Get Cooking Thanksgiving prep mise en place
In a typical year — two of which we haven’t seen of late — Thanksgiving Day dinner is often the largest family meal that a cook prepares. It’s often the most daunting; the most complex; the most fussedabout.
It needn’t be any of that, except still the largest. It might be rather everyday, in truth; it just requires planning.
“Mise en place” is kitchen-french for “planning.” (It’s French-french for “put in place” or “everything in its place.”) It is the greatest gift from France to the kitchen since butter.
Mise en place means having a well-stocked pantry and freezer or shopping to fill them. It means cutting up, prior to cooking, all the vegetables and other foods (the proteins, say) to be cooked. It means portioning out, in small bowls or on plates, other foods destined for the heat such as liquids or spices and herbs, or at the least taking the jars off the shelf or out of the fridge.
In the kitchen, “mise en place” means “everything out on the counter, where I can see it, ready to go.” So that, if all the mise en place is, well, in place, all that’s to be done is the cooking, the eating, the cleaning. And the relaxing. That’s the point.
“What I find that people do when cooking for a group, like on Thanksgiving,” says Jamey Fader, longtime Denver chef and culinary director at Marczyk Fine Foods, “is worrying about so many fine details that it all catches up with them.
“Keep it simple,” he reminds. “Focus on ‘tastes great.’ Cook just five dishes, for instance, not 14.”
“Get in the right headspace,” Fad