By this point, we have a pretty good feel for the kinds of things we want to make. We know what's in season and tasty this time of year, and we also have a pretty good stock of recipes that we can pull out at a moment's notice. Still, it never hurts to have a look around and see what our options are.
Our recipes come from all sorts of places. We have our standard go-to cookbooks for traditional (Deborah Madison, Mark Bittman) and fancy (Thomas Keller) preparations, and we usually pick up a few seasonal cooking magazines just to canvass for some new ideas. We usually start thinking about the menu some time in early fall, but this year we started brainstorming even earlier, around August. We were in Australia over the summer, which was their winter, so all of the cooking magazines we bought there featured the sorts of things that would be great to serve during Thanksgiving. We also had an amazing beet dish at Kylie Kwong's restaurant that we wanted to try to adapt for our meal.
When things started getting closer and we needed to get serious about locking off dishes, we spent some quality time with our cookbook collection:
Once we've gotten everything settled, I like making lists of all the ingredients we'll need and where to get them. That was all done tonight, so tomorrow we'll start on the shopping in earnest. Then we'll talk over what can be made in advance and make a schedule. And then it's just a matter of getting it all done.
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