A Complete Timeline for Getting Thanksgiving Dinner Prepared, Served, and Cleaned Up

Credit: Alisa Stern, Ian Moore; Getty / Stone / Maren Caruso, Moment / Alexander Spatari, iStock / Getty Images Plus / Liliia Bila

Thanksgiving has a reputation for endless brining methods, divisive side dishes, and argumentative relatives. It’s no wonder hosting can be stressful. Unless you’ve got The Right Stuffing, that is. This series is devoted to all things related to the Thanksgiving meal, and it will help you create dishes that appear on your table year after year—even if it can’t help you manage your relatives.

Thanksgiving dinner is a dance. Between family and the National Dog Show—which is just a drinking game sponsored by Purina—it’s a dance we usually perform while distracted. A written timeline is going to save your ass and allow you to enjoy Thanksgiving day, because even soused, you can look at the timeline and get back on track. You don’t have to remember a thing. And this year, we’ve created an printable timeline you can have for yourself.

Be smart about strategy

Make two smaller pans of sides instead of one big one. If they fit side by side in your oven, you get four sides in your oven at once, rather than two, and smaller pans take less time to heat through. Serve the first wave, and load up the second wave when you sit down to eat. Disposable half pans are perfect for this and, if you buy the covers, they stack in your fridge.

Only outsource dishes to guests that won’t require your stovetop or oven, such as appetizers, alcohol, dessert, or salad. Your plan will get screwed up if someone shows up planning to prep in your kitchen or hands you a pan to reheat.

Piggybacking on the above, explain you’re relying on guests for the booze, and take it off your to-do list. Let them organize it on their own, and whatever shows up will be fine, because people bring what they like.

Stuff your damn bird, because it is delicious and means the first wave of stuffing comes out when the bird does. You’ll have a backup pan of stuffing in that second wave of sides.

Rather than buying a frozen bird, order a raw or defrosted one and pick it up as late as possible.

Print out your recipes, old-school style. It’s easier to flip through multiple papers than it is to flip around online between recipes.

Use your smart devices to remind you what you should be doing. Your smart watch can have reminders for what you should be removing, mixing, or starting and give you an easy way to break away from Aunt Martha and go do what’s needed.

Divide to conquer

Get your menu together and make a schedule. Cranberry sauce and pie are even better after having a day to chill out. Don’t be a hero; lean hard on the days before Thanksgiving in your prep plan.

Our Menu

Turkey: Thursday

Apps: Might be able to make ahead

Potatoes: Better when you make them Thursday

Salad: Thursday

Vegetables: Might be able to make ahead

Cranberry: Make ahead

Stuffing: Make ahead

Green bean casserole: Make ahead

Sweet Potatoes: Make ahead

Pies: Make ahead

Gravy: Make base ahead of time, finish on Thursday

You most likely have a job and a life and things, so you’d probably prefer to isolate Thanksgiving bullshit to Thanksgiving. But if you don’t make some things ahead, your Turkey Day could devolve into that bad sitcom trope where everyone is screaming at each other, the lawn is on fire, and you all end up eating pizza. No worries, I got you.

The weekend before Thanksgiving

Clean out your fridge. Rearrange shelves to accommodate as much as possible.

Check staples: flour, sugar, spices, garlic, butter, oil, baking soda, baking powder, tin foil, plastic wrap, Ziploc bags, and disinfectant spray.

Make your shopping list. Add extra butter, because obviously.

Wash dirty kitchen towels.

Locate trivets, gravy boats, turkey lifters, basters, and any other specialty equipment while you still have time to order a replacement if you can’t find it or it’s broken.

Monday before Thanksgiving

Shop. Markets will be a shit show after today.

If you need to defrost your turkey, pick it up today (but I recommend getting it defrosted on Wednesday).

Wash and dry serving dishes. Use sticky notes to mark what they’ll be for.

The day before Thanksgiving

Pick up the defrosted/raw turkey early in the day, if you haven’t already, and deal with it first to avoid cross contamination. Pull out the giblets and neck, and brine/salt/inject it before putting it in the fridge. Alternatively, you can store the bird in a cooler lined with an unscented garbage bag, as long as you can keep the temperature around 40 degrees. You can also put the turkey in a brining bag, and put the brining bag in a trash bag full of ice. Once that’s done, disinfect your counters, sink, and faucets.

Look over your recipes for the day. Does anything today require room-temp items like butter or eggs? Take them out. Preheat the oven for sweet potatoes. Rinse the cranberries and get them on burner #1. Make a pot of stock for stuffing on burner #2.

Get all prep done for your stuffing, pies, and casseroles. Cut sweet potatoes, and get them into the oven to roast. Chop all the garlic you’ll need for everything. Cut all the vegetables and pile everything you prepped in bowls or plates or lemon water (for fruit or vegetables that might oxidize). If they’re items you won’t use until Thursday, throw them into Tupperware and label them so you can see everything in your fridge at a glance.

You still have two burners open, and we’re going to use them to saute anything that needs to be sauteed. In fry pan #1, get your stuffing going. In fry pan two, start cooking anything that should be sauteed for casseroles or other sides.

Complete your stuffing and leave it unwrapped on the dining room table until it has cooled off enough to get covered and go into the fridge. Check your cranberries. Complete your other casseroles, let them cool, and get them in the fridge.

Take the cranberries off the stovetop, cool, and store. Now make any pie crusts you need to and get them wrapped up and in the fridge to rest.

Remove sweet potatoes and complete the dish, allow them to cool, and refrigerate. Your oven is now free for pies, so pull the crusts out, construct your pies, and bake them off.

Use cookie pans to create additional shelves in your fridge if needed, using cans or jars as the risers. You can also remove your bottom-dwelling produce bins to gain another shelf. This space is perfect for cooling beer on Thanksgiving Day.

Prep any apps you can early—remember you won’t have the oven tomorrow.

Last thing, set your alarm. Here’s where the math comes into play. Figure out exactly how long your turkey needs to cook based on your recipe, add three hours, and write down that number. Now figure out what time you want the turkey to land on your dinner table. Count back the number of hours you just wrote down, and set your alarm for that time. Set one for 5 minutes later. (I refer to this as “X hour.”) This is when you should set up your smart watch/speaker reminders, too.

THIS IS IT

It’s Turkey Doomsday and you, my friend, are bound for duty. You have a responsibility, nay, an honor to get this bird on a table before your brethren are too drunk to eat it. This is your time. Be bold, be brave, be swift. Mostly, just GTFO of bed. It’s time.

X hour: Good morning, sunshine! Pull the turkey and stuffing out of the fridge/cooler and place on counter. Get another hour of sleep, shower, or zone out.

X-hour +1: Turn the oven on to turkey cooking temp. Get that turkey in the pan, stuff it, truss it, and season it.

X-hour+2: Put the turkey in the oven.

Peel the potatoes and get them boiling on burner #1. Prep the salad and the dressing, and refrigerate them separately. Finish your apps. If you’re going to make gravy from scratch (and you should) now is a great time to make the roux and the stock (burners #2 and #3). Once they’re done, throw them into bowls or Tupperware and set aside until later. When the potatoes are done, whip and/or mash them, then cover the pan, but do not refrigerate.

Get on with the cleaning/getting ready/drinking part of your day because the only thing you need to remember is basting, and you can set smart alerts for that or just set some alarms on your phone. From here on out, we’ll be talking about time as it relates to dinner.

The final countdown

This final portion of the dance can be done inebriated, so that’s great news. (Although obviously, we do not advise using knives while impaired)

Dinnertime -3 hours: Start checking your turkey; sometimes they get done early. (This early? Probably not, but you should be checking to get an idea of where things are.) Now is a good time to clear the kitchen and get your serving dishes, carving tools, trivets, and oven mitts out. Remove any casseroles, sides, and cranberry sauce from the fridge and allow them to come to room temperature.

Dinnertime -1 hours: An hour before the meal (or when your turkey is done, which you can’t really control), take the turkey out, and immediately reshuffle the racks in the oven to the top and halfway. Turn oven to 350℉ if it’s not there already.

Move the turkey onto the carving board, and cover it in foil. Pour all the turkey drippings into a fat separator and get it into the freezer. Put the casseroles and sides into the oven, with denser items like potatoes/sweet potatoes on top, and veggies on bottom.

Put the turkey pan on the stovetop over burners #1 and #2 and deglaze it. Add your roux and stock, grab the separator from the freezer and add the drippings from the pan. Pour it all into a saucepan, and place it back on burner #1 on low, with a lid.

Are you making vegetables that aren’t in a casserole? Now’s the time to steam them or saute them on the stovetop (since they’re already cut/prepped from yesterday) on burners #2-4.

Dress the salad. Have guests move completed dishes to table to keep them busy and out of your way.

Move the stuffing from the bird to a serving dish. Carve half the turkey and cover the rest with foil. If heated through, send side dishes to the table on trivets or towels. Put the second wave of each dish into the oven, set timer for 30 minutes. Turn off the gravy burner, pour it into a gravy boat, and send all the remaining dishes to the table.

You can now enjoy your dinner. When the timer goes off, there’s an additional wave of food. Your guests can help pull them out, and even carve more meat if needed. Practice saying it with me, “Cousin Carl, can you carve some more meat for the table? What a delight you are.” Once those dishes come out of the oven, your pies and any other desserts can go in. Ice cream can now come out of the freezer to soften on the counter.

Load out and clean up

After dinner, a magical thing happens: Everyone starts to pick up dishes and napkins in an attempt to help, and they deposit them in your kitchen in Dr. Seuss-like stacks that defy logic, gravity, and utility, as if merely getting things to the kitchen is the heavy lifting. I’ve found that with a little direction, you can maximize the help guests are willing to give, doing as little work yourself as possible. Here’s how:

Have vacuum bags, cheap Tupperware, or large Ziploc bags ready. People will want to help, but they’ll look to you for instructions, so start by only bringing serving dishes with food to the kitchen. Meanwhile, ask one guest to collect plates, scraping all the scraps into compost or the trash, a second to collect silverware in a large pan, and a third collects linens that go right to the washing machine. Everyone keeps their glasses. Ask for 10 minutes to organize before clean up.

Use the 10 minutes to parse leftovers into bags for guests and for yourself so all the food is put away before dishes start. Throw any turkey carcass parts into a big pot of water on the stove for stock. At that point, let your guests take over. By then it should be straightforward; the food is gone. Anything they don’t know where to put back, they can stack on the now-clean table for you to put away later. Playing a little music is a nice touch, and it’s helpful to have plenty of towels, sponges, and soap so no one has to look for supplies. Meanwhile, assume your throne on the couch to drink wine and accept compliments.