Using the Macro: Holiday Meal Planning

Whew! It's been a very busy month and a half here. I also haven't had a lot of new material as we have been mainly eating through stuff I've already posted, and I haven't been adding a lot to the freezer recently.  However, I just finished cooking for a week and a half, so I'll soon have some new recipes to add.  Posting will probably continue to be sporadic through the end of the year, but I should get back to a more regular schedule with the new year.

I did want to take a chance to talk about using the macro to plan holiday meals.  After all, I designed the macro as a planning tool for buying and cooking large quantities of food and multiple dishes, which describes holiday cooking perfectly.  I uploaded an updated spreadsheet with my holiday recipes.  You can download it here.

Freezing and Holiday Meals
First though let's talk about using your freezer with your holiday cooking.  Generally speaking the freezer is not going to be super useful in making holiday meals.  After all cooking and holidays go together, and most things you have at your holiday meals probably are not going to freeze well.  There are some things that can be made in advance and frozen.  The main issue the freezer causes is that is make things mushy.  Water expands as it freezes and as it expands it breaks down the structure of the food, creating mush.  So, things that are already mushy can generally frozen without issue, like mashed potatoes.  I made a large batch of mashed potatoes a few weeks before Thanksgiving last year and they turned out great.  Since it was just me cooking for my immediate family that year, having the mashed potatoes already made was when I was doing the rest of my Thanksgiving cooking.



Mashed sweet potatoes like those used in sweet potato pie or casserole (I've learned that what you call it depends on where you live.) probably would freeze well too.  My family makes a sweet potato pie very similar to this one, and I am confident that both the mashed sweet potatoes mixture and the topping would both freeze well and the dish could simply be assembled on Thanksgiving day.

Most baked goods freeze well, so desserts, breads and rolls can be made in advance too.  I once hosted a fancy Christmas dinner where I wanted to serve five tiny desserts with enough of each for everyone to sample every one.  I made all of the desserts in advance and froze them.  The desserts were just as delicious coming out of the freezer as they had been going in and this allowed me to serve a fun and impressive dessert while spreading the actual work out over the course of a couple months instead of all right before the party when I had a lot of other preparation to do.

One word of caution for freezing things for the holidays, do not choose your holiday meals as a time to experiment with how well something freezes.  Nothing is going to add to your stress of hosting a holiday meal like discovering that something you carefully made in advance and froze doesn't taste so good after being frozen.  If you have food that you want to freeze in preparation for a big meal like this, make enough of it and make it far enough in advance that you can thaw some to try before the holiday to make sure it tastes like you were hoping after being frozen.  With the desserts mentioned above, I baked and froze all of them a couple months in advance.  A couple weeks before the party I thawed and tasted some of each dessert.  That way I had time to come up with something new if my desserts didn't work out.

Using the Macro to Plan Your Meal
So in all likelihood you're not going to be doing a lot of freezing in preparation of your holiday meal.  However, the macro is still a very useful tool in planning your meal.  Tracking down all the recipes you use and creating shopping lists can be quite the process.  The spreadsheet stores the location of all your recipes, but more importantly once you have them entered, all you have to do is type in the recipe names and click a button.  The macro will create your list and organize it to make your shopping easier.

The multiplier is another useful feature.  If you're anything like me the amount of people you cook for over the holidays can vary a lot from year to year.  Some years we just have my immediate family and other years we have varying numbers of our extended family or friends.  The multiplier scales the ingredients for your shopping list without you having to go through and tediously multiply every ingredient in every recipe yourself.  Usually when I enter recipes into the spreadsheet I enter them exactly as written without scaling.  This makes entering faster and easier.  For my holiday recipes though I enter a version of the recipe that has been scaled to feed my immediate family.  This was I can go through all the recipes easily and give them the same multiplier for whatever number of people I am cooking for.  

The last area where the macro is very helpful is the prep list.  Having a list of everything that needs to be chopped, diced, shredded and minced means you can do all of those things a day or two in advance and have everything ready to start cooking on the day itself.

Entering Your Recipes
I have a list of what we eat for Thanksgiving and Christmas below, but I'm sure you have your own family favorites you make every year.  You can learn how to enter your own recipes here, allowing you to utilize all the planning tools the macro has to offer.  Here's what we like to eat:

Thanksgiving

Good Eats Turkey - This turkey is delicious as written.  Sometimes instead of roasting it we cook it our smoker.

Sweet Potato Pie - Our family recipe is very similar to this one.  We don't use the milk, and we use canned sweet potatoes.

Mashed Potatoes and Gravy

Green Bean Salad

Apple Stuffing

Cranberry Sauce

Pumpkin Pie

and of course rolls.

Christmas

Smoked Prime Rib

Potato Gratin

Pomegranate Salad

Stuffed Mushrooms - although I don't bother with the wine.

Peppermint Ice Cream with Hot Fudge

and of course rolls again.

Happy Holidays!!