Who is ready for Thanksgiving?! It’s my favorite holiday but this year I’m not as into it as usual. Mostly because for obvious reasons it’s not celebrated in England.
But Christmas is big here and I’m starting to get into the Christmas spirit early. However, I’m trying to hold out until after Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving though can be the cause of so much stress for some people. Especially if you’ve never hosted it or aren’t a seasoned host. Trust me, Thanksgiving is stressful even for us seasoned hosts.
The best way to approach Thanksgiving is with planning. And today I am totally covering all of your major meal time planning with a Thanksgiving cooking schedule, menu plan, and grocery list.
You’ll get all the Thanksgiving planning help you need on one super convenient printable.
I started making Thanksgiving cooking schedules because I only had one oven and really needed to focus on how to rotate the food and turkey in and out of the oven to make sure things were all done in time to eat.
But over the years, you can see all the cooking timelines I’ve made here, here, and here, I’ve realized I need to plan even more.
Not just the cooking schedule, but also the menu and shopping lists.
This printable makes it so convenient having all of that information on one page.
How to Use the Thanksgiving Cooking Schedule and Worksheet
I wanted to help break down how to flow through this worksheet and use it in a step by step way to plan your Thanksgiving meal. So follow along through the numbers with me.
1. The Thanksgiving Menu
The very first place I start is with the menu. Plan out what dishes you are going to be making for the big meal. If you’re doing more of a pot luck style and people are bringing things, write those down too.
Don’t forget to include the main dish, side dishes, desserts, and even drinks.
Once you have your menu written out and recipes collected you can move on to the second part of the planning worksheet.
2. The Shopping List
After you have your menu determined and recipes handy use the recipes to write down your grocery list.
Literally write everything off of the recipe onto the list. A lot of times I’ll read through a recipe and not worry about writing down butter or cinnamon thinking I have plenty to only realize once I’m cooking I don’t have enough.
I like to break up my shopping lists by the different areas in the store you’ll be getting those items.
So there is a produce section, dairy, meat, freezer, pantry, and other. Sometimes I even add in a baking section. Which I think makes sense on a Thanksgiving shopping list since you’ll be doing baking that day.
I use the other section for things like napkins, paper plates, aluminum foil etc.
3. The Thanksgiving Cooking Schedule
This is the meat and potatoes of this worksheet.
In this section you are going to go back to those recipes and list out all of your dishes with what they are, the temperature they cook at, and for how long.
This is the general information you’ll use to complete the cooking schedule.
4. The Order of the Thanksgiving Cooking Schedule
After you have all the information needed about cooking your Thanksgiving meal, you need to figure out what order things should cook.
The first step in this process is to work backwards from the time you want to eat. For instance, if you’re planning to eat at 5:00 p.m. then work backwards from there.
Based off of the total time things need to cook you can figure out the order and what time dishes need to go in the oven and what time they need to come out in order to be done by 5:00 p.m.
Always be sure to factor in about an extra 30 minutes for things that may need to take longer to cook or if you miss getting something in the oven right when you’re supposed to.
And it’s always a good idea to ask your guests that may be bringing something if any of their dishes need to go in the oven once they arrive. Factor that into your timeline as well
Another big tip for determining the order is to start with the dish that needs to cook at the highest temperature. This allows your oven to heat up to the highest temperature first then just come down in temperature all day. No waiting for the oven to heat up when you need to put your next dish in.
How to Get Your Thanksgiving Cooking Schedule and Planning Worksheet
To download and print your own worksheet so you can get started planning your Thanksgiving meal just click the picture below.
Once you put your email address in you’ll get the link to my resource library where you can download and print the PDF worksheet.
I hope this walkthrough was helpful in figuring out how a Thanksgiving cooking schedule could be beneficial to you. It’s how I plan my Thanksgiving meal every year.
It’s so helpful and totally decreases the stress when you have a clear cut step by step plan.
Are you hosting Thanksgiving this year? Will you need to plan how to get everything cooked on time? Tell me in the comments!
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