the binder. And decided what days to prepare the food. I indicated that by adding a post-it note on the bottom of the page and wrote either Wednesday or Thursday and what time to make the food.



After looking through all of the recipes, I made a list of the ingredients that I needed, how much and what days to buy them. I also highlighted the least perishable items and picked them up this past weekend.







So far this plan has worked pretty well. We still need to make another trip to the store on Saturday. We are also shopping around for turkey prices. It seems this year the price is still a little higher than it was last year.




I hope to post an entry on decorating the table for Thanksgiving. So look for that in future blog entry.

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