Stocking Up

Alright, its time to get down to the planning part of our 12 Weeks till Christmas. This week I want you to start thinking about what you will be cooking for Thanksgiving and start gathering your recipes. Our goal is to make a list of all pantry items that we can buy ahead of time. There are many different resources out there for wonderful Turkey Day recipes, just Google Thanksgiving recipes and you will have an slew of sites to chose from.

For me personally, my first successfully turkey was when I used the recipe Homestyle Turkey, the Michigander Way from allrecipes.com. I also like to do the basics of mashed potatoes and gravy, green bean casserole, mac and cheese, dinner rolls,  apple crumble and sweet tea!!!! I know it isn't too fancy but its all our family favorites.

There are tons of ways to organize your recipes. The first year I did 12 Weeks to Christmas I printed off my recipes and used contact paper to laminate them. Then when I started cooking I wrote down the start and done times on the different recipes with a white board marker. The next year I didn't have to worry about cooking because we visited family for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. This year we will be visiting for Thanksgiving but not Christmas. So although I wont have to worry about Thanksgiving Dinner I will be preparing Christmas dinner. And this year I will be using my much loved, don't know how I did without Big Oven!!!!!! Big Oven is awesome in Meal Planning because it not only stores your recipes while making a weekly or monthly menu planner, it also makes a grocery list!!!!!! And because Big Oven is online, you can also get the ingredients to any recipe you publish with your program anywhere you can get online. So if you have a fancy cell phone, I don't, you can pull up your account and get a grocery list right there in the store. How cool is that!!!! Well worth looking into if you are wanting to stream line recipes and meal planning.

And since we are talking about recipes this week, I'll like for you to link up with your favorite Thanksgiving recipe!!! And don't forget to write out that list of pantry items you are going to need for your Thanksgiving dinner!!!!! You don't have to get them just yet, we just want to have the list ready when it is time to go grocery shopping!!!!! Alright, have a great week and drop me a comment or two and let me know how you are doing so far as we go into Week 10 of 12 Weeks till Christmas!!!!