This year Thanksgiving could be much smaller than another year because of COVID-19. Here are some tips for cooking the smaller Thanksgiving meal.
You do not have to eliminate turkey, stuffing, and other traditional dishes of Thanksgiving meal from your celebration menu. I am giving you some useful cooking tips that I have successfully applied. Hopefully, this advice can help you enjoy a smaller celebration of Thanksgiving. The feast of Thanksgiving night usually includes big birds, large casseroles, and so on. Those dishes could serve up to 10 people or more.
Therefore, cooking for a smaller meal at Thanksgiving is challenging.
“Strangely, in the past, this time of year seemed challenging because we were trying to feed so many,” Rebecca Miller Ffrench, a food writer and founder of the State Table from New York, said in a statement. She also added that even though we are going to serve the smaller meals, we struggle with the same problem as when we cook large meals. If the problem is not physically painful, it is emotional.
In order to serve a smaller Thanksgiving meal, I suggested you purchase a smaller bird. Turkeys could be found in any American supermarket, and on average, they contribute a turkey at the 16-pound range. That bird can be served up to 12 people, while we are preparing a meal for about 8 people. When you search for turkey, a 10-pound turkey will be a better alternative.
Besides picking a smaller bird, you will need to serve fewer side dishes.
Miller Ffrench recommended that the best thing about Thanksgiving, for her, was the side dishes. The variety of those things make her happy. However, joy seems to be ridiculously wasting right now.
“Just one kind of cranberry, not two. Just squash, and not sweet potatoes as well. I hope we will take the time to relish each bite more, really focus on the individual flavors of each food, not the collective mounded plate,” Ffrench said. “These past months have taught me to truly savor things more, figuratively and literally.”
Remembering that you also have to cut half of the proportion for all the side dishes. The side dishes, as Ffrench has said earlier, are her joy but she would need to cut half of it. Lastly, pies are a very important part of the celebration, but we need to make it smaller as well.
Reducing the cooking time and the size of the cake to make it smaller is what I recommend. I also want to advise that if you overcook and have a large number of leftovers, please use them smartly. Leftover squash or mash potato can be used for soup. Or leftover turkey can be turned into a pot pie.
I hope that those small tips can help you enjoy Thanksgiving, a smaller Thanksgiving.
