If you carved your jack o laterns recently, you can cut them up, remove the rind (as well as any soft/black parts), and cube the pumpkin flesh. Then boil the cubes, and you have your pumpkin puree for pie. Freeze in qt bags.
Watch 10 for $10 sales for olives for the relish tray.
Reduce your menu by 25%-33%. That's how much of the typical TG meal ends up in the trash. Not leftovers, but trash.
We usually have about 8 people. All time high was 13.
For orderves (yeah, I took 7 years of French, I know how to spell it... but we as Americans don't even come close to the correct pronounciation, so we may as well spell it phonetically for English), we do stuffed mushrooms, too, but they're cheap- breadcrumbs, mushroom stems, wine, butter and seasonings make up the stuffing. We also have a relish tray, homemade sesame crackers, and some type of cheeseball or similar. Orderves cost us maybe $10.
Then we have soup- either squash or clam chowder- with homemade biscuits or similar. A giant can of clams from GFS costs $6, so the most this course costs is another $10.
We have a nearby cranberry bog, so we get our sauce for almost free.
Turkeys are free if you look around/plan ahead (by like a year).
We use our pureed pumpkin in homemade ravioli. That's cheap, because the pumpkin was already paid for under the Halloween budget, and the other ravioli ingredients cost maybe $2. It is time consuming, though.
We do sweet potato pecan pie, that's pretty expensive because of the nuts. Probably $5 in nuts alone, so about a $7-$8 pie.
We also do apple pie, but we forage the apples, so that's all but free.
We also usually have cheesy potatoes, veggie casserole, stuffing, gravy, and seven layer salad. All these things together cost maybe $20. Potatoes and onions come from our cellar, bread for stuffing is homemade at $1 a loaf, we make mayo and have tons of bacon in the freezer for salad dressing, have butter in the freezer, along with peas, almost always have eggs just kicking around ... so we'd need to buy $6 in cheese, celery $1, broccoli $3, carrots $1, cauliflower $2, lettuce $3, fresh tomatoes $3, cream $2.
So, total, that's about $50. Not including wine, though. Usually, our guests bring this.
