Time to get cooking?

Thanksgiving has always been a big holiday in my family, filled with Grandma's country cookin'. When I was little there were anywhere from 14 to 60 people crammed into my grandparents' house, so many that we had to eat in shifts.

The menu stayed pretty much the same every year and that's the way I like it. A few years ago, I sat down with Grandma and asked her to give me all of her Thanksgiving recipes. The conversation went something like this:

E: Ok, Grandma, so I'm clear, I need at least two full loaves of bread to make your stuffing? That seems like a lot. And how do I know what the exact measurement is for "enough chicken broth to make it look right"?
Grandma: Well, hun, I only know how to make it to feed all of us. I don't have the recipe written down anywhere, I just do it. Just make it look like mine.

And that explains why I have a homemade stuffing recipe that doesn't list ingredient amounts, but serves 20-25 people.

Anyway, it was important for me to get all her good recipes, for homemade bread, stuffing, broccoli casserole, creamed corn, biscuits, red velvet cake etc. so that those recipes could be kept in the family forever.

The catch now is that people expect me to actually make those things.

It's not that I can't cook, it's just that my expertise is more in party foods. Give me an appetizer, a dip, or some kind of cookie and I'm good. But last time I tried to make actual dinner foods, I ended up with chicken that tasted like corn chex and sweet potatoes that tasted like an orange juice-potato smoothie. (For the record, the recipe was for oven baked chicken tenders and mashed sweet potatoes with orange essence. Don't ask what went wrong. It all went wrong.)

Thanksgiving is at my mom's house this year, for only the second time in as long as I can remember. Grandma will be there to help with the stuffing, but it's my job to make the broccoli casserole and the red velvet cake.

That makes me nervous. Last year, I attempted to make the red velvet cake with my mom. It ended with half the cake crumbled in the pan, the other half lying pathetically on a plate, my mom cursing and throwing a dish towel, and my grandma standing in the corner snickering because we had used a glass cake pan. Apparently glass cake pans are bad for baking. (Which begs the question, why do people make glass CAKE pans if they're bad for baking?)

I'm think I'm turning the cake into cupcakes this year. I can handle cupcakes. Probably because they're typically only served at parties.

I hope I don't ruin Thanksgiving.