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Sounds to me like you still do a lot of work to make a great meal for your friends and family.

I usually buy gravy as well, and add it to the smaller homemade batch I whip up on T-Day. This year, I am making my own cornbread for the stuffing, but just as a test to see if it's really worth it.

And every year, nobody eats my homemade cranberry sauce.

Thanksgiving is my all time favorite holiday and I am the champion cook in my family. That said, I've always used store bought bread cubes for the dressing, I've always made the recipe on the back of the bag of cranberries (with the addition of a handful of dried cherries), and you've inspired me to try canned sweet potatoes! I've always made what I thought was an obligatory green vegetable that was rarely consumed. I think I'll toss that idea! I feel liberated! I will still bake my own desserts. And gravy is sacrosanct. Because we smoke out turkey outside, I don't get drippings for gravy. Instead, I buy a few turkey wings, roast them, and make a stock. I use the stock for the gravy and the dressing. It is heavenly, if I do say so myself!

I agree with what has already been said, you do a lot on Thanksgiving, so taking the occasional help is not a problem here. I have friends who order in their whole meal and pretend they did it themselves!!!

Hey Ed, how about a loose "recipe" for your doctored Pepperidge Farm stuffing? I'm making nearly everything else from scratch(ish), but I was just going to grab a bag of their stuffing to save the hassle.

Bless you Ed. I feel so much better now (I am not a successful briner either!)

I'm going to try your canned sweet potatoes trick.

And for a green veggie - how about Smitten Kitchens twist on Red Cat's zucchini with toasted almonds? You can do it ahead of time and it's good at room temperature....

I gots no problem with the Semi-Homemade approach (so long as no "tablescapes" are involved), but warning: IME, Thomas Keller's chicken stock is so lightly flavored as to be uhhhh...highly reminiscent of water. Granted, I like my chicken stock to yell CHICKEN, but the one time I tried playing with Keller's stuff, I wound up reducing it by about half with some chicken bones retrieved from the freezer and the scrapings of onions and carrots and parsley.

My parents don't have a lot of relatives in the States, so Thanksgivings when I was a kid involved cranberry sauce from the can (I rather liked it back then because I could cut along the ridges), mashed potatoes from the box, and storebought pies. I loved it anyways, and I'm sure it made cooking a lot easier on my mom.

Now that my sister and I are older and can help out with the cooking, we've transitioned to making cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes from scratch since they're not so difficult, but no one has been willing to put in the effort to make pies yet...

In any case, I'm all for semi-homemade if it allows you to stay sane and actually enjoy the holiday.

Jerzee, i'm right here with you. everything served at thanksgiving this year will be home made except for the cheeses and wines, but including the marshmallow :)

my menu:

- chestnut soup, roast pear creme fraiche, arugula oil, brook trout caviar
- lobster ravioli in spinach and beet pasta, bisque broth
- sweet potato and turnip gratin, cheddar marshmallow
- wild rice and shitake risotto
- wilted baby kale, pumpkin oil, toasted garlic and pine nuts, dried currants
- brined roast turkey breast, confit of drumsticks and thighs
- brown butter, thyme and caramelized corn sauce
- cranberry and pear coulis
- apple cider moonshine granita
- pumpkin and apple pies
- molasses ice cream stout float

@seyo you are gifted my friend. My people are not cool enough for a menu as epicurean as yours. If it were my husband and I, the menu would be more enterprising. That moonshine granita has got me thinking.
I bought a huge bottle of ouzo today. Wheels turning.

I went to Williams Sonoma today and found instant everything, stuffing, pie crust, gravy, soup all of it. I have to believe that WS has their hand on the "pulse" and that we old fashioned "cook from scratchers" are a minority group again. Maybe this is why the (formely about) Food TV has gone semi-homemade, yummo, tablescape (gasp).
That is ok, everything old is new again. We shall be a very vocal minority.

Thanks Jerzee, from what I've read, you hold up your end pretty well too. I think one of the missions of the food-makers is to push others, the eaters, into broader horizons. So even if they have somewhat conservative tastes, I like to challenge them and coax them into eating stuff they've never thought of, or thought they would like. Thats half the fun for me, watching them as their minds are being blown.

We try to do most everything from scratch now, and generally we do so by planning ahead, such as making and freezing pie crusts in advance. Otherwise it would be impossible. We don't do gravy from scratch as we've taken to deep frying a turkey (to anyone who hasn't tried it, it is a surpisingly fast and tasty method, but you do need a backyard for it.) And there are some things that just shouldn't be tinkered with that were meant to be semi-homemade, such as green bean casserole. I saw Alton Brown's episode where he did it homemade and it just didn't look as yummy, and I guess sarahbeam proved it in her own home.

I personally would love to do a feast like seyo someday, but it would have to be for just my husband and me and some food-enthusiast friends. Our families just wouldn't go for such a departure from tradition! What we have been able to do over time is introduce more homemade elements to the occasion as we've become better cooks, but obviously the larger the crowd the more difficult this becomes. At the end of the day a few shortcuts aren't going to hurt anybody as long as everything is tasty and everyone has fun!

OK, Ed, ya got me. You used the swear word Semi-Homemade in a newsletter that got shipped to my inbox and nearly threw me from my chair.

I was relieved to read that your idea of Semi-Homemade is a lot different (better!) than Shamdra Lee's.

Truth be told, the only truly SH dish I make is corn pudding. It requires Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix. I know if I put my mind to it, I could figure out the proportions of corn meal, flour, salt, etc. to yield the identical amount of dry ingredients contained in each box. With so much other T-Giving prep going on, to do this would be cutting off my nose to spite my face. My solution is to continue preparing the corn pudding as I have and simply fess up about the inclusion of corn muffin mix. With a respectable array of scratch foods on my T-Giving table, I think forgiveness for this one short cut dish would be in order.

Happy T-Giving!