Dear Future Thanksgiving Me

Dear Future Thanksgiving Me,

1. The smoky roasted sweet potatoes, bacon browned butter green beans, garlic mashed potatoes and gravy, and roast turkey breast are all winners. Just add more salt (thank you, Samin Nosrat, for transforming my cooking world with that tip). 
2. Make sure you completely fill up the sweet potato pan so you don’t have to scrub off charred sugar syrup later. Add a little less garlic and Greek yogurt to the mashed potatoes and fewer herbs to the turkey. 
3. Find a killer dinner roll recipe. Rejoice in the ability to make your grandma’s stuffing with ease once again (hello, Campbell’s creamed soups at my fingertips). Buy the pie crusts because you can in America, not that you know how to make them anyway, and bake the pie (pumpkin, obviously). 
4. Alternatively, just buy or do without all those things again, because that worked out great too.
5. Remember that the kids love attempting a Thanksgiving craft, they don’t care what the final product looks like, and it will only take about thirty minutes of your time. 
6. Thank God for friends and family who plan and execute Thanksgiving crafts with your children. 
7. Remember that making the table look just a little bit more polished will also only take a half hour or so of your time.
8. Make the Thanksgiving game plan. Where does each dish need to cook, and how long, and at what temperature? How much prep time do they need? You might grumble while you plan. Remember how it made cooking a big meal genuinely fun, and do it anyway.
9. Follow your cooking instincts. You’ve been doing this for years. When you think “that’s too much paprika” or “that baking time is too long” or “that’s not enough salt,” adjust accordingly. You know what you’re doing. (Your mashed potatoes are still only okay, and you haven’t yet cooked a whole turkey, but baby steps.)
10. Even if your celebration doesn’t look quite like you anticipated (re: a toddler’s hernia surgery recovery keeping you from celebrating with friends), if you celebrate as you can, that’s more than enough.
11. Thank your husband for inspiring this letter, for keeping the children out of the kitchen so you can cook in blissful solitude, and for set-up and clean-up help. 

(Oh, and just one more tiny thing: thank the Lord for the additional counter space you will almost certainly have, but also remember how very little counter space really isn’t so awful as you first feared. And if that isn’t a principle for all of life, I don’t know what is.)

Love, 

Your 2019 self