Simply Thanksgiving Friday Refrainish

Welcome back all! Apologies for the lateness - weather and just overall crazyness around here but here it is: So today, it's time to make your pastry crust (Martha Stewart is the best) and prep your veggies. Look at your recipes, write down how much you need of each/how to cut, and then get to it! Here's my basic breakdown, if you just want to keep it simple this year:

STUFFING: For every pound of bread, I do 2-4 carrots diced, 2-3 ribs of celery chopped, 1 large onion chopped, 3 cloves of garlic chopped. You could also do 1/2-1 whole sweet potato, a rutabaga or a turnip might be fun in there.

Green Bean Casserole: I make my cream of mushroom soup. If you didn't prep your mushrooms yesterday, do so today. For one 8oz container of mushrooms (you need two for a 9x13 pan of casserole though), 1-2 garlic cloves, and 1/2 a small onion. Trim up your green beans if you're using real and blanch tender crisp to get that out of the way. I like thin beans. I always buy french cut frozen. And once I used real and french cut them myself. (and then forgot the casseroles were in the oven and went out to meet some friends and had a terrible mess, but no fire, when I got home)

Sweet Potatoes can be prepped ahead of time. Potatoes get weird like apples, so unless you can submerge them in water, wait until tomorrow.

Crudites/Vegetable platter: I dislike dried up veggies, so I wait until tomorrow or Thanskgiving morning.

Turkey: Don't forget to prep what you put in your turkey. I do a whole garlic head, then quarter an onion and a lemon.

Pie Crust: Don't overwork your dough. I like to food processor the butter and dry ingredients, then pour into a bowl and slowly add the water. The first tablespoon I'll stir with a pastry cutter or such, but after that, I use my hand to gently gather the dough, and that way you can feel if it is coming together, or a bit dry. You'll also knowif it is still wet. If you get a dough ball that is too dry, wet your hands and gently work the dough to fix it. You might have to wet your hands a couple of times, depending on bad it is. Wrap in plastic and set in fridge.

While you're prepping, you can groove to my bizarro Thanksgiving Playlists I have linked up at the bottom. I searched keywords I associate with Thanksgiving and included bands or albums with that keyword in it. Now, I got a little flexible - if a name had "pie" in it, I might have included it. There are a couple of metal tracks, one in the middle and one in the end, just a heads up for those who find it too obtrusive. The Family list is with all albums or bands with Family somewhere the title - a warning, I found tracks that overall fit together, but if you blindly click to an artist, you might be surprised to find it's nothing like that track and I was very lucky to find so many tracks that could work. Anyway, there you go.