Or: How to Plan a Huge Meal and Not Lose Your Mind
It's the first day of November, which means that, if you're a food-lover, your thoughts are turning to turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and pies.
If you're a cook, you've probably had those things on your mind for several days already.
But if you're a food blogger, you've been planning Thanksgiving dinner for weeks. And you've probably already served most of it.
That's why, two weekends ago, we held the Super Bowl of Bitten Word dinner parties: Fakesgiving.
This was our second annual Fakesgiving -- an occasion to invite our friends over and cook as many of November's Thanksgiving recipes as we can manage. (Oh, and credit where it's due: We owe the name to our friend Whitney, who cooked a pre-Turkey Day "Fakesgiving" with some of her friends a few years ago.)
In our case, Fakesgiving isn't a dry-run for the real Thanksgiving. (Or at least it hasn't been so far. Last year, we were so sick of Thanksgiving by the time it arrived that we ordered in that night [whoops!]. And this year, we'll actually be in Argentina for the big day [steak for Thanksgiving? Okay!]). So though it's Fakesgiving for our friends, it's actually Thanksgiving for us.
So here's how it works. There are 14 guests (an easy number to determine because we have exactly 14 seats). We pore over the November issues and pick a mix of traditional and new recipes, a mix of easy and challenging.
This year we ended up making 15 dishes (although it's a total of 17 separate recipes). There's at least one from every magazine that we receive. Some of them are great! And some of them are, well, not so great.
Anyway, here's the plan for what's coming up on The Bitten Word.
Tomorrow, we're going to publish our annual round-up of all the Thanksgiving recommendations from this year's issues.
Then, starting Wednesday, we'll be featuring a new dish every day leading up to Thanksgiving. Hopefully you'll find some inspiration for your own Thanksgiving -- or in some cases, some solid advice on what to avoid.
For today, we're sharing our tips for planning and executing a big meal like this without losing your head, your friends or ability to celebrate Thanksgiving without having PTSD about what happened last year.
