The Big Grocery List

Posted on November 8, 2019 by dragonspitapothecary

This month our focus naturally turns to food. We think of our favorite dishes like homemade mac-n-cheese, stuffing and of course the desserts! We look forward to that big table set with all these pretty dishes piping hot just waiting for us to dive into them. As anyone who knows that has made a feast like this before there is a lot of work that goes into making it beautiful and tasty.

When you shop for the ingredients and items needed to make this big feast it can easily overtake your shopping list. Here we are planning a beautiful meal for those we love and keeping in mind the ones that are picky eaters, trying to be good and low carbing it, what the kids will want and what everyone expects. There are even some families that are particularly picky about how something is made. As if making all these dishes is just not enough labor as the recipe calls but now we have to also allow for personal twists.

For many of us the actually preparations and cooking starts several days before the actual holiday and long before that are shopping carts full of the supplies needed to pull it all together. Here’s some tricks that I have learned along the way to help:

Meal Menus

There is an art to buying all you need for Thanksgiving week and having the place to store it all while you also prepare regular meals and fulfill needs every day leading up to it. I know my kitchen can easily bust at the seams with all that extra food hanging around and I don’t have the budget to just go buy it in one trip either.

As a result, I have found using a meal menu in November and December is a real money saver. I can plan out meals that use up what I have in the pantry now and make leftovers to save on cooking every night. It takes a bit to build it out but I love that suddenly I don’t have to hear “I don’t know” when I ask what everyone wants for dinner! Decision is made and I can walk into the kitchen to make dinner without being stressed over what to pull together that’s quick and everyone will eat. The other advantage of doing this in advance is it gives you a chance to clean out the pantry to start making room for the Thanksgiving week meals. I’ll look up recipes to use what I have in the pantry and start getting a little creative. Consider this pre-training for cooking the big feast!

For me, doing this lets me feel more organized about what needs to be on my list when I go to the store including what to order online and what I want to personally pick out. While I love ordering groceries online these days there are some things I really like picking out myself such as fresh produce, the turkey and other things. Admittedly sometimes it is still cool to actually push a grocery cart too.