Organizing and Planning Holiday Dinners

Well another Easter dinner has come and gone at our household. I don't end up cooking for a large group...just the six of us in our immediate family plus my mother usually.

As every holiday dinner approaches, I generally try to come up with something new or different, in other words, try to reinvent the wheel for some reason. But as of the last few seasons, I have taken another approach. Using a computer generated recipe program (I happen to have Big Oven) I have started to print out the recipes that I generally use for each holiday meal...Thanksgiving's turkey recipe, Christmas with its Egg Nog, and now Easter with the Crown Jewel Jello Salad and so forth. Now rather than drag myself down trying to come up with something new, it is far easier to pull out the folder with last year's holiday dinner menu and recipes and start there. I might also have put some notes down onto the hard copy of the recipe such as "too salty" or "be sure to make a double batch" so those tidbits of information won't be forgotten by the following year.

Sad to say, but our immediate family has never had certain "traditional" foods that the family could expect on any given holiday until recently. I decided I wanted our kids to remember our dinners and to even be able to look forward to them the next year knowing that there will be Mia's Potatoes or that wonderful Berry Trifle. There doesn't have to be something new served all the time, and this way memories and our own traditions will be formed.

I think it's working. I heard our oldest tell a friend that there were two pans of Mia's Potatoes! She was anticipating the leftovers already.