I am a Nerd! (Thanksgiving Prep)

I love Excel Spreadsheets. And I love cooking. So any chance to combine the two makes my nerdy heart skip a beat. Since I'll be cooking my first Thanksgiving Dinner this year, I wanted to be extra prepared. So I turned to my trusty spreadsheets to help keep me organized.

For those of you who are in the same boat as me, or who just want some extra help preparing for Thanksgiving (or any big meal), here's what I did:

I created an Excel file with a tab/spreadsheet for each recipe. Then I created a shopping list page with all of the ingredients I needed for each recipe. Once that was done, I used the "data sort" feature to group the ingredients so I could combine them into total amounts of each ingredient. (click on the images below to see a larger version)

I used this as my shopping list so I could check off what I had in my pantry and what I would need to buy.  Next, I created another page with my schedule of prepping and cooking.  I broke things down into time segments on Thursday and had side-by-side columns for things that would happen in the same time-frame.

The great thing about Thanksgiving is that it's typically the same menu year after year. So, while this was kind of time-consuming this year, next year will be a breeze. 

Feel free to email me or leave a comment if you have any questions about Thanksgiving preparations. And don't worry, I'll be posting my menu and recipes in the coming days.

Bon Appetit! The Food Whore