The past few years I’ve cut myself some slack for holiday meals when we’re just serving 4. We still have a nice meal together, but I’m not stressed and our budget doesn’t take a hit either. With a little forethought you can also fix an easy Thanksgiving dinner without breaking the budget.
1- The weekend before Thanksgiving, eat as many leftovers and odds and ends from the fridge as possible.
2- Start then and prepare a couple of side dishes and freeze them or put them in the fridge until time to cook them on Thanksgiving day.
3-Do your baking prep in advance too.
4-Bake or cook the desserts and side dishes in cookware that you can also serve from.
5-Don’t bake a turkey or ham! Instead, buy thick cut slices at the deli. If you buy 1.5 slices per person you should have enough for your main meal plus a sandwich for leftovers for each person. I usually pay $1.98/lb and spend about $4 total. Higher price per lb, but much lower price than buying the whole bird or a ham. The trade of convenience is well worth it for me.
6-Store your leftovers in the same dishes they were cooked and served from. Once the dishes are mostly eaten, then switch them to smaller containers. It’s not worth the time to keep switching to (and then having to wash) more dishes just to save some space in the fridge for a couple of days.
We don’t live close to our families, so the time that we do have with them is precious. It’s wonderful to not feel frustration over being in the kitchen so much while I have company, but still know that I have prepared a good meal for us to all enjoy together.
Here is our 2011 Thanksgiving menu and how I was able to balance it with lesser expensive meals to stay right at my $5 per meal budget.
Don’t forget to check out the Thanksgiving recipe collections too!
We have a family of five (my husband and I and our three kids; 7, 4 , & 2). We’re in the same circumstances – our families both live 700+ miles away, so we don’t always have more than just our 5 for Thanksgiving Day. I’ve decided to still do Thanksgiving (I want my kids to remember it), but I plan ahead. I usually start purchasing groceries for it a month ahead of time and then the payday before Thanksgiving, I pick up the Turkey, because they are usually cheap! This week, I price matched stuffing at Walmart using Target’s ad ($.79) and bought 4, then used the coupon from the recent paper for $4 off a Butterball turkey when you buy 4, so it brought the price of the turkey to $10. We are having turkey and thanksgiving leftovers all weekend next week! My husband is off the same as the kids, so we’ll have a great meal all weekend and for not much more than we would have spent on groceries for everyone to be home.
It seems like turkey day grocery prices are on sale more this year.
These are great tips! We are just the five of us as well, as our family are in Denmark, England, Jamaica, Orlando and NJ….its just not the same, when there is no big family to celebrate with.
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