There are three dozen rolls in the chest freezer right now, two gallon bags of crumbled cornbread, a quart of sautéed onions and celery, two foil pans of mashed potatoes and two quarts of gravy base. All of it is for Thanksgiving, fifteen days from today, and every bag has a strip of blue painter's tape on it that says so in black marker, partly as a label and partly as a warning to Matt.
When I cooked for a catering company, nothing that could be made ahead was ever made the day of. You'd prep a 300-person wedding three days out and spend the event itself reheating, plating and keeping your head. Thanksgiving for fourteen is small by those standards, but the principle holds. If Thanksgiving morning is mostly reheating, I get to talk to my family.
I did all of it on Sunday afternoon and Monday evening.
Rolls: bake them, but pale
Three dozen soft yeast rolls from a recipe I've made since my catering days, scaled down for home: 6 1/2 cups flour, a packet and a half of yeast, 2 cups warm milk, 1/3 cup sugar, an egg, a stick and a half of butter and 2 teaspoons salt. The mixer kneads. After the first rise I shaped 36 balls, set them close together in three 9-by-13 pans, let them rise again and baked them at 350 for about 16 minutes, two or three minutes less than I would for the table. They should be set and barely golden.
Once they were completely cool, I froze the pans uncovered for an hour, then popped the rolls out in slabs of twelve and sealed them in gallon bags with as much air pressed out as I could manage. On Thanksgiving morning they thaw on the counter in their bags, then get wrapped in foil and warmed at 350 for about ten minutes, with a brush of butter when they come out. Three dozen cost $6.80, about 19 cents a roll.
The one rule: they have to be cold before they go in the bag. One year I bagged them a little warm and every roll grew a layer of ice. They came back dry and tasted like the freezer.
Cornbread dressing: freeze the parts, not the pan
I've tried freezing finished dressing, and in my kitchen it comes back gluey. So I freeze the parts and put them together the night before. On Sunday I baked two skillets of cornbread in the cast iron, let it sit out a few hours to dry, then crumbled it into two gallon bags with a loaf of white bread I'd cubed and toasted. The onions and celery, two cups of each, got cooked down in butter with sage, thyme and black pepper, cooled and frozen flat in a quart bag.
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, everything thaws in the fridge. That night I mix the crumbs and vegetables with four beaten eggs and about six cups of warm chicken stock until it looks like wet sand, spread it into two foil pans and refrigerate it. Thursday it bakes at 350 for about 50 minutes. The dressing ingredients cost $14.60.
Mashed potatoes nobody believes were frozen, and the gravy
Ten pounds of russets, peeled, boiled and run through a ricer. I mixed them with two sticks of butter, two 8-ounce blocks of cream cheese, about a cup and a half of warm milk and plenty of salt. The cream cheese and butter are why this works. Lean mashed potatoes go watery and grainy after freezing; rich ones come back creamy.
I packed them into two foil pans, pressed plastic wrap right onto the surface, covered them with foil and froze them. They move to the fridge on Tuesday to thaw, and Thanksgiving morning they go into the Crock-Pot on low for about three hours with a splash of milk, stirred every hour or so. The first time I did this, I froze them in a single gallon bag, and it thawed into a lopsided brick that took two days and still had a cold center. Shallow pans are better.
The gravy base is frozen too. With the turkey on the smoker, there aren't usable drippings until the very end, and brined drippings are salty anyway, so I roasted three pounds of turkey wings with an onion, a carrot and two celery ribs, simmered it all into stock, and made a butter-and-flour gravy that's frozen in two quart containers. On Thursday it gets reheated on the stove, and I whisk in a little of whatever comes off the turkey for flavor. Potatoes and gravy together cost $16.35.
Keeping it safe and keeping track
Everything cooled on the counter for no more than an hour before going into the fridge to finish chilling, then into the freezer. I thaw in the fridge, not on the counter, except for the rolls, which are just bread. I follow USDA guidance on cooling and thawing, because guessing is not how I want to feed fourteen people.
In the spreadsheet, the three make-ahead sides come to $37.75. The oven tab has a new line for Wednesday night: assemble dressing, 20 minutes. And the chest freezer is fuller than it's been since August. After the summer we had, I'm glad to hear it humming.
