Thanksgiving: thing to do ahead of time.

Thanksgiving is Genna's favorite holiday, true foodie that she is. And while there will only be four at our table, we will have the complete classic menu: turkey, gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, brussel sprouts and pecan pie. It's all about the leftovers for us ;-)

There are a few thing you can do way ahead of time to make your Thanksgiving eve and day less stressful.

This morning I baked cornbread for stuffing. You could also make the pumpkin cornbread I blogged about recently. We usually make my sister's cornbread stuffing.

This year we plan to make a hybrid that combines bread and cornbread.

I cubed the whole wheat sourdough bread, so it could begin to become stale. With stuffing stale is a good thing  and an easy thing to do ahead.

I plan to put some of our lovely Granny Smith's into the stuffing.

Cranberry sauce is the other easy thing to make ahead. Every year I plead for homemade cranberry sauce. IT IS SO EASY TO MAKE, THERE IS NO EXCUSE !!

And that way you can tailor it to your own tastes.
This year I decided to go with oranges and cinnamon.

Into my saucepan, I tossed, one 8 ounce bag of organic cranberries, 3 inches of cinnamon stick...

one half of an orange with peel, 2/3 cup water ( orange juice is good too), 2/3 cup sugar.

Mix together, bring to a boil and simmer for about 10 minutes. Taste and adjust for sweetness. Cool and store, there, it's done and only gets better as it sits.

Here a another post I did last year about cranberry sauce.

So now you have your bread getting stale and your cranberry sauce made, doesn't that feel good ??