Friendsgiving planner: balance the menu before the day

How to plan a Friendsgiving menu that adds up

A sign-up sheet tells you who is bringing what. It doesn’t tell you that nobody is bringing ice, that every dessert contains flour, or that four dishes need a hot oven in the same half hour. This planner looks at the menu as a whole:

1. Add the guests and tick any dietary needs: vegetarian, gluten-free or nut-free. The host counts as one more person.
2. Add each dish with who brings it, what kind of dish it is, which needs it suits, and whether it needs the oven.
3. For oven dishes, give the temperature, how long it needs, and how many minutes before dinner it goes in.
4. Read the plate: missing courses, dietary coverage and oven clashes, then print the menu for the table.

Gaps by course: our rule of thumb

There is no official formula for a potluck, so the planner uses a simple rule of thumb of our own and tells you exactly what it is. For a group of n people (host included), it looks for at least:

These are counts of dishes, not amounts of food. For how much turkey or how many potatoes to buy, use a quantity calculator such as our sister site Kindred Picnic.

Dietary coverage

For each need in the group, the planner counts the dishes marked as suitable in the mains, the sides and vegetables, and the desserts. A zero is a gap: in the example, Ollie eats gluten-free and every dessert contains flour, so someone should bring a gluten-free one.

• Gluten-free. In the US, a packaged food labelled gluten-free must contain less than 20 parts per million of gluten (FDA). For homemade dishes, ask the cook about ingredients and shared surfaces.
• Nut-free. Peanuts and tree nuts are two of the nine major food allergens in the US, with milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, wheat, soybeans and sesame (FDA). The planner lists every dish not marked nut-free so you can ask and label it; a chestnut stuffing or a pecan pie is easy to miss.
• Vegetarian. Check the gravy and the stuffing: both often use meat stock.

This is general information, not medical advice. Ask a guest with an allergy what is safe for them, and keep their dish labelled and separate. If someone has a severe allergic reaction, use their adrenaline auto-injector if they have one and call your local emergency number straight away; in the UK the NHS says to call 999.

The oven plan

Most home kitchens have one oven, and a Friendsgiving asks a lot of it. The timeline shows when each dish is in, measured back from dinner time, and flags two kinds of clash:

• Too many dishes at once: more than the number you set for “dishes the oven holds at once”.
• Different temperatures at the same time: two dishes more than 25 °F (about 14 °C) apart. That threshold is our own rule of thumb; check each recipe.

Keeping the food safe

FoodSafety.gov, run by the US government, gives these temperatures: cook poultry, including stuffing cooked inside the bird, to 165 °F (74 °C), and reheat casseroles and leftovers to 165 °F too. Keep hot dishes at 140 °F (60 °C) or above until they are served, using a slow cooker, chafing dish or warming tray. Refrigerate leftovers within 2 hours, or within 1 hour if the food is somewhere above 90 °F (32 °C). Use a food thermometer to check.

Common mistakes

• Five desserts and no vegetables. Ask people what they are bringing before they start shopping, and check the course gaps.
• Nobody brings ice, foil or serving spoons. They count as items here so somebody owns them.
• Forgetting the host. The host eats too, and usually cooks the main.
• Everyone arriving with a dish to “just pop in the oven”. Agree who reheats when, using the timeline.
• Unlabelled dishes. Print the menu: it lists every dish with V, GF or NF as marked by the cook, and who made it.

Still choosing the day? Send a find-a-date poll. Splitting the shopping? The expense splitter shares the costs.